#MeToo: Chetan Bhagat counters Ira Trivedi's accusation of sexual harassment with screenshot of message

Ira alleged that Bhagat had once tried to kiss her which was declined by the former.

Sharing the screenshot on Twitter, Bhagat tried to imply it was Ira who was eager to kiss him.

In the screenshot of the message, which came from Ira (not verified by IBNS), the accuser had said "Miss u kiss u" in the last line.

Bhagat tweeted the screenshot saying, "So who wanted to kiss whom? @iratrivedi’s self-explanatory email from 2013 to me, esp last line, easily shows her claims from 2010 are false, and she knows this too. This mental harassment of me and my family has to stop. Please don’t harm a movement with #fakecharges #harassed"

Days ago, as the #MeToo movement gained momentum after actress Tanushree Dutta accused actor Nana Patekar of sexually harassing her on the sets of 2008 film Horn Ok Pleassss, Ira detailed her experience with Bhagat in a column of Outlook.

She wrote in the column, "I met Chetan Bhagat close to a decade ago at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He was moderating a panel “Teen Deviya/ Three Goddesses” that I was a part of.  Back then, Chetan was the star of the literary world and I felt both nervous and gleeful to be sharing the stage with him. 

"During the panel, he asked me something to the effect “what do you do when men hit on you at book launches?” I replied – something along the lines of “I tell him that if he buys a 100 books I will kiss him, and if he buys all my books I will marry him.” I was 22 and I thought that I had just been very clever and sassy. I had not, however, given anyone permission or consent."

Ira further wrote, "A few weeks later, he invited me to tea at the India International Centre, in my mind a perfectly innocuous place for two authors to meet. He asked me to come to his room but I suggested we meet in the tea-room instead. After our tea, he asked me to come up to his room on the pretext of giving me a signed copy of his book. As soon as I entered his room, he made a pass at me: I ducked as he tried to plant a kiss on my lips and then I laughed, because I didn’t know what else to do, or how to respond. 

"I asked him what in the world he was trying to do and he told me coyly, without hesitation and almost with an air of entitlement, that he had bought a hundred copies of my books and donated them to a library in Pune, so a kiss was his prerogative. I ignored his comment and pretended to be amused though in reality I was shaken. This was a married man with children, whose family I had hung out with at the literature festival. This was uncalled for and shocking behaviour."