The Himachal Pradesh High Court on Saturday stopped a police investigation into a sexual abuse case against veteran Bollywood actor Jeetendra.
Hearing the actor’s petition, Justice Ajay Mohan Goel passed the order after an initial hearing.
Jeetendra was accused of sexually harassing his cousin, who came forward last month to file a police complaint 47 years after the alleged incident.
The actor has dubbed the charges as “baseless” and a “miserable effort by a jealous competitor to disrupt his business activities”.
The victim made the allegation in a police complaint filed with the state’s director general of police.
Earlier, Jeetendra’s counsel Rizwan Siddique said: “Foremost my client specifically and categorically denies any such incident.”
He claimed that such “fabricated claims” cannot be entertained by any court of law or the law enforcement agencies after a span of almost 50 years.
“Such efforts are, therefore, in all fairness treated with the contempt it truly deserves,” Siddique said.
As per the complaint, the incident took place in January 1971, when the victim was 18 and Jeetendra was 28. It happened when the actor “arranged” for the alleged victim to join him in Shimla on the set of his movie.
The victim claimed that on the night they reached Shimla, Jeetendra returned to the room in an inebriated state, joined their two separate beds and sexually assaulted her.
Jeetendra, now 75, is a well-known name in the Hindi film industry. He is also a film producer, and has daughter Ekta and son Tusshar with wife Shobhaa.
