After speaking about how the #MeToo moment happened in Bollywood several years ago, actress Tanushree Dutta who had previously refrained from taking names of her perpetrators has now gone ahead and revealed her harasser. In an interview with an entertainment portal, the actor spoke about the harassment that she was subjected to on the sets of the film Horn Ok Pleassss. Tanushree accused Nana Patekar of wanting to touch her inappropriately in an intimate dance step that was supposed to be a solo number mentioned in her contract.
In the interview to the entertainment portal, Tanushree gave a detailed account of the incident and 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."
She further added "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.”
She also condemned the Bollywood fraternity saying that she raised her voice about the incident nobody came in support of her to condemn Nana’s actions. She said, “When I had complained about the same to the producer and director, and told them to ask him (Nana Patekar) to stay away from me, they didn’t pay heed. Just because I was new to the film industry, whether or not it was required, let’s do an intimate scene with her.”
Apparently, Janice Sequeira a leading journalist and influencer took to social media today to validate Tanushree’s claims and revisited the incident. Read her entire account below.
However, Ganesh Acharya who had choreographed the song had some other things to say. He told a news website that he does not remember the incident described by Tanushree and said, “But it was a duet song as far as I remember. Something did happen that day because the shooting was also stalled for over three hours. There was some sort of misunderstanding. That particular song didn’t involve any kind of indecent step in the first place. It was pure dancing. That’s all.” Defending Nana he said, “But I can confirm that nothing of this sort of happened. It’s a wrong statement that Nanaji called members of some political party on set. It never happened. 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.”
Tanushree was replaced in the song by reality TV star Rakhi Sawant.
