Indian-origin internet advertising mogul Gurbaksh Chahal, who escaped jail despite beating his girlfriend 117 times, has been fired from his post of CEO and chairman by his company.
The board of directors at RadiumOne, a Silicon Valley company that focusses on real-time advertising across web, mobile and Facebook, met over the weekend and “voted to terminate the employment of Gurbaksh Chahal as CEO and Chairman of the company,” the company said in a statement.
Last week, Chahal, 31, dodged the 45 felony charges and instead pleaded guilty to two misdemeanour courts – one for domestic violence battery and one for battery.
He was sentenced to three years of probation, 52 weeks of participation in a domestic violence program and 25 hours of community service but got no jail time.
Chahal has termed the allegations against him as “grossly exaggerated” and said he is being attacked because of his ethnicity.
In a lengthy blog post Sunday titled ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, Chahal apologised to his family, friends, employees, customers and investors for having had to suffer from “this bad publicity related to my personal matter”.
In the post, which was apparently written before he was fired, Chahal said as RadiumOne CEO, he vows to make it a hugely successful company, a great place to work, and a wonderful partner in the community.
The hype generated by the case has led to him receiving death threats and he said he is being targeted not just because of the case but also his ethnicity.
He added that people’s hate towards him is due to “misrepresentations” of facts.
“Right now there are many people calling for my head. I am the recipient of death threats and hateful language aimed not just at what I was accused of, but attacking me for my ethnicity, my social class, and even my gender. Many would gladly lynch me based because of my origin–and not the facts of my case,” he said in the blog.
He denied hitting his girlfriend “117 times” but said he did lose his temper when he discovered that his girlfriend was having “unprotected sex for money with other people, a fact that she testified to in her interviews with the police.
Chahal was arrested in August last year after police responded to his girlfriend’s 911 domestic violence call at his San Francisco penthouse apartment.PTI