Film and television actor Payal Ghosh submitted a written complaint at the Versova police station against filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, accusing him of rape, molestation, wrongful restraint and confinement. Ghosh's legal counsel, advocate Nitin Satpute, said that police were recording her statement, and claimed a First Information Report (FIR) is likely to be registered by midnight. The written complaint was lodged after Ghosh had made some serious allegations against Kashyap on the microblogging site, Twitter, and narrated her ordeal in an interview.
On Saturday, Ghosh had tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and PMO's official Twitter handles in her tweet, saying Kashyap had forced himself on her and requested action against him. Advocate Satpute told The Free Press Journal, "The incident had occurred between 2014 and 2015, when Kashyap had called my client for a meeting and was smoking weed and he took her to the bedroom and raped her. My client escaped at the first opportunity she got, but was advised by her colleagues not to speak about the incident, as it was likely to ruin her career."
However, after Ghosh's recent revelation, her family extended support and asked her to file a legal complaint against Kashyap. Accordingly, a written complaint was submitted and her statement is being recorded, informed Satpute. At the time of going to press, the process of recording the statement was underway and an FIR was likely to be registered. Ghosh, who made her Bollywood debut with the Rishi Kapoor-Paresh Rawal starrer, 'Patel Ki Punjabi Shaadi' in 2017, tweeted that Kashyap had bragged about his connection with numerous film industry veterans and how he had been intimate with several female artistes.
On his part, filmmaker Kashyap has refuted all of Ghosh's allegations and his lawyer Priyanka Khimani released an official statement, which says her client has been deeply pained by the false allegations of sexual misconduct that have recently surfaced against him. Shortly after the Ghosh's allegations, there was outrage on social media, questioning the authenticity of her claims, as she had taken more than five years to speak up about the sexual assault.
