Indian Silicon Valley CEO Assaults Wife For 10 Yrs, Gets Off With Jail Time Of Just 30 Days

A deal was struck, and the judge had left for vacation, before the victim had her say in the same Santa Clara courthouse where Brock Turner was given six months for sexual assault.

Santa Clara April 20, 2017: At Apple, Neha Rastogi worked on everything from Siri to FaceTime to Maps, sometimes seated beside Steve Jobs himself.
She is clearly brilliant and dedicated as well as passionate about the happy interface between technology and the public. Nobody could have foreseen that she would someday be compelled to employ an iPhone to record harrowing moments of what she says was a pattern of domestic abuse during virtually her entire 10-year marriage to a man who is now CEO of a Silicon Valley startup.
Without the recordings, it would have been just another case of “he said, she said,” as her husband, Abhishek Gattani, faced his second felony domestic violence charge in Santa Clara Superior Court in fabled Palo Alto.

Instead, it was “he said, she-and-her-iPhone said.”
The video that Rastogi made on May 17, 2016, of 5 minutes and 58 seconds of her life with Abhishek Gattani offers no dramatic images like the elevator surveillance footage of Ray Rice knocking out his girlfriend with a single devastating punch.
Visually, this footage is so uneventful you might think that somebody had mistakenly left their phone in video-record mode in their pocket.
But that makes the audio all the more disturbing, most particularly when you begin to hear the repeated thwacks in the presence of their then 2-year-old daughter.
If you know what is to follow, Gattani’s intent seems clear in his tone and words even before the hitting starts. His voice is not raging, not even raised, but quietly ominous, controlled, and controlling.
As the video starts, the two have been discussing a website that had been garnering numerous clicks but now was getting only a few. Rastogi seems to have suggested that the problem is a software bug. Gattani presses her as a teacher might to define a bug in computer terms. But what he really seems to be seeking to teach her is submission.
“We are talking about a bug, what is a bug… NEHA… Rastogi?” he asks on the video. “You are a QA [quality assurance] person, right? This is amazing. I am having fun today actually. Let’s talk about what– is– a– bug?”
“Let’s say you—” she begins.
“No, no, no,” he says. “When did I say that’s a bug? We talked about bugs right? Is it getting very difficult for you to focus? You really do need help. You need me to take another step and come to you. You need help?”
He appears to have his own idea of help and of making her focus.
“Let’s—you know what, here’s the thing, it’s all in your hand,” he continues.
He appears to be telling her that she is to blame for whatever happens to her.
“You don’t want to get beaten up?” he asks. “Then control yourself.”
He appears also to be telling her to rein in the very fear and hurt he is instilling in her; she better not cry or he will give her all the more reason to do so.
“If you didn’t want that police report and incarceration you should have gotten yourself and your senses back to track,” he goes on.
He was referring to a domestic violence incident shortly before noon on Nov. 30, 2013, when Gattani apparently did fly into a rage during an argument about what to pack for a trip with their then 3-month-old baby to their native India the next day. A postal worker called the police to report that a woman was being assaulted in the street outside the couple’s home in Sunnyvale, California. The responding officer would report that when he arrived, witnesses said that Gattani had been “pushing and pulling [Rastogi] along the sidewalk while punching her with a closed fist in the side and back multiple times.” The subsequent police report notes that Gattani told the officer, “He was holding [Rastogi’s] hand when they were walking the neighborhood, he denied that he ever got violent or physical.”
Gattani was charged with felony assault, which was later reduced to a misdemeanor at Rastogi’s urging in a time when she still hoped to keep her family whole and could still feel some sympathy for him despite his behavior. He seems on the video that she is now surreptitiously recording three years later to have taken the position that the earlier incident was her fault because she had not managed to remain calm and focused while he was beating her.
“Am I not right? Yes or no?” Gattani can then be heard saying on the video. “Despite that incident you are still not able to control yourself. OK. You still aren’t—right? This shows me that you need good motivation to do that.”
Motivation in his lexicon seems to be more physical abuse.
“It’s my failure that I have not been able to provide that to you,” he says.
He then returns to the ostensible subject of the present grilling.
“What is a bug?” he asks. “Come on, bitch! What is a bug?”
“A bug is when– a– you know when the– when something doesn’t behave as per intended.” she replies.
He asks how the glitch they have been discussing could be described as a bug. She seeks to answer. He remains unsatisfied.
“No, no, no. I asked you how is that a bug?” he demands.
She again tries to answer.
“No, no you bitch,” he says. “I have a very very specific question, you please, you keep answering complicated questions OK.”
He accuses her of accusing him of being critical. She seems to remain conciliatory, telling him that she is trying to answer honestly and asking his advice.
“So– I a– a– a– I am just asking what do you think is your understanding that a product manager would go ahead and do at this point,” she says.
“Abhishek, please don’t hit me more,” she says. “I– I am just trying to be more critical over here. I am just trying to question this– Please don’t do this, please don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”
She is crying now, but a skeptic inclined to give the “he” the benefit of the doubt in a “he said, she said” might note that she knows she is recording the exchange and might be playing things up.
He then poses a hypothetical: “OK, here is a link that seems to be landing to a page, which takes you to this content. Would you…”
But then comes the first thwak.
“… keep that link, or would you remove it? Tell me…”
Then comes a second thwak.
“… Keep that link or remove it?”
Rastogi continues crying.
“Remove it,” she says.
“So did you get your answer of what you would do?” he asks.
A third thwack can be heard.
“Your users come to the app, they login, right?” he asks.
“Yeah, no this is a bug I will act on,” she says.
She seems ready to say whatever he wants her to say. Two more thwacks come as he describes a scenario where the user is diverted from a desired page to a generic or empty page.
“What would you do?” he asks.
“I would fix it,” she says.
“You will fix it Na’?” he asks. “Is that a bug? Is it actionable?”
Then comes a seventh thwack.
“Is that something you will fix?” he demands. “Is that something you will operate on?

By her account, he is again pulling her hair with both hands, causing her to cry out in apparent pain. There is an eighth thwack. He asks why she asked him about the glitch in the first place.
“You love being critical right?” he asks. “Because right now it is all about being critical? Yeah?”
There is a ninth thwak. She sobs.
“Yeah, you are right,” she says.
“How come I am right?” he inquiries. “Why, why did it, why come this? Why does this this this thing take so—you spent an enormous number of time debating.”
She would later be asked by a Sunnyvale police officer whether she considered getting away from her husband when he was assaulting her.
“The victim told me she did not think she could leave,” the officer would write in a report. “In the past if she did anything other than take the assault it made her husband angrier, and the assault was worse. She added that he had already assaulted her that evening, and this was the second assault. She clarified the suspect used both hands to hit her on both sides. Initially his left hand held her right ear, but then he switched to striking her with his left hand.”
By the time of that report, Rastogi had taken the video and other evidence she had gathered with her iPhone to the police. Her 38-year-old husband was arrested and ended up pleading no contest. The device she helped refine seemed to have become an instrument of justice.
But to 36-year-old Rastogi’s dismay, the top charge against Abhishek was reduced from felony assault to felony accessory after the fact, with an accompanying misdemeanor of “offensive touching.”
The prosecutor in the case, Assistant District Attorney Steve Fein, described the plea deal to The Daily Beast as a fair outcome, noting that accessory after the fact is also a felony, though not a violent one that would place Gattani at risk of being deported back to his native India. Fein indicated that his boss, Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen, seeks to avoid such deportations. Fein noted that the plea calls for a six-month jail term, though only 30 days of actual incarceration, with the balance served in the weekend-work program, doing manual labor for eight-hour shifts but otherwise at liberty. Fein maintained that Rastogi offered no objection when he provided her with the details of the deal.
“She seemed fine with it,” Fein said.
Rastogi insists she was never even close to fine with it and became less so having learned that Gattani would likely serve not even half of the 30 days in jail and could have the felony expunged from his record if he successfully completed three years of probation and the other terms of the plea.
Indeed, the overall deal is so lenient as to call into question how seriously the criminal justice system took a case where the physical injury was not as catastrophic as that suffered by some victims, but the long-term effect as told by Rastogi amounts to an excruciatingly intimate domestic terror.
Rastogi—who is presently separated and in the process of a divorce from Gattani—made her feelings dramatically clear in a four-page victim impact statement that she read aloud in court on Thursday at what was supposed to have been the sentencing. She declared herself doubly victimized by her husband and by the criminal justice system. She wondered aloud how someone arrested for a crime could be charged with being accessory after the fact without being charged with the crime itself, even though he was the only possible perpetrator. She also made it known that she is offended by the charge of offensive touching.
“‘Misdemeanor—offensive touching’? I didn’t even need to look this one up, as it made me laugh when then I realized that I was laughing at myself, I was the joke here,” she said in her statement. “‘Offensive touching!!!’ Please explain me is it offensive touching when a 8 month pregnant woman is beaten and then forced to stand for the entire night by her husband, is it offensive touching when a mother nursing her 6 day old child is slapped on her face by her husband because he thinks she is not latching properly with the child, is it offensive touching when a women is flung to the floor and repetitively kicked in her belly, is it offensive touching when a woman is slapped 9 times by her husband until she agrees to everything he is saying and then gets hit again for not agreeing with it sooner…?”
She went on, “Offensive touching—I call it terrorism…”
She added, “That’s how I felt—terrorized and controlled, held hostage by the fear of pain, humiliation and assault on my being and my daughter’s.”
The judge who presided over the case, Allison Marston Danner, had apparently decided that the victim-impact statement would have so little impact on the outcome that she had scheduled the sentencing for a day when she was on vacation.
But the pro-tem judge who filled in for her, Rodney Stafford, was clearly moved by Rastogi’s plea for actual justice—an appeal that was adamant, but also as controlled and logical as computer code, ringing with the strength of a woman who refused to be subjugated, of a loving mom determined to protect her child. He put off the sentencing until May 18, after Danner returns.
“That was certainly a powerful statement and I’ve listened to it very carefully,” Stafford said from the bench on Thursday.
He noted that he was only sitting in while Danner was away.
“So, until today, about 15 minutes ago, I knew nothing about the case,” he went on. “So, I don’t know how the negotiations were arrived at. I assume that the matter was negotiated in good faith by both the prosecution and the defense.”
He continued, “However, it gives me pause and gives me some concern that Judge Danner [who] was basically part of the matter of settling this matter may not have known some of the things you have brought to the attention of this court.”
Stafford asked Rastogi if she had an extra copy of her statement. She said that she did.
“What you’ve just read, is that a verbatim reading of it?” he asked.
“Yes, mostly yes,” Rastogi said.
“Ma’am, like I say I just, I just here sort of walked into this and I really don’t know much about it,” Stafford told her. “I thought there was a disposition that had been settled on and I think your thoughts ought to be at least made, that Judge Danner ought to at least be made aware of it and I’ll make sure that she gets a copy of the statement that you’ve just read.”

“Judge, may I ask a question?” Rastogi inquired.
“Yes,” Stafford said.
“Do we expect any change on that day?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Stafford said. “I don’t know why Judge Danner, after she reads that, she may have some further discussions with the attorneys, I don’t know.”
Gattani sat at the front of the courtroom, staring straight ahead during the entire statement, not once looking at Rastogi. His attorney, Michael Paez, had earlier told The Daily Beast that his client has nothing to say to the press regarding the case and Rastogi’s many accusations.
“He’s not going to comment on this thing,” Paez had said.
When asked about Rastogi’s statement and his earlier impression that she was fine with the deal, the prosecutor, Fein, told The Daily Beast, “she has changed what she told me.”
“Her understanding of all the intricacies of the case are not as in depth as mine,” he added.
In response to her view of the plea as expressed in the statement, Fein said that “I respectfully disagree.” He further said that as a prosecutor he could not address those aspects of Rastogi’s life with Gattani that were not immediately pertinent to the criminal case and admissible in court.
“I have to look just for the criminal case, whereas she lived it,” he said. “That’s a different thing.”
He allowed that no case is exactly like another, but ventured that the outcome in this one was not unusual.
“[Gattani] didn’t get a lighter deal, he didn’t get a heavier deal,” Fein said.
He confirmed that Gattani’s immigration status was a factor.
“It was a consideration, yes,” he said.
Rastogi would tell The Daily Beast that she had met Gattani only a few times before their arranged marriage in 2009. She was a modern woman of Indian birth and American citizenship who still treasured tradition.
“Women, we were raised to be smart, we were educated, we make the same kind of money, we do anything,” she said, adding, “I didn’t want to give up the romance of the culture we come from,” also saying, “I just want to be treated like a human being, to be loved, respected and cherished.”
She began to learn in the first months of their marriage that her husband had trouble controlling his anger, when they drove 20 miles to see a movie only to discover it was sold out.
“He said, ‘Why didn’t I call the theater before coming?’” she would remember. “It never occurred to me. He just kept getting angrier and angrier.”
She added, “He started using really foul language. Nobody had ever spoken to me like that.”
He kept on after they returned home.
“He just felt I wasn’t sorry enough,” she recalled. “He slapped me. I kind of sat down on the floor. He kicked me in my belly. I was lying there on the floor… I couldn’t even scream. I didn’t believe it happened… I had never known or even seen anybody who ever went through this.”
She added, “I feel that’s not OK [but] calling the cops just never ever occurred to me at all.”
The next morning, he acted as if everything was only normal.
“He just woke up, had breakfast,” she would report.
She hoped for an apology. None came.
“Why would you do that?” she would remember asking him after two or three days.
“That’s what happens,” he replied by her account.
He appeared to her to be on the verge of doing it again. And he remained that way.
“It was all unreal,” she recalled. “I just shut down… My body’s doing things, but my brain is numb.”
He seemed to blame her whenever things did not go as he wanted.
“It’s always my fault according to him,” she later said.
The abuse continued and at times it seemed as if he never called her by her name.
“It was bitch or slut or whore,” she recalled.
She would later tell the Sunnyvale Police that her husband began subjecting her to a demeaning ritual under threat of force.
“She talked about him wanting to humiliate [her] by making her stand at the foot of the bed for hours,” the resulting police report would say. “She cited this as in the tradition of school humiliation. He would threaten to come hit her if she did not comply.”

To the outside working world, they must have seemed like a perfect Silicon Valley couple. Gattani’s LinkedIn profile says he created Polaris—“the search engine for the second largest eCommerce retailer in the world”—and was the principal product director of engineering for Kosmix and then led engineering and product teams for a major online retailer. Rastogi was a quality engineer and then a product engineer and manager for Flip Video and then Cisco and then Apple, staying with the development of applications from start to finish. She could see beauty in a piece of code and magnificence in all the layers of inspiration and effort that go into an application.
“It’s a piece of art,” she told The Daily Beast.
She added, “I do like what I do.”
And the result was something that would be employed in millions of lives, including her own.
“I always work [on] products I would use,” she said.
This enviable image of a Silicon Valley couple on the rise toward having it all seemed complete when she became pregnant. But by her account the nightmare at home only deepened.
“She said he struck her when she was pregnant,” a Sunnyvale police summary of her account reads. “He then advised her he was doing that for her benefit to teach her to remain calm.”
The child was born in August of 2013.
“The abuse was really bad,” she would later tell The Daily Beast. “Now we have a child.”
She would further tell The Daily Beast that Gattani became angry when she had difficulty breastfeeding.
“He was saying that I wasn’t doing it right, that I wasn’t concentrating,” she recalled. “It got him really mad and irritated. He hit me when I was breastfeeding the baby.”
She did not end the marriage, she said, in part because of her upbringing in India, where nobody she or her family knew was divorced and where it would have brought shame on all involved.
“I didn’t grow up around even one couple that was divorced,” she told The Daily Beast. “I don’t want a broken family for my daughter.”
She reasoned that her husband must be deeply unhappy and she urged him to seek something that might give him at least a modicum of joy and make him feel more fulfilled.
“Flying lessons, golf lessons, dance classes, whatever you want,” she recalled. “I tried to introduce him to so many different things, hoping he will find one thing he likes.”
Then came the day in November of 2013 when the postal worker saw Gattani punching her outside their home and called 911. A radio car responded and a cop separated Gattani and Rastogi. Two more radio cars arrived.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, I’m in trouble,’” she would recall. “I’m standing in the middle of three or four really big, tall guys questioning me… The question in my head was, ‘What did I do?’ It didn’t occur to me that somebody called the cops because he was hitting me.”
She only came to understand that her husband was the one in trouble when the police arrested him and took him away.
“My first response was he was going to kill me,” she would remember.
He later called her from jail, saying he loved her, sounding crushed. She could have just left him there, but he was still the father of their child and he was still her husband and she was still someone whose first inclinations are to forgive and sympathize.
“My internal voice was speaking to me, ‘I cannot leave him in this,’” she would recall. “‘I cannot do this to him. He has done this to me over and over, but I cannot do this to him.’”
She got in the car and headed for the jail.
“I was the one who bailed him out. I was the one who picked him up.”
She would remember that as she drove him from home, he asked, “Am I a bad person, Neha?” and began to open the door of the moving car and threatening to jump out.
“That night, he was so broken,” she would report.
She would remember him saying, “I’m not a bad person. I do this for the betterment of our family. I wanted to give you a better future. That’s why I push you so hard.”
As soon as they got home, he went in to bathe, as if he could wash away the jailhouse taint.
“I don’t even want to see these clothes,” he told her.

By her account, she retained a defense attorney on her husband’s behalf and attended hearings when he did not want to attend them over the long seven months that the case proceeded through the criminal justice system.
She would recall him being fearful that his colleagues would learn that he had been arrested.
“If somebody finds out, I’m going to kill myself,” he said by her recollection. “I’m such a senior executive.”
She would later describe him as being anxious and frazzled, complaining, “I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.” She found herself seeking to reassure him on top of being a full-time working mom.
“Pacify him, calm him down,” she would report.
She urged the district attorney’s office to lower the charge from felony assault.
“We got it reduced as [low as] it could have been,” she would remember.
He was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to a year of domestic violence/anger management classes, but not a minute behind bars. She would tell The Daily Beast that he was anything but grateful.
“He made it like this was my failure he still got a misdemeanor,” she would recall. “He always said, ‘What did you do for me?’”
The abuse abated as he attended the anger management course, though he insisted that it was her responsibility to be mindful of his “triggers.”
“You also have a role to play in me not being aggressive to you,” she would remember him saying.
She would also recall him saying that she had to learn to own up to her mistakes and informing her, “I can’t hit you, but I can hit myself,” and then begin striking himself.
“He hit himself in the head to control me,” she would conclude.
In time, she would report, he returned to hitting her.
“At least twice a month” she told The Daily Beast.
She would remember him saying, “What are you going to do, call the cops on me? I’ll call the cops for you.”
In their working lives, Gattani had become co-founder and CEO of Cuberon, a startup that describes itself as a “customer behavior analytics company that helps product and marketing teams to discover, analyze, and visualize customer behavior that impacts their business metrics.” Rastogi describes his co-founder as “an amazing guy.” She herself left Apple to work for the online retailer on mobile apps for home shopping, which targeted just the kind of customers she was happy to assist.
“All these products are for moms,” she noted.
She began to put an Apple product to a new use for herself on April 28, 2016, when Gattani pressed her to quit the job that meant so much to her.
“I only use Apple phones,” she would tell The Daily Beast.
She set her iPhone to video record, though the footage—which she would later share with the police and The Daily Beast—showed neither him nor her. The audio was clear.
“Repeat what you were saying, what were you saying?” she can be heard asking.
“What I want to do today, my goal, my accomplishment for today is to have you resign from your job and I’m going to make it happen,” he can be heard replying. “My entire day, even if it takes the entire day, whether it’s fighting, pushing you around snatching your phone. Or whatever…”
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.
“I will die, but I want to see you burn before I do that,” he said. “That will give me some peace to my soul. When I die even if my soul wanders around then it will not feel that lost as much as I would otherwise think…”
Then, on May 17, 2016, Neha made the recording with the nine audible thwacks. She recorded another conversation on June 14, 2016.
“You are telling me that you are at the brink of cutting my throat and killing me?” she asks. “You want to kill me, what did, what did you just say? You want to kill me basically?”
Here again a skeptic might have suspected entrapment. But here again he immediately confirms what she has suggested.
“Yeah I would like to see you murdered,” he says. “I used to always think, like in some murders (in movies and all) they show that the murderer stabbed the victim with a knife 45 times; how would someone do that. Killing someone even once is so difficult to accomplish. Then how can that person/man stab the knife in the victim’s body so many times. I now imagine and can relate now to doing that to you. And I am not kidding. If you can’t believe me I can swear on anyone’s life.”
Rastogi took his threats seriously. She set about preparing a will and began to look into obtaining life insurance.
“I started to plan,” she would say. “If he killed me, I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to be dead. He’s going to be in jail. If I am going to die, how am I going to give my daughter a family?’”
On June 19, Father’s Day, the family took a trip to Lake Tahoe. A subsequent Sunnyvale Police police report reads, “Rastogi stated that she and her husband Abhishek were driving back from Lake Tahoe on 6/19/16 verbally arguing the entire way. The couple mainly argues about marital issues and the stresses of work for Abhishek. Upon arriving home from the Lake Tahoe trip, Abhishek became angry and struck Rastogi one time with a closed fist in the upper left thigh. Rastogi did not call the police at the time of the incident due to the continued threats that he would stab her with a knife.”
The report continues, “After the incident Rastogi took photos of her injury with her phone and recorded several threatening conversations on her phone with Abhishek.”
The police would later listen to the calls and note in a report that the exchanges in English include a male, apparently Abhishek, saying, “You need to be brutally treated for you to see the truth,” and, “You will remember this.” The report continues, “The victim tells the suspect, ‘Please stop.’ A young girl also adds, ‘Please stop,’ and asks what he is doing. The male voice said, ‘Making medicine.’”
The young girl is almost certainly the couple’s daughter, not yet 3. Rastogi would later report that at another moment the girl said, “Mama, I’m scared of papa.”
Rastogi understood that she could not just let things continue.
“I finally said, ‘No, I’ve had enough,” she would recall.
She decided to seek advice of an attorney, Michael Pascoe of Silicon Valley Law Office. The office manager there is a paralegal named Karen Ewart, who is also an experienced domestic violence advocate. Ewart chanced to see Rastogi pace back and forth outside the office and finally enter only to immediately turn around and leave. Rastogi subsequently worked up the nerve to return and ask to speak to someone.
“I felt it was important for me to get it out,” Rastogi would later tell The Daily Beast. “Not just to defend my child but to teach her you may get in situations that are not safe, but stand up.”
Pascoe and Ewart listened to Rastogi and recommended she go to the police. Ewart was with her when she walked into Sunnyvale Police headquarters.
“I never imagined I would be in a police station for anything,” Rastogi would later say.
Officer David Meinhardt spoke with Rastogi in an interview room. His report would note, “Prior to and during the statement, Rastogi was visibly shaking and cried several times.”
But Rastogi was not at all confused about her reasons for being there.

“My intentions are very clear,” she said, “I want safety for my daughter and I want my own safety.”
She recounted to the police the history of her marriage and backed up her account with a thumb drive containing the videos and the recorded phone conversations, all of which she had made legally as a domestic violence victim with an order of protection from the previous case. She also provided photos of her most recent injuries.
The next step was for Meinhardt to get the husband’s side—the “he said”—of the story. The subsequent report reads, “I responded to the work place… of Abhishek Gattani to obtain his statement. Upon arriving at his work place I asked him outside to speak away from his co-workers.”
The report continues, “Abhishek stated that he and his wife argue often but that he has never hit her in the past. Abhishek was arrested in 2013 for domestic violence and has not had any issues since. Abhishek has no idea why the police would need to get involved in a simple verbal dispute and continued to state that he has never hit his wife or daughter.”
The report concludes, “Based on the statements provided and the photographic evidence, I placed Abhishek under arrest for 273.5(a)PC-Domestic violence. Abhishek was placed in handcuffs which were double locked and checked for proper fit. He was then transported to [Sunnyvale Police] HQ for booking without further incident. While at [Sunnyvale Police] HQ, Abhishek invoked his right to speak to an attorney.”
Rastogi figured that her husband would be held at least through the long Fourth of July weekend, but on Saturday she was shocked to learn he had been freed without bail. She was able to track his phone and she could see he was headed her way. She hurried to hide her car, so he would conclude she was not at home.
By the account of Ewart, the domestic-violence advocate, Rastogi was advised by the district attorney’s office not to attend the initial hearings because it would “complicate things.” Rastogi finally decided to see for herself how the case was progressing.
On Dec. 21 of last year, Rastogi attended a hearing. The judge, the prosecutor and the defense attorney went into chambers, out of her hearing and view, for some 20 minutes.
When the prosecutor, Fein, emerged, he sat down with Rastogi. He indicated to her, and later confirmed to The Daily Beast, that his office was concerned about placing Gattani in danger of being deported.
Ewart, the domestic violence advocate, was present. She would recall Fein “mentioned something about ‘his vs. her’ story.”
Ewart would further recall, “I told him there’s more to this case than that, WE HAVE RECORDINGS. The defendant lied to the police, said he never hit her… I believe even in a world of liberal bleeding heart NIMBY Palo Altans, they would find the recordings as awful as anyone else who heard them does. THE RECORDINGS SHOULD BE HEARD. BY ANYBODY, BY EVERYBODY.”
Rastogi was back in court with Ewart for a hearing on Jan. 27. They arrived right on time, at 9 a.m.
“Similar to last time, when we entered, counsel, [Fein] and defendant departed,” Ewart would report. “Judge, this time, stayed in the courtroom.”
Fein then reappeared and asked to speak to Rastogi and Ewart in the hallway.
“[Fein] told us that they made an offer of a felony—but a lesser form of a felony, one that would make him an accessory to the crime of an unwanted touching, accessory after the fact,” Ewart would recall, matching what Fein would later tell The Daily Beast. “That way it would soften the penalty and not affect the immigration status.”
Fein then returned to the courtroom for the formal plea in case B1687324.
“We’re calling the matters of Abhishek Gattani,” said Judge Allison Marston Danner.
“We’re prepared to proceed with the plea,” defense lawyer Mike Paez said.
“Mr. Fein, are you going to put the proposed disposition on the record?” the judge asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Fein said.
Fein told the court that Gattani would be pleading to felony accessory after the fact and to misdemeanor offensive touching.
“The court should indicate on or about and between May 17th, 2016 and June 19th, 2013, Gattani did offensively touch Neha Rastogi,” Fein said. “The understanding is he will do 30 days of that in custody, and five months of that on the weekend work program… And there will be no early termination of probation. He must do the three years on probation. But if he’s done everything he’s supposed to do in accordance with the probationary custom, if they recommend a misdemeanor part way through there will be no objection.”
Fein was saying that the charge would be reduced to a misdemeanor and Gattani would no longer be a felon. Gattani’s lawyer, Paez, noted that his client had served two days—actually part of a Friday and part of a Saturday—in jail.
“I’d like those days to be credited toward his county jail sentence, as we’ve discussed in chamber as well,” Paez said. “And we discussed that he would commence the weekend work portion of the sentence first, followed then by the custodial time.”
Paez was apparently referring to the discussions conducted in the back after Rastogi arrived at the courtroom. The parties had apparently decided to knock the two days off what was effectively a 15-day jail sentence, making it 13 for Gattani. And Gattani would be allowed to serve the weekends first, in accordance with his preference.
Rastogi had not been party to those discussions and she had yet to be given an opportunity to express her feelings to the judge when the time came for Gattani to make his formal plea.
“How do you plead?” the judge asked regarding each of the two charges.
“No contest,” Gattani replied twice.
While that is not an admission of guilt, it carries the same consequences of one, except that by saying “no contest” the admission could not be used against him in civil court should somebody sue him.
“It’s my understanding that the victim is going to want to speak at the time of sentencing,” Fein said. “I can recommend a Thursday morning to give us a little more time.”
Fein was being accommodating to the victim, but only after the deal was done and her impact statement would presumably have little or no impact. Not that Fein or Danner had anything to do with establishing the way things are routinely done. Danner’s clerk later told The Daily Beast that she does not comment on ongoing cases.
One question that would have been worth asking was why Danner could not have at the very least scheduled the sentencing for a time when she would be on the bench to hear Rastogi’s statement.
Danner is a Stanford-educated former federal prosecutor as well as a law professor who studied international criminal law, once writing with a co-author that “the idea of applying legal rules and standards to the complex and chaotic backdrop of contemporary armed conflicts and episodes of mass atrocity is a bold—some would say futile—effort to fix individual responsibility for history’s violent march.” She was on vacation when Rastogi arrived in court and delivered a searing account of her husband’s violent march through her life and demanded that he be held fully responsible.
Imagine the scholarly article Danner might write if a perpetrator of international terrorism were allowed to escape individual responsibility by skating as an accessory after the fact?
Thanks to Stafford, Danner will have the four-page statement regarding another kind of terrorism awaiting her attention when she gets back from her holiday.
In it, Rastogi writes that “I feel fooled not just by a convicted criminal, aggressor, wife beater, batterer, that I unfortunately married – the worst mistake of my life but by this court as well. With all due respect to the system… I stand FOOLED, disgraced and ridiculed as a victim.
“I wanted to speak up at the last hearing as well, but I was told today is the right time to do so. Honestly I am not sure why is it so, as it seems it’s all done… what’s the point of me speaking up now? I get heard to be ignored? to be told that the system understands the abuse and the impact it has had on our child and me but sorry it is what it is. I was told no jail, no classes, no penalties can change Mr. Gattani. Is this the faith the DA’s office and the court have in the justice being provided in this court? Is that the reason for leniency in such cases? Have we given up on justice?”
Next month, a hopeful Rastogi will be back in court. This happens to be the same courthouse where another Santa Clara judge, Aaron Persky, outraged the country last year when he sentenced Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to just six months in jail and probation for sexual assault.
At 1:30 p.m. on May 18, Rastogi will learn what impact, if any, her victim-impact statement had on Judge Danner in case B1687324, the case of she-and-the-iPhone said.
Here is Rastogi’s complete statement in court.

Your honor,
I appreciate this opportunity given to me to speak about my abuse at the hands of Abhishek Gattani, I thank for this time given to me to voice my concerns, and requests to you and this court in the case of People vs. Abhishek Gattani. I apologize that my statement is a bit long but I’ve been effectively silenced since the day I married Abhishek and now throughout these criminal court proceedings and this is my one and only chance to speak … so please bear with me.
First I’d like to bring to your attention a few facts, which I feel, have not been considered in this case while coming up with the plea deal granted to and accepted by Mr. Gattani.
1. I had been married to Abhishek Gattani for 10 years, and being battered by him for the entire duration. He hit me, multiple times during each incident on my face, arms, head, belly, pulled my hair and abused me and called me a bitch, whore, slut, bastard and much more in my language. Towards the last 4 years of our marriage he brainwashed me into admitting that I was a complete disgrace to him and the family we built and that if he was in my place, he would commit suicide out of shame, in other words telling me to commit suicide. He also started to threaten to kill me and when I expressed fear or feeling unsafe with him he called it “my self inflicted depression”. He was probably a few days away from killing me when I got out of this dangerous and abusive marriage – I had started getting my will done, my life insurance done, in other words started to prepare our child’s future once he kills me. I even mentioned to him that what if this happen to our child if this happens and he said “I will not leave you, I will kill you and then kill myself, our child (not mentioning her name here) is collateral damage”. Abhishek – she is NOT collateral damage – She is the best thing that happened between us and will remain so.
2. Finally on 1st July 2016, I reported abuse to the authorities. Abhishek Gattani was arrested once before on 30 November 2013, as he was beating me punching me in the head and grabbing me from the neck, out in the open (on the street) when our mailman reported his abuse. He was convicted for this violence against me in this very court in 2014. His first arrest on felony battery charge was reduced to misdemeanor – disturbing the peace on account of POSSIBLE immigration consequences. The same reason being given by his defense attorney Mr. Paez (who I hired for Abhishek during the first case), this time around to enable reduction and leniency in the plea deal offered to this serial aggressor. I helped Abhishek escape a harsher punishment, because, being from India, I did not know better, I did not understand the American criminal justice system and above all I hoped like a fool that this might bring some change in him.
3. He was also required to take a 52-week anger management class as part of his previous sentence.
4. This time around there is evidence in the form of audio and video clips which clearly show and prove that Abhishek was hitting me (repetitively hitting me on the face and body), there are videos of him threatening to stab me 45 times and many of these videos show this abuse towards and happening in the presence of our then 2.5 year old child. There is also evidence in the form of pictures of bruises obtained from these beatings. There is also evidence of his parents confirming (over a video recording) to his physical abuse against them (both father and mother) as well as Abhishek’s younger sister.
5. Abhishek and I have a now ~3.5 year old daughter together who has been exposed to and has been impacted from, his abusive – aggressive behavior.
YH, this is the second time his abuse towards me has been reported to the state, but it is not the second time he has committed these crimes. Our child (3.5 years now) and I have taken many years of abuse, of which 3 years of abuse post his conviction in the matter from 2013. I hoped that he could change his ways and that I could give a complete family to our child. That hope died on 30th June 2016 and I reported his violent abuse towards our daughter and me on July 1st of 2016.
In these past few months I have tried come to terms with the fact that the man I married … the father of my child … is a horrible human being, and didn’t deserve my care or respect or love and now, he doesn’t deserve another second of my mental space given the 10 years I have already wasted on him. He was a mistake and now I need to move on… but I find it difficult to move on when I feel wronged by the DA’s office and this court. Honestly I feel fooled not just by a convicted criminal, aggressor, wife beater, batterer, that I unfortunately married – the worst mistake of my life but by this court as well. With all due respect to the system… I stand FOOLED, disgraced and ridiculed as a victim.
I wanted to speak up at the last hearing as well, but I was told today is the right time to do so. Honestly I am not sure why is it so, as it seems it’s all done… what’s the point of me speaking up now? I get heard to be ignored? to be told that the system understands the abuse and the impact it has had on our child and me but sorry it is what it is. I was told no jail, no classes, no penalties can change Mr. Gattani. Is this the faith the DA’s office and the court have in the justice being provided in this court? Is that the reason for leniency in such cases? Have we given up on justice? Is that the thinking behind giving him a charge which honestly doesn’t add up to his crime AT ALL? I am no attorney but I can read and understand English. When I look up the charge: Felony – Accessory after the fact it means: Someone who assisted another 1) who has committed a felony, 2) after the person has committed the felony, 3) with knowledge that the person committed the felony, and 4) with the intent to help the person avoid arrest or punishment.
Please help me understand how is this a charge appropriate to the crimes he has himself admitted to in this very court. By taking the plea deal he has admitted to hitting me, he has admitted to threatening to kill me, he has admitted that he hit me and mentally tortured me throughout my pregnancy and his abuse resulted in me making multiple trips to the ER even as late as 8 months into my pregnancy. Please advise me how does accessory after the fact apply to a criminal like him? Who was he assisting while torturing me … who is that criminal, because if it wasn’t him shouldn’t this court be searching for that person. Please let me assure you as a victim of his abuse, you need to look no further – HE did it. His charge should be Felony – battery with the intent to harm if not kill.
The second charge on him is a “Misdemeanor – offensive touching”? I didn’t even need to look this one up, as it made me laugh when then I realized that I was laughing at myself, I was the joke here. “Offensive touching!!!” Please explain me is it offensive touching when a 8 month pregnant women is beaten and then forced to stand for the entire night by her husband, is it offensive touching when a mother nursing her 6 day old child is slapped on her face by her husband because he thinks she is not latching properly with the child, is it offensive touching when a women is flung to the floor and repetitively kicked in her belly, is it offensive touching when a women is slapped 9 times by her husband until she agrees to everything he is saying and then gets hit again for not agreeing with it sooner … is it offensive touching – I call it terrorism … That’s how I felt – terrorized and controlled held hostage by the fear of pain, humiliation and assault on my being and my daughter’s.
I feel disgraced by the charges – 3 years of abuse towards our child and 10 years of abuse towards me has equated to 15 days of his life in jail. The system has shown me that concerns over Abhishek’s immigration status has completely trampled rights of my daughter and my own. How is it that this is the second time he has been convicted of Domestic Violence and this is the charge.
Between the prosecution and defense, I’ve been marginalized and honestly insulted. What I have suffered at Abhishek’s hands has become insignificant in favor of considerations for Abhishek’s job, immigration status. What about our child, what about me? We both experienced domestic violence from Abhishek, yet our voices cannot reach the authorities. The plea deal given to him is not punishment for his doings rather an encouragement for continuing his ways, with just one lesson to be learnt by him – to keep it under the covers next time and that he should silence the next victim and not just control her. He was shown leniency by this court in his previous case, but the same shown this time around, stands no basis. Seriously, how many chances does a grown up, educated, CEO of a tech startup need to understand that he is not to hit anyone or else he will have consequences like going to jail, or even being deported.
This person preys on the mere perception of weakness and that’s what the system is exhibiting today. Multiple times in the past, Mr Gattani would come back home from Cuberon, his startup, after having an argument with his co-founder and tell me, “you and my co-founder (who shall remain unnamed) are the same – lazy, empty promise makers, Positive fools, with no results. I can’t trust him.” Mr Gattani, had the same remarks about friends and even successful, accomplished people as the main investors in his very startup just because they would show empathy and not aggression when approaching a challenging situation, calling them free loaders and lucky by being at the right place at the right time. Who is the free loader today if not him, and who is offering this leniency – the judicial system. This to him isn’t equality or rights but sign of weakness, which he takes advantage of. He has physically and mentally tortured his parents, his sister, his wife and now his 2.5 yr old daughter too – all because he looked at our values and morals and care for him as a sign of weakness, which he could misuse. He named our strength as our weakness and continuously took advantage of it. He will do the same here and I stand terrified of the consequences of that as a mother, as again a future victim and for all those who he would prey on in the times to come.
I am appalled by the sentence he is getting.
I believe justice will come to him, if not through this court then by God’s decree on account of his doings but I do stand disappointed here as a law abiding citizen of the most powerful country in the world, feeling unprotected and ridiculed by a CRIMINAL… who is here pleading guilty for the same crimes committed against the same victim in just 3 years of the first REPORTED incident while ON probation.
The reason I speak out now, is that, no anger management classes can help a man who doesn’t think he did anything wrong when he HIT and ABUSED others to control them, once someone escapes their guilt the only thing that stops them is serious consequences – which is a rightful conviction. I see that the defense council has requested his felony charge to be reduced to a misdemeanor in the future. This is the same criminal who has already fooled the system for 3 years after being convicted for the same crimes. I can almost confirm he will do the same again.
I believe in God and I will pray that we don’t come back here in this very situation because this court was lenient with this convicted felon with a criminal history… I pray that I am proven wrong as peace is cheap at such cost… but if I am proven right this moment will stand very dark and very heavy in the minds of all of us who could have done something to stop that from happening.
I don’t understand the legal proceedings but I do seriously object to his request for getting to serve county jail post completion of the 5 month sheriff’s program. Is this a joke?. This criminal is asking for a chance to wrap up his business???? Really are we enrolling him in a spa of giving him a punishment for abusing his wife and child for 10 years. We are looking for the convenience of this felon who forced me multiple times to resign from my job (all recorded and provided as evidence) or else he will continue his abuse in front of our then 2.5-year-old child and not allow her to go to sleep … this leniency for a person of his morals and virtues?
I cannot articulate my despair at this treatment of his crimes. It’s as if we are giving him a slap on his wrist because he got caught … this is barely any consequence for him for ruining the childhood of our daughter and the 10 best years of my life. I believe you as the judge in this case have the power to rethink what is being given away here in the name of equal rights. Rights come with consequences too. I believe you have the power to stop any further leniency then already being given to him by the DA’s office. I believe you have the power to restore some faith in my heart that I wasn’t completely made a fool of, by this criminal and the judicial system.
I request you the following:
1. no jail credits are given to him and he serves full sentence of 30 days in county jail (CJ),
2. he be arrested today and made to serve his CJ sentence from right now; and
3. his Felony charge NEVER be reduced to a misdemeanor.
I request this to you knowing fully well that YOU have the power to do so. Rest, please do what you think is right and would help you sleep tonight.
Once again, thank you for this opportunity to state the facts and voice my disappointment. Thank you for listening to me everyone.