Real life Batra vs fictional Patel

BY Hoot Desk with IANS| IN Law and Policy | 23/03/2008

An American judge rules in favour of an Indian lawyer seeking to sue NBC for ‘libel in fiction’ committed by its legal series "Law and Order".

Hoot Desk with IANS. Pix: Ravi Batra

In US libel law there is such a thing as "libel-in-fiction", suits in which category tend to get dismissed at an early stage. But an Indian lawyer in Manhattan who sued NBC TV for its depiction of a villainous Indian American lawyer, a character who he said resembled him, has succeeded in getting a ruling which allows him to press on with his $15 million libel suit.

Ravi Batra, a New York lawyer, had filed the suit against the producers in 2004 alleging the long running NBC show "Law and Order" had a villainous Indian American lawyer named Ravi Patel with an appearance similar to his - bald and bearded - in a November 2003 episode titled "Floater" concerning judicial corruption.

In a decision last week, State Supreme Court Judge Marilyn Shafer rejected the TV series creator Dick Wolf¿s bid to get the lawsuit dismissed and allowed the case to proceed.

In what she deemed the first "libel-in-fiction" claim to survive a summary motion in nearly 25 years, Shafer held that viewers would identify a fictional matrimonial lawyer named "Ravi Patel" with Batra "because of the uniqueness of name, ethnicity and appearance", the New York Law Journal reported.

Indian-born Batra applauded the ruling, saying the episode of the show known for its ripped-from-the-headlines stories had "recklessly undermined public confidence in the rule of law and the noble judiciary".

In his complaint he had said that the episode deliberately inflicted emotional, monetary and professional injury on him. In the episode Ravi Patel is found guilty of fixing matrimonial cases, corruptly selling consultancies and appointments to judgeships.

Defence attorneys described any similarities between Batra and the Patel character as "abstract". A spokesman for NBC Universal, which airs the show and is also named as a defendant, said the network was confident that evidence would ultimately disprove Batra¿s claim.

Batra¿s own law firm is representing him in the case.

The New York Times reported last week that Batra demonstrated that at the time the episode was broadcast, he was one of only six lawyers in New York City with the given name Ravi and the only one of the same age and description as the Patel character. The lawyers for the show¿s creator Dick Wolf argued that unlike the Patel character, Mr. Batra is based in Manhattan, never appeared before the corrupt judge and has not been implicated in any wrongdoing. But the judge harked back to news reports about a judge and a politician in Brooklyn, involved in an April 2003 case where Mr Batra was the lawyer, and said viewers aware of media reports in that case might think Ravi Patel was intended to be Ravi Batra.

Meanwhile both the New York Times in 2003 and Village Voice in 2005, among others, have written on Ravi Batra¿s friendship and close contacts with several State judges. His political contacts at one point put him on the panel that screened Democratic nominees for Supreme Court judgeships.