Businessman Raj Kundra - husband of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty - and others have been charged with making pornographic content in a couple of deluxe hotels which was distributed by OTT platforms for monetary gains, the Maharashtra Cyber Police have said. Kundra, along with models Sherlyn Chopra and Poonam Pandey, a film producer Meeta Jhunjhunwala and a cameraman Raju Dubey, allegedly shot the obscene or porn videos in two suburban five-star hotels, as per the Cyber Police's charge-sheet filed before a court last week.
Earlier in 2021, the Mumbai Police Crime Branch had filed its separate chargesheet in April, followed by a supplementary chargesheet in September in the sensational pornographic racket case that came to light after a raid at a bungalow in Madh Island bungalow in February (2021).
The Cyber Police, which had filed a case in 2019, have claimed that Kundra, Director of Armsprime Media Ltd. was engaged in producing and distributing obscene videos on certain websites.
In the 450-page chargesheet, others named include Banana Prime OTT's Suvajit Choudhary, and a staff member of Kundra, Umesh Kamath, for allegedly producing a web series 'Prem Paglani' containing porn content and uploaded on the OTT.
Pandey is also accused of developing her own mobile App, 'The Poonam Pandey', getting her videos shot, uploading and circulating them with the help of Kundra's company.
According to the Cyber Police, Dubey had also shot Chopra's videos, while Jhunjhunwala is accused of aiding and abetting by scripting and directing stories for her (Chopra).
The Cyber Police has claimed that Kundra's company "aided and abetted the crime" as it derived financial benefits from all the other co-accused though aware that such things are illegal, even as they are on the lookout for some other "missing" models who acted in the porn videos or web series.
After the high-profile case was exposed in the swoop by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch, in which several of the accused were nabbed, Kundra was sent to two months custody before getting bail in September 2021.
The other accused included Ryan Thorpe, the IT chief of Kundra's firm Viaan Enterprises, Yash Thakur alias Arvind Shrivastav who is believed to be living in Singapore and Kundra's brother-in-law Pradeep Bakshi, based in London, running companies Kenrin and HotShot.
The Mumbai Police, which accused Kundra of producing around 100 porn movies, had also frozen the bank accounts of Thakur with a sum of Rs 6.50 crore in it, and recorded the statements of 43 witnesses in the case, as per its supplementary chargesheet in September 2021.
