The Madras High Court on Wednesday restrained Maridhas, a Madurai-based vlogger, from continuing to display allegedly defamatory and derogatory videos on his YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts against TV18 Broadcast Limited and Senior Editor M. Gunasekaran of its Tamil news channel, News18 Tamil Nadu.
Justice C.V. Karthikeyan granted the interim injunction, valid till August 12, following a civil suit preferred jointly by the television company, Mr. Gunasekaran and senior anchor Jeeva Sagapthan seeking damages of ₹1.5 crore from the vlogger. The judge also restrained him from uploading any new defamatory videos against the company.
Since the Tamil news channel was just one of a bouquet of television channels owned by the plaintiff company, the judge said that any defamatory content circulated against it in the social media might have a cascading effect on all other channels too. He agreed that the company was entitled to maintain a suit to protect its reputation.
The interim orders were passed after being convinced with the submissions of senior counsel M.S. Krishnan and advocate Anirudh Krishnan, representing the plaintiffs, that a prima facie case had been made out for grant of injunctions as prayed for and that the balance of convenience was also in favour of the plaintiffs.
As far as larger relief such as damages, permanent injunctions and insistence on issuing a public apology in a national newspaper was concerned, the judge ordered notice to the vlogger, returnable by August 12.
Earlier, the senior counsel said the vlogger had shot an e-mail to the plaintiff company on July 5 levelling certain allegations against its employees. On the same day, he released a video on social media platforms accusing Mr. Gunasekaran and a few other journalists in the news channel of being ideologically aligned and biased towards Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Dravidar Kazhagam. “Such baseless allegations go against the company’s core principle of maintaining neutrality,” Mr. Krishnan said.
Further, stating that the vlogger did not even give breathing time for the company to respond to his e-mail, the counsel said he released yet another defamatory video on July 7.
“To top it all, the defendant came up with a third video on July 10 and displayed a fabricated e-mail purportedly sent to him by the company’s employee Vinay Sarawagi of Mumbai.
“The forged e-mail read as if the company had found the defendant’s allegations to be true and that it had decided to initiate action. However, an inquiry with ProtonMail confirmed that an e-mail account in the name of Mr. Sarawagi had been created and deleted in quick succession and it had been used for the purpose of sending a fabricated reply,” he added.
Mr. Krishnan said the defendant had every right to express his views on varied subjects on social media but he does not have the right to defame anyone and make false claims using fabricated documents. “This is nothing but a sheer act of fraud… It is also a business because YouTube pays for popular videos,” the counsel said and insisted on interim orders.
Published - July 30, 2020 01:26 am IST
