India-born tech CEO hits girlfriend 117 times, only gets community service

Gurbaksh Chahal is not a familiar name when it comes to the list of top Indians in Silicon Valley. For the less initiated he’s the CEO of RadiumOne, which is a company that focuses on real-time advertising across web, mobile and Facebook. Currently the company is valued at $500 million and will go public soon. But his company’s success is not the reason that Chahal has hit the headlines. It is the fact that he has managed to escape jail time, despite pleading guilty to charges of domestic violence for beating up his girlfriend Juliet Kakish. According to Huffington Post, there’s a video of Chahal where he can be seen beating his girlfriend nearly 117 times in the course of half an hour. The report on HuffPo adds, Chahal was sentenced to three years’ probation, 52 weeks in a domestic violence training program and 25 hours of community service.  [caption id=“attachment_1496395” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Screengrab from Chahal’s website.[/caption] According to San Francisco Business Times Chahal’s violent attack had also come coupled with death threats. The report points out his girlfriend had told the police that Chahal held his hands over her mouth and nose while telling her he was going to kill her nearly four times.   Chahal was arrested last August but was let out on a bail of $1 million, according to news reports. According to Business Insider, which accessed the full complaint against Chahal, the list included, hitting Kakish repeatedly in the head, assaulting her with a pillow, dragging her from the bed to the floor, and hitting her in the lower body approximately 15 times. So why did the judge not hand out jail time to Chahal? Well, because he rejected the most crucial piece of evidence which was the video. According to the judge the video,which was from the surveillance camera, was illegally obtained, even though the police said that had they waited for a warrant it would have got erased. Moreover Chahal is not getting convicted of felony and and thus will be able to stay on RadiumOne’s board. He’s also tweeting inspirational quotes on Twitter, and pleading his innocence. His latest tweet says_, " I maintain my innocence regarding these exaggerated allegations….Rather than continuing a political witch hunt for another year attempting to fully clear my name. “_ While Chahal might be claiming innocence on Twitter, the fact remains  that there was pretty damning evidence against him, which was not accepted on technical grounds. RadiumOne is Chahal’s third company. He had built two advertising based companies before. ClickAgents which he sold to Value Click in 2000 for $40 million and BlueLithium, which he sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million.