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On 6 August 2026, the Bombay High Court did something that criminal courts rarely get the chance to do. It looked at the exact same set of facts a trial court had already examined, in a case that had run for thirteen years, and reached the opposite conclusion.
Tarun Tejpal, founder and former Editor in Chief of Tehelka magazine, was convicted of rape and sexual harassment of a junior colleague inside a hotel lift in Goa in November 2013. He was sentenced to ten years of rigorous imprisonment and fined over ₹10 lakh, payable to the survivor. This overturned a 2021 acquittal by the trial court in Mapusa in North Goa, a verdict that had, at the time, been widely criticised for the way it judged the survivor’s behaviour rather than the accused’s conduct. Tejpal has said he will challenge the conviction in the Supreme Court, and the Goa government has separately petitioned the Supreme Court seeking an even harsher sentence.
But for anyone who sits on an Internal Committee, advises one, or is responsible for how their organisation handles a complaint under the PoSH Act, the last word almost does not matter. What matters is what happened between 2021 and 2026, because the gap between those two judgments is, quite literally, a masterclass in what fair inquiry looks like and what it does not.
What actually happened
The facts as both courts agreed on them, were not really in dispute. A junior colleague accused Tejpal of sexually assaulting her on two consecutive nights inside a hotel lift during Tehelka’s THiNK festival. She reported the matter internally within eleven days, in a detailed email asking for a Vishaka guidelines committee (the PoSH Act had only just been notified). Tejpal responded with an email admitting to a lapse of judgement and an attempt at a sexual liaison, and announced a six month recusal from his editorial role. Tehelka did not constitute a proper inquiry committee until the matter became public.
The criminal case that followed ran for thirteen years. A charge sheet of nearly 2,850 pages. Over 150 witnesses. Seven months in custody before bail. And in 2021, an acquittal.
Where the trial court went wrong
The trial court’s reasoning is worth sitting with because it is not unusual. It is, in fact, one of the most common failure modes seen inside real Internal Committees across India even today.
The judge held that the complainant did not show the kind of normative behaviour a victim of sexual assault might plausibly show. Her messages to Tejpal in the days after the incidents, which read as calm and professional were treated as proof that she had not been traumatised. The formal apology email, sent in Tejpal’s own words, was set aside as involuntary. And her personal life and post-incident conduct were extensively questioned during cross examination.
Every one of these is a version of what psychologists and legal experts call the perfect victim myth: the assumption that a genuine survivor must be visibly distressed, must sever all contact with the accused, must resist physically, and must report and behave in a single predictable way. Reality does not work like that. Freeze responses, appeasement, and the simple economic and professional need to keep functioning in a hierarchical workplace are well documented, common, and entirely compatible with a genuine complaint.
What the High Court corrected
The Bombay High Court’s 81 page judgment, authored by Justice Neela Gokhale on a bench with Justice Amit Jamsandekar, reappraised the same record and reached a different conclusion on almost every point.
It held that Tejpal’s contemporaneous apology email was strong corroborative evidence, reasoning that a person of his stature and legal sophistication would be unlikely to falsely confess to something this damaging without cause. It rejected the sterling witness standard the trial court had applied, holding that minor, peripheral inconsistencies in testimony recalled years after a traumatic event do not defeat credibility on the material facts. It held that CCTV footage showing no visible struggle inside a lift cannot, by itself, disprove coercion. And it explicitly named and rejected the idea that a credible survivor must fit a single behavioural template, calling the trial court’s acquittal perverse.
The court’s own words, as widely reported, capture the shift plainly: that a judge does not preside over a trial merely to see that no innocent man is punished, and that no person of reasonable prudence would falsely apologise for an incident like this. The Solicitor General, appearing for the state, put the underlying principle even more simply while arguing for sentencing: when a woman says no, it means no.
Why this matters far beyond one criminal case
It would be easy to read this as a story about one newsroom, one lift, and one very long court case. It is really a story about how workplace investigations, of any kind, go wrong, and it maps almost exactly onto the mistakes Internal Committees make when they are untrained, unsupported, or simply left to figure things out on their own.
Consider the parallel timeline that ran alongside the criminal case. Tehelka’s own institutional response, in 2013, was to negotiate an apology informally between the Managing Editor and the complainant before any committee existed at all. There was no prompt, formal, protected process. That is not a legal footnote. Under the PoSH Act, it is precisely the governance failure the law was designed to prevent, and it is still one of the most common gaps Kelp sees when we conduct diagnostics for organisations that assume their IC exists on paper and is therefore functioning.
The lessons for Internal Committees
A few principles come through with unusual clarity from this case and they are exactly the ones we build into every IC training and inquiry framework.
- There is no template for a credible complainant. Calm demeanour, continued professionalism, delay explained by workplace hierarchy, even friendly seeming messages sent to preserve one’s job, are all compatible with a genuine complaint. None of them, alone or together, should be treated as disqualifying.
- Assess consistency on the facts that matter, not on every peripheral detail. A sterling witness standard, where any small inconsistency is treated as fatal, sets an unreasonably high bar that real human memory, especially memory of a traumatic event recalled years later, will rarely meet.
- Preserve and weigh electronic evidence early and on its plain meaning. Emails, chat logs, and messages are often the most decisive evidence years down the line. A hedged or qualified admission is still an admission, and should be evaluated on its substance rather than dismissed because the respondent later claims it was made under pressure.
- Character is not consent. A complainant’s personal life, reputation, or general conduct has no bearing on whether she consented to a specific act on a specific occasion. Questioning that strays into this territory is not just unhelpful, it is affirmatively inappropriate under the PoSH Act’s emphasis on a fair, non-adversarial inquiry.
- Seniority is never a shield. The instinct to assume a person of his standing would not do this is the exact inverse of the perfect victim myth, and it is just as damaging. Both errors substitute assumption for evidence.
- Act immediately and formally, never informally. The moment a complaint is received, however it is framed, the statutory process should be triggered. Negotiating apologies or settlements before a committee is even constituted, as happened here, causes harm on its own and undermines confidence in the process regardless of the eventual outcome.
- Apply the correct standard of proof. PoSH inquiries operate on preponderance of probabilities, not the criminal standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt. An IC that unconsciously imports the higher criminal bar will end up dismissing complaints that should, under the law that actually governs them, succeed.
The single most important takeaway
If there is one idea every HR leader, Presiding Officer, and IC Members should carry out of this case, it is this: the outcome of a criminal trial and the outcome of an internal inquiry are legally independent of each other. The 2021 acquittal did not mean an IC handling the same facts at the time would have been wrong to uphold a complaint. The 2026 conviction does not retroactively validate every IC that ever got a similar case right, or wrong. Each process has its own standard, its own purpose, and its own responsibility to get right, on its own timeline, without waiting for a criminal court that may take over a decade to speak.
That is, in the end, the entire reason the PoSH Act exists as a separate, faster, workplace level mechanism in the first place.
This case has become one of the most cited examples in PoSH training rooms across India this month, and for good reason. It is a rare, detailed, public record of exactly how a perfect victim bias creeps into an inquiry, and exactly how an appellate reappraisal corrects it. At Kelp, we build our Internal Committee training, PoSH inquiry frameworks, and IC certification programmes around real, evolving jurisprudence like this, not generic templates that go stale the moment a new judgment lands.
If your IC has never been tested against a case this complex, or if you are not confident your committee members would recognise a sterling witness trap or a stereotype driven line of questioning when they see one, this is the moment to find out, before a real complaint puts that gap on record.
Reach out to Kelp today and let’s build a more inclusive workplace together.
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