MUMBAI: After a former employee accused him of sexual harassment, Arunabh Kumar, founder of YouTube channel The Viral Fever (TVF), found himself at the receiving end, with other female associates claiming that he assaulted them as well.
The saga began when a woman wrote about how Kumar allegedly harassed her while she was working at TVF. Soon, the blog post began trending across several platforms, and former TVF staff Aayushi Agarwal and external agency staff Reema Sengupta, who directed a web series for TVF, came out in support of the writer, alleging that they too were sexually assaulted by Kumar.
The TVF team put out a statement dismissing the allegations, but this response caught eyeballs due to its tone. “We will leave no stone unturned to find the author of the article and bring them to severe justice for making such false allegations,” it read.
The writer of the blog post claimed that Arunabh initiated ‘leading’ conversations on several occasions—talking about Chaturbhuj Sthan, the red-light district of Muzaffarpur, indulging in ‘role play’ and so on. She alleged that even the threat of a police complaint didn’t stop him from making such statements.
“Police to meri pocket me hai. (The cops are on my payroll),” she quotes Kumar as responding.