MUMBAI, Maharashtra — In 2015, the four partners at Phantom Films, the edgy Bollywood production house set up by directors Vikas Bahl, Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane and producer Madhu Mantena, learnt that one of them had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman crew member during the pre-release promotional tour of their movie, Bombay Velvet.
After months of agonised negotiations and recriminations, Phantom's four newly powerful men of Bollywood did what made the most sense to them at the time—nothing.
The partner accused of assault was Bahl, best known for directing Queen—a Kangana Ranaut starrer critically acclaimed for its empowering narrative of a strong female character's voyage of self-discovery.
At the time, Phantom Films had just signed a major deal with Reliance Entertainment, and would go on to make on a series of big-ticket projects including Sacred Games for Netflix.
Bahl, the woman crew member said, insisted on dropping her to her hotel room on the early hours of 5 May 2015 and pretended to pass out drunk on her bed, only to awaken soon after and masturbate on her.
The woman was alone, vulnerable and recovering from an accident that had left her on crutches for months. She had only just begun to walk unassisted.
In October 2015, she reached out to Kashyap and detailed her experience, but almost two years would pass before her testimony was addressed with any degree of seriousness.
Meanwhile, Bahl harassed her until she finally quit the company in despair, she said in an interview with HuffPost India.
Today, as Bahl prepares for the release of Super 30, a big budget film starring Hrithik Roshan, the young woman is struggling to revive her career in Bollywood: an industry where everyone knows everyone, and no one wants to upset anyone. Earlier this month, actor Nana Patekar sent a legal notice to Tanushree Dutta after she said Patekar had assaulted and threatened her on the sets of the movie Horn Ok Pleassss in 2008.
"This is the price you pay for speaking out against harassment, humiliation and injustice in India," Dutta told news agency ANI.
Over this summer, HuffPost India spoke to over a dozen filmmakers, artistes, crew members, studio executives and most importantly, the woman in question, to piece together a tale that reveals just why the global movement to hold powerful men accountable for their sex-crimes has left India's entertainment industry largely untouched.
Almost all of them begged anonymity, claiming that speaking out would end their careers. The people to come on record were Bahl's fellow director and business partner at Phantom Films, Anurag Kashyap, and Kashyap's girlfriend Shubhra Shetty, who told HuffPost India they believe the woman, and corroborated all key aspects of the woman's testimony
The news of Bahl's alleged assault was briefly covered by the Mumbai Mirror in 2017, but soon dropped out of public memory. Now, three years after the incident, the woman recounted what happened over a series of interviews that stretched over four months.
A combination of therapy, Buddhist practice, and support from her friends and most importantly, her boyfriend, she said, have given her confidence to speak out now.
In a sign of how the conversation around sexual assault is gathering momentum to demand answers from powerful men, Bahl's business partner Kashyap admitted to HuffPost India he had failed the woman—three years after he first learnt of the allegations.
"Whatever happened was wrong. We didn't handle it well, we failed. I cannot blame anyone but myself," Kashyap said. "But now we are determined to do better. We believe her completely. She has our undying support. What Bahl has done is horrifying. We are already on our path of course correction and will do everything in our capacity to fix it."
While Kashyap agreed to an on-record interview, HuffPost India sent detailed questionnaires to Phantom Films's remaining three partners—Bahl, Motwane and Mantena. This story will be updated if they respond.
Three days after our questionnaires were sent, Kashyap tweeted that Phantom Films would be dissolved, and the four partners would go their separate ways.
Bombay Velvet
On the night of 4 May 2015, a gaggle of Bollywood A-listers assembled in an exclusive party suite at the Park Hyatt, a luxury resort in south Goa.
Bombay Velvet, Kashyap's ambitious adaptation of historian Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables, was days away from release and the crew and cast—which included stars like Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma and Karan Johar (who had a cameo in the film) and Phantom partners Bahl and Kashyap—had gathered to dance away the nervous energy that precedes any big-budget release.
The star-cast dispersed by 2.30 am, it was now May 5, the woman said, and a smaller group of people, including the woman, Bahl, and a few other crew members moved to another suite, where the celebrations continued.
"We were all having fun," the woman said. "I had been drinking vodka and by now, I was really, really drunk,"
When the party finally wound down, the woman said Bahl offered to drop her to her room.
"I told him I will figure it out," she recalled, but she said Bahl pointed to the fact that she was still recovering from an accident that had left her with a limp, and insisted he accompany her for her safety.
"I didn't make anything of it. For me, Bahl was my boss's business partner," she said. "I wasn't worried about anything. He had acted normally throughout the party."
When they finally reached her room, the woman hugged Bahl, bid him goodnight, and rushed inside to the bathroom.
"I couldn't hold my pee anymore," she said.
But unbeknownst to her, Bahl had slipped into the room behind her, the woman later told HuffPost India.
When she came out, she said, she was taken aback to see Bahl lying on the footrest of her bed.
"He acted as if he couldn't get up. I asked him to get up, leave. In my head, I was thinking furiously, 'what should I do to get him out?'" she said.
The woman said she asked Bahl to leave the room several times, but he refused.
"I had no energy to do anything more. He wasn't leaving my room. I gathered some strength and put multiple pillows between the two of us to create some sort of a divider," she said. "Everything was blurry, I was on the verge of passing out but one part of my brain was very aware of this man who wouldn't leave my bed."
Within seconds of her lying on the bed, the woman said, she felt Bahl put his hand inside her dress. The woman says she resisted several times. When she pushed him away one final time, Bahl dropped his pants and began to masturbate.
She was too shaken to face him, she said, so Bahl masturbated onto her back.
"Fuck you, bitch" she recalls Bahl saying, before he pulled up his pants and left the room.
"The next morning when I woke up, I remember taking a very long shower."
She said she was still numb all of next day.
There was another party the next day, and Bahl showed up.
Gaslighting
That evening, the woman said, Bahl made it a point to walk up to her, and loudly state that she was very drunk the previous night, and asked her if she had made it to her room safely.
Bahl did not respond to HuffPost India's request for comment.
The woman saw this as way to gaslight her, by muddling her own recollection of the events of the night before.
She avoided him for the rest of the evening, and asked a cast member to stay close to her to protect her from Bahl. HuffPost India interviewed the cast member who confirmed that the woman told him Bahl had done something to her soon after the incident.
"She didn't mention the specifics at that time but I later found out and understood what she was referring to," the cast member told HuffPost India. The person begged anonymity, fearing that crossing paths with Bahl and Phantom would have severe repercussions on his career.
The following night, the woman flew back home to Mumbai from Goa.
On 7 May, two days after the incident, the woman narrated the incident in detail to a close friend of hers, a producer who, at the time, was working with Phantom on an independent film.
HuffPost India conducted a detailed interview with the friend, who corroborated the sequence of events. The friend also requested anonymity, fearing retaliation from Bahl's supporters within the industry.
"I was shocked and asked her to immediately take it up with Kashyap," the friend said. "But the thing with Phantom is, we know nothing would come out of it."
On 13 May, there was a screening of Bombay Velvet, after which the crew went to Bahl's house for a party. The woman avoided the celebration.
On 15 May, Bombay Velvet released and sank like a stone. One critic described it as an "epic misfire". Kashyap, the one partner in Phantom the woman was close to, disappeared into a depressive shell. The woman said she felt she wasn't ready to talk to him about the incident.
"I took her to a therapist. She was feeling suicidal," the woman's friend recalled. "It didn't quite help so we went to a few more people. She was on strong antidepressants and we were all worried for her. The antidepressants had side-effects."
On one visit to her apartment, the friend hid all sharp objects in the house, including knives from her kitchen.
"I was paranoid that she'd harm herself," he said.
By the end of May and beginning of June, the medication started to show severe side-effects. A friend of hers introduced her to Buddhist practice, which bought the woman a sense of calmness and faith. She began the process of healing herself.
"I was blaming not just myself for this incident but the entire course of my life, my past divorce, the accident, all of it," the woman said, looking back at the immediate aftermath of the incident. "I was in a phase where I felt like I didn't deserve any better."