The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted anticipatory bail to businessman Raj Kundra, and actors Sherlyn Chopra and Poonam Pandey in connection with a First Information Report (FIR) against them for allegedly distributing pornographic videos, news agency PTI reported.
A bench of Justices K M Joseph and B V Nagarathna also asked all the accused to cooperate with the investigation.
The apex court had earlier granted Kundra, who is the husband of actress and businesswoman Shilpa Shetty, in connection with the FIR registered against him for allegedly distributing porn videos.
Kundra had been booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Indecent Representation of Women (Prevention) Act and Information Technology Act for allegedly distributing/ transmitting sexually explicit videos. The names of Pandey and Chopra were added to the FIR as co-accused.
Kundra’s lawyers claimed that he was in no way connected to content creation, publication or transmission of alleged illegal videos even as the actors, who were named as co-accused, had given full consent to shoot the videos.
Earlier, Kundra was arrested in July 2021 in another case which related to the alleged creation and uploading of pornographic films on mobile applications. He was later granted bail in September 2021 by a metropolitan magistrate’s court.
In April 2021, Mumbai police had filed its chargesheet in the case, and a total of nine individuals were named in the chargesheet. The Mumbai Police Crime Branch had later filed a supplementary chargesheet of 1,467 pages in the pornography case and had named four people, including Kundra, Ryan Thorpe, the IT head of Kundra’s firm Viaan Enterprises.