Delhi High Court rejects plea against removing defamatory content on Hardeep Puri’s daughter

THe new delhi heights margaret court on mon refused to toy with a separate petition challenging a single judge’s order directing the removal of all existing allegedly defamatory content linking Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s daughter, Himayani Puri, with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.A bench of justices Vivek Chaudhary and Renu Bhatnagar, however, asked the petitioner, Kunal Shukla, a Raipur-based activist, to file an application for vacating the single judge’s March 17 order, and asked the single judge to promptly consider the same on April 23.“We’ll keep our hands off on any observation; you go there (before the single judge) and contest. File your stay vacation there, and the court will consider it…Let the matter be placed before single judge on April 23 and the court to decide the stay vacation application, uninfluenced by any of the observations,” the bench remarked.The court passed the order after Shukla’s lawyer, senior advocate Vikas Singh asserted that the March 17 order was passed without granting an opportunintiy of being heard or issuance of notice. The order, Singh said, amounted to decreeing the defamation suit, at the ad interim stage itself. “The tweet was of February and the injunction was granted in March. What is the hurry?” Singh said.Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, appearing for Himayani, opposed the same asserting that the parties were served before the date of hearing.On March 17, the single judge directed that all existing allegedly defamatory content including reports, social media posts, videos, and other material, uploaded from IP addresses in India be removed within 24 hours and restrained Shukla and others from posting similar material in the future. The court, however, declined to order an immediate global takedown of the content, instead directing that material uploaded outside India be geo-blocked to prevent access within the country. The March 17 order was passed in a defamation suit filed by Himayani.In her suit, Himayani stated that starting February 22, 2026, a series of false, misleading, and defamatory posts and articles were published and amplified across social media and intermediary platforms, including X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, digital news portals, blogs, and other web-based publications. Terming the allegations as false, she in her suit, had said that unfounded claims were strategically propagated through sensationalist and manipulative formats, including edited videos, misleading captions, and doctored thumbnails, designed to maximize public outrage.Across the world, politicians, celebrities and members of royal families have been drawn into controversy after the US Justice Department published a new cache of nearly three million documents in January related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.