Daily Times

Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput has denied the claims made a few months ago of sexually harassing his ‘Kizie Aur Manny’ co-star Sanjana Sanghi, an Indian publication reported.

A couple of months ago, there were reports that Sushant Singh Rajput had made his ‘Kizie Aur Manny’ co-star Sanjana Sanghi uncomfortable, with his “over-friendliness” and flirtatious banter. Director Mukesh Chhabra had rubbished the reports at the time, and said nothing of the sort had happened.

Recently, the reports started doing the rounds again, that Sushant would try to flirt with Sanjana on the film sets. According to the report, when she complained to Chhabra, he brushed it off.

Going with the #MeToo flow, Twitter users began to accuse Sushant of sexual harassment. An upset Sushant tweeted before going off Twitter,

“The last thing worth doing is to defend yourself of the fiction created by an agenda. People using this much required campaign for their personal agenda is too much to ignore. So here is the text conversation with Sanjana till the time I shot for the film. I let you decide.”

He shared screenshots of his conversation with Sanjana on Instagram as well. “I feel sad to reveal personal information but it seems that there is no other way to state what actually happened, in the midst of this curated, well timed and agenda driver smear campaign. From the first day of the shoot till the last day, this is what happened on the sets with Sanjana. Misconduct ? Not at al. Agenda ? You decide,” he wrote.

In one chat, Sushant wrote, “Hey just wanted to tell you that despite of everything that’s so not conducive for actors on set, what you’re doing is nothing short of f***ing epic. Good going girl.” Sanjana responded to the message with a text that read, “A whole lot of non conducive conditions, yes. Thank you so much Immanuel.”

In one message Sanjana had written, “Performing with you today was a treat. Those words will always stick with you, thank you so much.”

Mukesh Chhabra tweeted in Sushant’s defence and said, “I totally stand by @itsSSR – no such incident happened on the sets and let’s not have a Twitter trial and make an innocent person suffer for somebody else’s ulterior motives I had clarified this on twitter long back and I still maintain it.” Sanjana has not said anything on the subject, yet.

Published in Daily Times, October 20^th 2018.