August 3, 2019
Two young women have alleged on Facebook that they were forcibly made
to leave a hotel in Chennai last month by the staff on the grounds that their
behaviour was making other guests uncomfortable.
The girls, who have given their names as Rasika
Gopalakrishnan and Shivangi Singh have said the
incident occurred at a prominent hotel. “My friend and I decided to go to a
bar called The Slate Hotels on a Saturday night. While dancing, there were 4
to 5 men who were standing at the bar and were constantly staring at us,
making us very uncomfortable,” Rasika posted.
As far as we knew, almost everyone else was enjoying themselves as much as
we did, yet why did we draw such unwarranted attention? Why was it so hard
to digest that two people of the same sex were dancing together?
–RAsika Gopalakrishnan, Facebook
She said that later when she went to the bathroom with her friend, they were
harassed. “We hear frantic knocks on our door, ordering us to step out of the
washroom”. Rasika says there were male and female bouncers who started
questioning them. “Three male bouncers and 1 female bouncer were inside the
washroom, demanding to know what we were doing in the washroom together. They
accused us of ‘doing something else’, they warned us about ‘several
complaints’ they had received from the guests, and they insisted that we
leave immediately. So we left”.
She has said they were in the bathroom minding their own business and that
nothing had happened with other guests. Rasika has questioned how the hotel
could have thrown them out for no reason and called the behaviour “offensive
and unprofessional. “How dare they have the audacity to assume that we’d be
‘upto something’?
In her Facebook post, Shivangi has alleged that the hotel manager said their
behaviour made people uncomfortable and that there was footage that showed
them behaving in an in appropriate manner. “He lied about the footage — it
never existed — so that we could be scared into submission, into redacting
our own complaints. This is outright manipulation of customers”. The couple
also say they were unfairly targeted as there were other couples who were
dancing intimately.
Source: https://newzhook.com/story/same-sex-couple-allege-harassment-by-chennai-club
