Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s daughter Aaliyah has opened up about the intense trolling she faced over her lingerie photoshoot and the effect it had on her mental health. “I have never felt more frightened than I have in the past few weeks to the point where I considered deleting my Instagram,” Aaliyah wrote in a post on Instagram.
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“The past few weeks have been really hard on my mental health. Ever since I posted a photo of me in lingerie, I have been getting the most vile, degrading and disgusting comments,” she wrote in her note.
Aaliyah said she tried to ignore the harassment and shrug it off, “but the truth is,” she wrote, “that we need to speak about it because these kinds of comments contribute to the rape culture that affects all women in India (and the rest of the world) in one way or the other.”
“We seem to be a country that will hold candle marches for a woman after she’s been sexually assaulted but won’t protect a woman while she’s alive,” she wrote.
“And the truth is that women in India grow up being sexualized their whole lives,” Aaliyah added.
She then opened up that she was “sexually assaulted as a minor by a middle-aged man.”
“The double standard is that many of the people who have harassed me, along with many other women, are hypocrites. They love to pretend that they’re on a moral high ground buy in reality, they are the ones promoting rape culture that exists,” she added.
A few weeks back, Aaliyah shared posts on Instagram from a photoshoot for a lingerie brand.
She had opened up on her YouTube channel about the online abuse she faced over her photoshoot.
“The amount of backlash I got for it like people telling me I should be ashamed of being Indian and posting stuff like that,” she said.
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“People were sending me rape threats. People were calling me a prostitute. People were DMing me and asking me what my rate was. People were sending me death threats,” she said, adding that none of it matters as they are people hiding behind their phone screens.
