“MY TRUTH GIVES ME STRENGTH”
After being hounded for two months, Rhea Chakraborty finally breaks her silence in a point-by-point rebuttal of the allegations against her
Rhea Chakraborty opens up on her relationship with Sushant Singh Rajput, his battle with mental illness and the allegations against her
The Sushant Singh Rajput story has been told and retold by many—his cook, his creative content manager, an ex-girlfriend who had not spoken to him in four years, a supposed best friend whose call records reveal he hadn’t spoken to the actor in over a year, former staff, an actress whom he never worked with, his family through videos and Instagram posts, not to forget the media, only too eager with intimate details sourced from the Mumbai Police, the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation. But in his last year, very few knew the 34-year-old actor better than Rhea Chakraborty, his girlfriend since April 2019. In an exclusive interview to India Today TV, the actress broke her silence on the various allegations made against her in the 73 days since the actor’s death on June 14, heeding what she described as Rajput’s call in her dreams to “speak the truth” about their relationship. The details divulged by Rhea during her chat with Consulting Editor Rajdeep Sardesai, which lasted over 90 minutes, seemed to come from a woman shattered by sudden loss but putting up a brave front in a storm of accusations hurled at her over the course of two months.
On June 3, five days before Rhea left Rajput’s duplex apartment in Bandra, she had called his psychiatrist Dr Kersi Chavda, worried that the actor was once again struggling with depression. Chavda spoke to Rajput and agreed that he needed medication, said Rhea. It was also on this day that Rajput shared an affecting post, his last on Instagram, remembering his mother who passed away in 2002. Rhea reveals that Rajput had never come to terms with the loss and suffered emotionally because of it. When they started dating, Rhea said, Sushant had not met his father, Krishna Kishore Singh, in five years. This contradicts Sushant’s Patna neighbour Birendra Singh’s statement, who told the magazine in the August 31 issue that Sushant had taken care of his father’s medical treatment when he had visited the actor in Mumbai in 2018. Vikas Singh, the lawyer representing Sushant’s family, told India Today TV soon after the interview with Rhea that Sushant had visited his village in May 2019 and spent time with his father.
Denying allegations that she had pulled Sushant away from his family, Rhea said she realised the significance of having them by his side as he began therapy after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. However, Vikas Singh has said that during a meeting with his three sisters at Waterstones Hotel in Mumbai in November, Rhea had taken Sushant aside briefly and convinced him to not travel with them to Delhi. The actress, however, countered saying that she had, in fact, extended an olive branch and hugged Sushant’s sister Priyanka, whom she has accused of groping her in April 2019. It was also the first time Rhea had met
his eldest sister, Neetu, and learnt that Sushant had another sister, Meetu, living in Mumbai. The details of the encounter differ, however, in the retelling of one of Sushant’s sisters. She told the CBI that a bodyguard of Sushant’s had warned the family that his life was in danger. “If they thought I was not a suitable girl for him, why did they leave him with me at Waterstones?” Rhea asks. “Why did they not stop him [from returning to Mumbai] when he went to Chandigarh in January [to meet Neetu and her husband O.P. Singh]?”
The stay at Waterstones has become a bone of contention between Rhea and Sushant’s family, who have accused her of holding him hostage under the “pretext of curing him of depression” during the meeting at the resort. This is what Sushant’s brother-in-law, IPS officer O.P. Singh alleged in the messages he sent to ex-DCP, Mumbai Police Zone 9, Paramjit Singh Dahiya, in the middle of February.
Rhea has denied that she called the shots in the actor’s life. “He did exactly what he wanted to do,” says the actress, admitting that Sushant smoked marijuana, something that has also been alleged by Mushtaq, Sushant’s bodyguard of nine months until February 2019. She has denied that she used prescribed medicines and substances to abet his suicide. In fact, her WhatsApp messages to Sushant reveal her attempts to wean him off weed in January. She clearly had little success since Neeraj Singh, Sushant’s domestic help, mentions rolling joints for the actor just a few days before his death.
As for the claim that she was making up Sushant’s mental health issues, Rhea said that she had nothing to gain from doing so given that she was about to do the biggest project of her career with Sushant. “Why would I want to sabotage it by taking him to psychiatrists?” she said. The project in question was a film to be directed by Rumi Jaffrey and produced by Vashu Bhagnani, for which the actor was, reportedly, promised Rs 15 crore. But the Covid-19 lockdown meant the contract was never signed, the fee wasn’t paid and the shooting couldn’t start in May, as was originally planned.
Incidentally, Rs 15 crore is the amount that Sushant’s father has accused Rhea of siphoning off from his son’s bank accounts. Sushant’s family has also complained that Rhea got rid of the actor’s old staff to take over the management of his finances and business affairs. However, Rhea says, Sushant’s house manager Samuel Miranda, also among the accused in the FIR filed in Patna, was hired by his sister Priyanka, who is a Delhi-based lawyer.
While Miranda had told Sushant’s flatmate Siddharth Pithani that Rhea was using the actor’s debit and credit cards for personal use, Rhea clarified that she wasn’t living off Sushant’s money. It was Sushant who liked living life “king size”, which included paying for their tickets and hotel stay in Europe and hosting her brother Showik in Italy.
It was during this European getaway in October that Rhea would learn that all was not well with Sushant, who
would share that he had gone through a bout of depression in 2013, for which he had consulted Dr Harish Shetty.
Nothing during that holiday went according to plan. Instead of exploring the streets of Paris freely, like his character Manny does in his last release Dil Bechara, Sushant was holed up in his hotel room in Paris for three days, says Rhea. At the Palazzo Magnani Feroni hotel in Florence, Sushant, convinced that there was someone in the room, couldn’t sleep and refused to leave the room. The trip was cut short. Sushant was never the same again.
A STORMY JUNE
On June 8, Rhea asked Neeraj to pack her bags and left with her brother by early afternoon. According to cook Neeraj, she was upset and Sushant wasn’t present to see her off. Rhea maintains it was Sushant who asked her to leave abruptly before his sister Meetu arrived to stay with him. What hurt her more was that Sushant wasn’t empathetic of her mental health troubles, which included anxiety and panic attacks and told her she couldn’t do her therapy session with Dr Susan Walker at his place. A WhatsApp chat between Rhea and filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt on the same day suggests that the relationship had come to an end. She says that she reached out to Bhatt as she was upset that Sushant didn’t want her back. She subsequently blocked Sushant’s number on June 9 when instead of calling her, he just left a message asking of her well-being. “I wondered if he wanted to push me away because I was unwell,” said Rhea.
The same day, Sushant’s erstwhile manager, Disha Salian, died after falling from the balcony of her fiancé’s apartment on the 14th floor. It was ruled an accidental death. As media ran headlines identifying her as Sushant’s manager, his lawyer Priyanka Khemani called to ask him about her. Rhea says Disha and Sushant had met once just before the lockdown in late February or early March at his residence after Sushant’s earlier manager Shruti Modi was asked to take a break to recover from a leg injury.
The news of Disha’s death left Sushant disturbed, something Pithani told Zoom TV in an interview. Rhea wasn’t witness to Sushant’s breakdown, but was familiar with it having witnessed the mental strain he continued to feel long after his name popped up during the #MeToo movement in 2018. The actor was accused of harassing his Dil Bechara co-actor Sanjana Sanghi, who cleared Sushant’s name a month-and-a-half after news broke in blind items. Furthermore, Sushant felt like he wasn’t being recognised for his work in the film industry and believed that no matter how good his work was, success by way of recognition and awards would never come his way. This led him to formulate plans of moving away from Mumbai, and to only return to the city occasionally to do a film.
THAT FATEFUL SUNDAY AFTERNOON
For Rhea, the clue to Sushant’s death lies in what transpired in the six days after she left his house. After Sushant did not open his door or answer Pithani and sister Meetu’s calls, Pithani called a locksmith to break open the door. He told the CBI he was the first to see Sushant’s body hanging from the ceiling fan by a green kurta, followed by his house manager Dipesh Sawant and Neeraj. Pithani informed Meetu, who was on her way to Sushant’s house, that the actor had hanged himself. Neetu was also promptly told and she and O.P. Singh asked Pithani to bring the body down. As soon as Pithani cut the kurta using a knife, Sushant’s body collapsed on to the bed. It was at this point that Meetu came into the room and screamed, “Gulshan, yeh tune kya kiya (what have you done?)”, referring to Sushant by his pet name. She reportedly asked Pithani to cut the noose off from around his neck and keep Sushant’s head straight on the bed.
In the midst of what she calls a witch hunt and a media trial against her, Rhea calls out the silence of Sushant’s sister, Meetu, who was present while the actor was at his lowest, but still chose to leave on June 12. She has questioned why the actor did not receive the medical help clearly needed under the circumstances.
Rhea gave a point-by-point rebuttal during the interview to the many charges made against her— being a social climber, being the reason for Sushant’s mental illness, ruling his life, usurping his earnings, supplying drugs to him—but the veracity of her statements and her subsequent innocence or guilt lies now with the CBI, Enforcement Directorate and the Narcotics Control Bureau, the agencies which are investigating the case. The actress says she has faith in the justice system and, more than that, in her love. “I can never regret loving him,” she confessed. “I still feel he is here. The thing that gives me strength is that he is watching over me.” ■
For Rhea, the clue to Sushant’s death lies in what transpired in the six days after she left his house. Why, she asks, did his sister leave him when he was so ill?