Richard Gere’s Obscene Indian Kiss Case Suspended

In many ways the people of India were right to find it obscene when Richard Gere roughly grabbed Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS awareness event last month and started slobbering kisses all over her confused Bollywood face because, well, because it's Richard Gere. Urgh.

But it looks as if Richard Gere has finally got lucky and might not have to spend the rest of his life trapped in a special Indian jail for godless western perverts where he'd be forced to spend all day whittling touristy Bhuvaneshwari statues out of driftwood. It's been announced that India's Supreme Court has suspended Richard Gere's arrest warrant until it has a better idea of what's going on. That's good news for Richard Gere, but less good news for those of us who were kind of hoping that an Indian arrest would go some way to contributing to the punishment that Gere deserves for making Bee Season.

Shilpa Shetty is no stranger to controversy, whether it's being on the end of a barrage of racist abuse on Celebrity Big Brother, having a bunch of publicity-hungry British politicians fawn over her or celebrating days that nobody gives a toss about. So Shilpa Shetty can handle all the kerfuffle that came when Richard Gere kissed her at a charity event and people started burning effigies of them both.

But Richard Gere? He's a more sensitive soul. We've seen Pretty Woman, so we know that Richard Gere only sleeps with prostitutes after he's bought them nice clothes. We've seen Final Analysis, so we known that Richard Gere only sleeps with mental women before he realises they're mental. We've seen The Mothman Prophecies, so we know… oh, who are we kidding? Nobody has seen The Mothman Prophecies. Anyway, our point is that Richard Gere probably wasn't expecting so much controversy to come from his innocent sexual mauling of Shilpa Shetty in Mumbai last month.

Outraged at the obscenity of a man kissing a woman in front of some other people, Indian lawyers filed complaints against Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty, with Richard Gere later being tapped up with an arrest warrant. But now the highest court in India has put the skids on Richard Gere's arrest warrant while it figures out what exactly it's supposed to do with him when he's eventually arrested, as Forbes reports:

India's Supreme Court temporarily suspended on Tuesday an arrest warrant for actor Richard Gere, who was wanted for allegedly breaking public obscenity laws by kissing Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty. The court suspended all legal proceedings against the pair until it decides on the proper jurisdiction for the case.

We don't know for sure how long Richard Gere's arrest warrant suspension will last for - or even if it will ever resume at all - but at least Richard Gere now has time to reflect on all the trouble that his wandering hands have got him into. As a practising Buddhist, we can expect that Gere will search long and hard inside himself before eventually reaching peace within his soul and declaring that he'll probably just limit himself to inappropriately groping Jewish girls and Mormons in the future.

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Gere Arrest Warrant Suspended - Forbes