Actress Tanushree Dutta names actor who allegedly sexually harassed her

Actress Tanushree Dutta, who in the past had mentioned that she was a victim of sexual harassment during the shoot of Horn ‘OK’, Pleassss, has now named her alleged harasser, says a report published in TheQuint.

According to TheQuint report, Tanushree in an interview to Zoom TV said, “I want to take names—actor Nana Patekar, producer Sami Siddiqui, director Rakesh Sarang and choreographer Ganesh Acharya. When Nana Patekar misbehaved with me, he said out loud that he would do an intimate step with me as well in the song, which wasn’t mentioned in my contract. It was supposed to be a solo sequence of mine. I would feel very uncomfortable when he would come next to me and try to put his arm around me. He’d grab me and push me around and say, ‘You stand here, you stand there’. Whereas, he shouldn’t have been on the set. And he told the choreographer to stand aside and said, ‘I’ll teach her how to dance’. I didn’t know how to deal with this. This had never happened with me before in Bollywood.”

Tanushree went on to say that she had complained about it to the producer director, but nobody paid attention. Although people in the industry gossiped about her, nothing was said to Nana Patekar, the actress claimed. Later she had to even deal with people who were shaming her for speaking out in 2008, said the actress.

But choreographer Ganesh Acharya has come out in defence of Nana Patekar. In an interview to News18, Ganesh Acharya said, “He’s a very sweet person, he can never do that. He is very helpful and he has actually helped a lot of artistes in the industry, he can never do anything like that.”

Ganesh Acharya even refuted Tanushree’s claim that the dance sequence in the film Horn ‘OK’, Pleassss was supposed to be a solo one. Acharya in his interview claimed that he was informed that Nana Patekar was a part of the dance sequence.

Tanushree’s version was also backed, however, by journalist Janice Sequeira, who tweeted saying, “Some incidents that take place even a decade ago remain fresh in your memory. What happened with #TanushreeDutta on the sets of “Horn Ok Please” is one such incident—I was there.”

Tanushree in her interview also said there is hypocrisy in the #MeToo movement, which had uncovered rampant sexual harassment of women actors in Hollywood. Teh actress, who made a sensational debute with Aashi Banaya Aapne, and went on to work in many films like Dhol, Risk and Saas Bahu Aur Sensex, said that “it (#MeToo movement) won’t happen (in India) unless and until you’ll acknowledge what happened with me in 2008.”