Seven months after actor and model Revathy Sampath wrote a Me Too post against him, director Rajesh Touchriver has responded to the allegations through a post on his wife and activist Sunitha Krishnan’s blog.
His response comes days after Revathy accused actor Siddique of misbehaving with her three years ago, when he allegedly spoke to her on a film offer. Rajesh, who had kept quiet all these months, writes that he had been busy all this while and had thought of presenting his side, if ‘the person’ made any formal complaint to a legally competent body. Throughout his post, he avoids naming Revathy, saying, he has ‘no axe to grind with this person’.
Revathy had, in her post in October 2018, written about allegedly facing mental harassment, sexually flavoured comments, gender discrimination and blackmailing from Rajesh. She had explained in detail how the director was unprofessional and manipulative in the sets, passing off ‘sexually flavoured comments’ as ‘funny little jokes’, discriminating against her because she was a newcomer, calling her and texting her in the night and not paying her properly. She’d also mentioned about a certain text message he’d repeatedly sent – “Ready for dance?”
Rajesh, in his blog post, says the actor had been in touch with him since 2016 ‘requesting for a break’ and he could only find a suitable part for her in 2018 for a Telugu-Odia bilingual film called Patnagarh that he was directing. She played a police officer in it. It was also her first feature film and she came to Odisha for the audition which she cleared. Rajesh writes that she told him she didn’t have the money to go back (to Kerala) and that he'd persuaded the producer to let her stay on in Odisha until it was her turn to shoot.
Everything, according to Rajesh, was fine when the shooting began and Revathy hung around with Malayali technicians. “There was easy comradeship, jokes and light banter on the sets in an otherwise very stressful shooting schedule.” He mentions light banter ‘on commonly joked matters on the set’ again when he explains the ‘Ready for dance?’ message Revathy had written about.
The stress began, Rajesh writes, when the lead actor who had limited dates, came for shooting and all efforts were made to finish his portion soon. “Since we were working on tight budgets all supporting actors were asked to reach the location in the morning itself and as per the situation the combination scenes were completed. This is when the problem started with this person, she started throwing tantrums on the sets, abusing the Managers that she was being made to wait for her scenes and why couldn’t she come to the sets when her scenes would start.”
Rajesh also claims that Revathy did not like feedback or corrections on her performances and she would ‘start crying in front of all the crew and stage walkouts from the set’.
“Out of sheer frustration, I started sending her messages on ‘whatsapp’ my feedback about her performance and what needs to be done to correct it. My messages both appreciated her good performances and criticised her bad performance (screenshots of all the messages available).”
The blog post, however, does not have any screenshots as of now.
He then goes on to explain a scene that Revathy had spoken about in an interview back in October. She’d alleged that during a shoot on the beach, her clothes were wet and Rajesh had commented on her lingerie and told her he enjoyed watching her wet.
The director explains this in his blog post thus, “During the course of the shoot, watching the monitor I noticed that she was completely drenched and her upper portion of her body could be visibly seen through the drenched Tee Shirt. I asked my assistants to go and inform her to dry up and re-shoot. All my assistants refused, as by this time most of the cast & crew were not even willing to go near her. Somehow I sent an assistant with a towel to her. And I had to personally go to her and ask her to dry up and change her inners. She immediately flared up and started accusing me that I was making comments on her body. That was it, I lost it and give her a mouthful that this is not an ‘item number or a piece film’ for people’s bodies to be flaunted, the role is that of a police officer and all decorum for the same has to be maintained.”
He finally touches on the payment issue, and both Revathy’s and Rajesh’s versions match, although the latter justifies the producer’s delay in getting it done. The producer had not paid her and on the last day, she refused to act till her payments were cleared. She was then given part of the payment and the remaining was promised in writing.
TNM reached out to Revathy for her response but she declined to comment.