SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Gurbaksh Chahal, the tech mogul who was fired as CEO from his own company for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, has managed to evade serving any jail time thus far. The judge sentenced him to 12 months in county jail for violating probation on domestic violence charges.
The former CEO pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor assault charges from the original 2013 assault. He paid a fine and was stripped of his chief executive title of RadiumOne, a marketing tech company. He was also placed on probation.
Then in 2014, Chahal was accused of assaulting another woman.In September of 2014, according to prosecutors, Chahal kicked a South Korean woman roughly ten times in his apartment. They further asserted that he conspired to keep the woman from talking to the police by threatening to report her to immigration for allegedly faking a marriage to obtain a U.S. visa.
Last month, San Francisco Supreme Court Judge Tracie Brown ruled that Chahal had violated his probation as a result of the second assault. Now, Chahal faces a full sentence for misdemeanor charges related to the second assault.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Tracie Brown agreed with the district attorney’s office last month, and ordered Chahal to surrender his passports. Chahal has not been taken into custody after sentencing, pending an appeal.
However, his fate could have been much worse — Chahal originally faced 47 felony assault charges stemming from the 2013 incident, a video showed him striking his then-girlfriend 117 times. The video was ruled inadmissible in court after a judge determined police had seized it illegally. As a result, his charges were downgraded to the aforementioned misdemeanors.
RadiumOne’s board only fired Chahal after the company faced public backlash for keeping him on.
In an open letter to the board in 2014, Chahal wrote that he was “deeply disappointed” as well as “shocked and saddened” with the company’s decision to fire him over the “exaggerated allegations against me.” He wrote that he was “practically lynched on social media.”
Encarnita Alonso filed a lawsuit against Gravity4 last year, after the company hired her as senior vice president of global marketing and fired her just six weeks later.
Her lawsuit, filed in California state court, charges that Chahal and Gravity 4 violated her privacy by secretly monitoring her and that her termination was part of a “pattern … of humiliating and abusing women who dared to question him.”
Chahal’s family and supporters gathered outside the court today with signs asking for District Attorney Gascon to resign