Delhi High Court on Thursday rejected the defamation suit filed by Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer Sameer Wankhede, over his alleged portrayal in the Netflix series The Ba***ds of Bollywood, holding that it lacked jurisdiction to entertain it. Sameer Wankhede is involved in a legal battle with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Aryan Khan. He filed a defamation lawsuit against SRK’s Red Chillies Entertainment and Netflix over a character shown in Aryan’s directorial debut series.
Wankhede alleged that the character of the anti-drug officer is a defamatory portrayal of him, damaging his reputation and undermining public confidence in law enforcement. The Court has returned the suit to be presented before a court of competent jurisdiction.
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Earlier, Red Chillies Entertainment had strongly defended itself in the High Court. The company insists Aryan Khan’s Netflix series is fictional and has no connection to the 2021 Cordelia cruise incident. Red Chillies refuted the charges, saying that Wankhede has often spoken publicly about the cruise case and should not expect creators to avoid portraying powerful authority figures simply because it may seem unflattering.
Red Chillies argued in court that IRS officer Sameer Wankhede had misunderstood the content of the show. According to the production house, the series uses satire and exaggerated storytelling but does not depict or target the former NCB officer or the cruise raid that brought Aryan Khan into national headlines.
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Senior advocate Neeraj Kishan Kaul, representing Red Chillies, told the court that fiction, satire and real-life inspiration often overlap in creative work. He stressed that this does not make a show defamatory. Kaul emphasised that the series explores many themes and should not be judged based on isolated scenes.