Actor Tanushree Dutta, who has come out once again to put on record the sexual harassment that she had to face while shooting for a song sequence in the film Horn OK Pleassss in 2008, had also put on record how she and her parents were attacked by a mob of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) party workers on the sets of the film. The footage of Tanushree’s car being attacked and vandalised in 2008, while she and her elderly parents were in it, has now resurfaced due to the controversy.
Tanushree Dutta in an interview had alleged that, after she refused to do some intimate dance steps with Nana Patekar, he called the MNS party to further harass her and the producers called in the media to get some publicity from the incident.
The video clearly shows a shaken Tanushree Dutta in her car with her parents while a mob tries to break the glass of her vehicle, and climb on it while stamping it, taking out air from the car’s tyres and damaging the car. Tanushree and her family are eventually escorted out to safety by the Mumbai police.
We spoke to one of the men involved in the attack that’s been recorded on this video.
The man in the orange t-shirt, who is seen repeatedly striking at Tanushree Dutta’s car with his video camera, is Pawan Bharadwaj, who at the time was a cameraperson working with Sahara’s news television channel. Speaking to The Quint Pawan Bharadwaj says that the reason he attacked Tanushree’s car had nothing to with the controversy that was going on between her and Nana Patekar on the sets of Horn Ok Pleassss. “I was asked by the assignment desk to go for a shoot at Filmistan studio that day. I went with our reporter Tejal Mehta to do the story at Filmistan, I did not have any idea what the story was or who is involved in it. We waited for the actors to exit the shooting floor and as soon as we saw Tanushree Dutta and her father emerge, I started rolling my camera. But Tanushree’s team attacked our reporter Tejal and then her father snatched my camera from my hand and slammed it on the ground, my camera broke from the front and back,” recounts Pawan.
Pawan also alleges that Tanushree and her father then got into their car and tried to rush out of the studio compound during which the tyre of their car ran over his feet.
“I almost fainted, the bystanders sprinkled water on my face and I revived myself and realised that their car had been stopped near the exit gate by a crowd. I was angry that my camera had been destroyed, I was worried about my job and so I demanded a compensation, but they did not listen to me, so I started hitting the car with my camera in my frustration,” he adds.
According to Pawan, the news channel filed a complaint with the police against Tanushree Dutta and her father for assaulting their reporter and damaging their property. However, both the parties came to an understanding the very same day and the complaint was dismissed by the police after Tanushree and TV channel officials shook hands over the matter.
Pawan says that he does not recognise the other men in the video who are seen obstructing Tanushree’s car and jumping on it.
Aditya Kumar, another former employee of Sahara also put out his version of the sequence of events that took place at Filmistan Studio that day which was captured in this video. He states that this footage is from “another case” wherein Tanushree Dutta’s make-up and hair dresser verbally abused a reporter named Tejal Mehta and broke Pawan’s camera.
Here is Times Now’s version of the incident that took place in 2008. The reporter here says that Tanushree’s father shut the door of their car after refusing to speak to the media, which caused damage to one of the cameras. The report states that the media later got into an “ugly fight” with Tanushree’s father.
What we need to keep in mind is that Tanushree has not yet alleged that the attack which took place in this particular video was engineered by the MNS.
You can watch the footage of the attack on Tanushree Dutta in 2008 below:
Raveena Tandon reacted to the video footage that has resurfaced. She took to Twitter and said, “Seeing this footage for the first time. Shudder to think what she went through. Her face showing such brave calm. There is a goon with a camera in his hand Was he a media person? Trace these scumbags even now, register a case, lock them up. What are the cops standing by watching?”
This video also shows what journalist Janice Janice Sequeira, who was on the sets of the film that particular day and claims to have seen the incident unfold, described in her series of tweets.
Just like Dutta had said in her statement, she is seen sitting inside her car, cornered from every side by goons yelling at her and attacking the car from the outside.
In the video, the goons are heard saying “hawa nikal” (deflate the tyres) to each other, with one proceeding to do so promptly.
Ganesh Acharya Admits Dutta Complained in 2008
In yet another video going viral currently, choreographer Ganesh Acharya, who Dutta had also named in her harassment charges- for trying to intimidate her into doing an indecent step with Nana Patekar, reluctantly admits that Dutta had actually complained about feeling uncomfortable back then.
Speaking to the media about the incident, Acharya, who has now denied the entire episode cold turkey, said that Dutta had locked herself in her vanity van, after she said that the “touching step” between her and Nana Patekar, that Acharya had introduced, was making her uncomfortable and something she didn’t wish to do.
This too, corroborates the sequence of events described by Sequeira:
“After four hours, she finally came out (of the vanity van) and said this touching won’t work. Whatever you do, you have to do another way,” Acharya said.
Acharya said that this is when he told the director that he thought Dutta was throwing her weight around and making false allegations.
It still remains to be clarified if there were members of the MNS too in the mob that attacked Tanushree Dutta’s car at Filmistan Studio that day or if the attack was only spurred as a reaction to the alleged assault by Tanushree’s father on the media.
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