Javed Akhtar says he was ‘humiliated, embarrassed’ by Kangana Ranaut’s claims against him: ‘I was under tremendous pressure’

He said that Kangana had previously claimed that he had threatened her, but he’d decided to let it slide. “In the magazine interview, she only said I had threatened her, but I did not react to it. She had not said that I threatened her by saying that she would have to commit suicide. But in a television interview in July 2020 she improvised and as everyone was speaking about suicide, she said all this,” he said. “This was not earlier. Suicide had become a buzz word after Sushant Singh Rajput’s death and she used it to make an allegation that I was from some suicide brigade and that I was forcing her to commit suicide. If it was so, she would have mentioned it in her first statement in the magazine.”

Javed Akhtar said that he would have ‘forgotten’ about the televised interview as well, but wasn’t able to because ‘many people had an extreme reaction to it’. He said that he received calls from people in Lucknow, who told him that they didn’t expect this from him. He added, “I was very upset and may have chosen to ignore it. We are lazy people who are concerned with the creative field. It took me 4-5 months to file this case as I saw that it was not going away. I was under tremendous pressure. I was feeling humiliated. People did not let me forget it, and it was getting bigger and more and more embarrassing, so I had to file this complaint.”

Her interaction with the lyricist, Kangana had claimed, was after she was involved in a public war of words with her Krrish 3 co-star Hrithik Roshan. Kangana had called the then-married Hrithik her ‘ex’, but he had gone on to deny this. Javed said that he’d spoken to both Kangana and Hrithik to apologise to each other and call a truce. “I tried to convince her by saying that only people are having fun at hearing all this while her name is being muddied and it would affect her career. However, Ranaut was not receptive to my suggestion as I had a very formal relationship with her, so I was not able to insist after a point and I told her to forget about these things. We parted on a friendly note,” he said.

Kangana had told Pinkvilla in the aftermath of Sushant’s suicide, “Once Javed Akhtar had called me to his house and told me that Rakesh Roshan and his family are very big people. If you don’t apologise to them, you will have nowhere to go. They will put you in jail, and eventually, the only path would be that of destruction…you will commit suicide. These were his words. Why did he think if I don’t apologise to Hrithik Roshan, I would have to commit suicide? He shouted and yelled at me. I was shaking in his house.”

She repeated these claims in court last year, when she appeared to give a statement in the ongoing defamation case. Javed Akhtar will be cross-examined by Kangana’s lawyer on June 12.

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