TV station sued for scaring woman

The South Jakarta District Court began hearing on Tuesday a lawsuit against television station TransTV filed by a woman over the shooting of a reality show that she claimed "had committed an unpleasant and felonious act against her".

Diana Damey Pakpahan is demanding Rp 40 billion (US$4.4 million) in damages.

The incident took place in August, when she and her husband went to Pondok Indah Hospital for her regular pregnancy checkup, where in the parking lot she saw "a white, scary object resembling that of a ghost".

Startled by it, she panicked and ran into two other women who were running toward her screaming. She fell over.

The "ghost" was later found out to be a mockup figure for TransTV's Paranoid show, a mystical reality show in which people are scared out of their wits by so-called ghosts and other macabre beings.

What irked Diana was that the crew immediately left the scene without even helping her, which she regarded as irresponsible.

TransTV program manager and corporate communications director, Riza Primadi, denied the accusation, saying that Diana was not the target of the show, but the two women, "who laughed after the crew told them that they had just taken part in the show".

"We also apologized to her, and heeded the public's call that we stop airing the show, which we pulled in August," Riza was quoted by online news portal Detik.com as saying.

Separately, hundreds of elementary school students and their teachers from the Jakarta Islamic School Network held a rally at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle, demanding the media stop publishing or airing mystical, erotic, violent material.

"We hope the media heeds our call in respect of the upcoming Ramadhan," the group's coordinator Kadarusman said. -- JP