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A Karachi additional sessions court sentenced on Tuesday director Jamshed Mahmood Raza, popularly known as Jami, to two years in jail for defaming fellow director Sohail Javed in 2019. He has been taken to the Karachi Central Jail to serve his sentence, his lawyer has confirmed.

The case involved a letter Jami read out from an anonymous sexual assault survivor at the Lahooti Melo, a festival held in Jamshoro that focused on the #MeToo movement in its theme, and also posted to his Facebook page.

The letter that Jami read out was from an unnamed survivor who described being assaulted by a very well-known figure in the entertainment industry but did not name the alleged abuser. Jami didn’t name the alleged abuser in his Facebook post either. However, Javed argued that in the comment section of the post, many people guessed it was him and Jami did nothing to stop the speculation or deny the accusation.

He said the letter contained “specific references” such as referring to the alleged abuser as a “music video and TVC director”, saying “he was a panellist at a festival in Hyderabad”, “he introduced his 23 or 24-year-old son to me, who worked in the same profession as mine” and “descriptions of personal stories shared by the alleged predator [that] led people to believe that [Javed] is the subject of the accusation.” He argued that this caused irreparable damage to his reputation.

The case was filed in 2019. In February that year, Javed served Jami a legal notice asking him to tender an “unconditional public apology on the same/equal forum” which was used to publish the letter.

Jami’s legal team responded to the notice on March 9 denying the accusations. The same day, Javed filed a defamation lawsuit against Jami, asking for the aforementioned posts to be removed as well as Rs500 million in damages and Rs500 million for mental torture.

Jami denied the accusations of defamation and said the letter was handed to him by the organiser of the Lahooti Melo and he did not know the content at the time of reading it. “He stated that after posting the video, other users began naming the complainant in the comments. He alleged that he neither named the complainant nor intended to defame him. Upon seeing his name in the comments, he stated that he delated the post and even deactivated his Facebook account,” read the judgment issued by the additional sessions judge. The judgment was reached after several court hearings over the course of the past few years.

“He presented himself as an activist and producer who acted without malicious intent and asserted that the complainant [Javed] had, at some stage, ‘forgiven’ the individuals on whose insistence the letter was read.”

The court observed that these defences lacked “evidentiary backing” and that Jami did not “produce the letter’s author, any communication with the Lahooti Melo organisers or any credible evidence to show that he was unaware of the content beforehand”.

“More importantly, he failed to clarify why, despite recognising the emerging misidentification, he continued to repost and respond to comments in a way that exacerbated the imputation. His alleged act of deleting the post, assuming it occurred after the damage, does not exonerate him of liability. Notably, he also refused to be examined on oath or lead any evidence in defence.”

Jami has been convicted under Section 500 (defamation) of the Pakistan Penal Code. He has been sentenced to an imprisonment of two years and a fine of Rs10,000.