WhiteHat Jr drops defamation suit against critic Pradeep Poonia

Whitehat Jr founder and CEO Karan Bajaj

Edtech player WhiteHat Jr has withdrawn the $2.6 million defamation case against its critic Pradeep Poonia. The lawsuit was filed in November 2020 at the Delhi High Court.

A WhiteHat Jr spokesperson confirmed that it has withdrawn the defamation notice but declined to offer further comment.

Last year, the Byju’s-owned startup accused software engineer Poonia of infringing trademarks and copyright of properties owned by WhiteHat Jr. Poonia’s social handle was WhiteHat Sr.

It also accused him of defaming and spreading misleading information about the startup and its founder Karan Bajaj.

The defamatory statements, in particular, relate to Poonia’s “defamation spree” against an imaginary child Wolf Gupta who in WhiteHat Jr’s advertisements lands a plum job with Google, besides claims that WhiteHat Jr’s teachers are “uneducated” and “housewives”.

Wolf Gupta was an imaginary character used by the startup for advertisement and it was later removed by the company for advertisements.

During the hearing last year, the High Court had directed Poonia  not to use, “telecast or transmit any information received by hacking the WhiteHat's server … and not help people take down content of WhiteHat Jr.”

The court has also restrained Poonia from using “WhiteHat Sr” on YouTube and to take down specific URLs” using the name. Tweets dated September 12 with comments on WhiteHat’s teachers and on September 5 calling the business a pyramid scheme, and other specific tweets in September and October (11.10.2020, 3.09.2020, 22.09.2020, 20.10.2020, 23.10.2020) have to be taken down.