Neena Gupta opened up about being molested as a child and revealed why she didn't tell her mother. In her autobiography Sach Kahun Toh, Neena recalled several memories from her childhood and her school days, both good and bad. In the book, she recounts facing multiple instances of sexual misconduct.
Neena shared an incident of visiting a optician and said that her brother was told to sit outside while she was inside the doctor’s chamber.
In her book, Neena wrote, “The doctor started with examining my eye and then went down to check out other areas that were unconnected with my eye. I was scared stiff while it was happening and felt disgusted all the way home," as quoted by Hindustan Times.
Neena added, "I sat in a corner in the house and cried my eyes out when nobody was looking. But I didn’t dare tell my mother about this because I was so scared that she would say that it was my fault. That I had probably said or done something to provoke him.” She also wrote that it happened to her more than once 'at the doctor's.'
Sharing the account of her visit to a tailor Neena wrote that he got ‘too handsy’ while taking her measurements. She also said that she had go back to that tailor several times after the incident.
Neena explained, “Because I felt like I had no choice. If I told my mother that I didn’t want to go to them, she would ask me why and I would have to tell her."
The actor wrote that while children are taught the difference between 'good touch and bad touch' at a very young age now, they didn't get that information even as teenagers.
Neena Gupta also recounted that a friend's brother, who had recently gotten married, propositioned her when she was 16 but she "somehow managed to shrug off his advances politely without offending him or his family.”
After the Badhaai Ho actor entered college she realized that almost every girl have faced these incidents like these but none had shared it with their parents, reasoning that it “would mean that the little freedom we had would be taken away. Or worse – that we would be blamed for bringing it upon ourselves.”
Actor Kareena Kapoor Khan launched Neena Gupta's autobiography Sach Kahun Toh on 14 June. When Kareena had asked Neena if she was afraid of judgement after the book's release, Neena had revealed that she wouldn't have written the book if her parents were alive.
She added, "My mother suffered her whole life to hide those things. It used to bother me sometimes that people could say, 'Oh, this is why she's like this.' Now I'm appreciated for my work. My husband and my daughter love me so I'm beyond that now."
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