A Division Bench of the Madras High Court, on Monday (September 8, 2025), stayed a single judge’s order directing the Editor, Publisher and Printer of Tamil magazine Junior Vikatan to pay a compensation of ₹25 lakh to Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) MP T.R. Baalu for having attributed to him a speech that he never made against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Justices S.M. Subramaniam and C. Saravanan granted the interim stay following an appeal filed by the magazine, through its counsel N. Ramesh, against the decree passed by the single judge on February 4, 2025 in a 2014 defamation suit. The single judge had partly decreed the suit after being convinced that an article published by the magazine in 2013 was per se defamatory and malicious.
