Journalist refutes Akbar’s claim

AUnited States-based journalist, who has accused former Union Minister M.J. Akbar of raping her 23 years ago, yesterday hit out at his statement where he said they had a “consensual relationship”, saying that it wasn’t.

In a first-person account in the Washington Post published on Friday, Pallavi Gogoi, now the chief business editor at National Public Radio, gave a detailed account of how she was allegedly raped by Akbar and narrated her ordeal of working under him when Akbar was the editor of the Asian Age newspaper more than two decades ago.

Akbar on Friday said they had a “consensual relationship”, even as his wife Mallika accused Gogoi of lying.

Dismissing Akbar’s statement, Gogoi tweeted: “Rather than take responsibility for his abuse of me and his serial predation of other young women who have courageously come forward, Akbar has insisted — just like other infamous serial sexual abusers of women — that the relationship was consensual. It was not.”

She attacked the former minister by saying that “a relationship that is based on coercion, and abuse of power, is not consensual. I stand by every word in my published account.”