The news of Phantom films (Vikramaditya Motwane, Anurag Kashyap, Vikas Bahl and Madhu Mantena) sudden dissolution came as a surprise or shock to many.
The dissolution also saw the revisitation of allegations of sexual against director Vikas Bahl. In a feature with Huffington Post young women who was a former employee of Phantom films exposed the sexual misconduct of the director which took place in Goa.
Vikas has not responded on the issue and has remained quiet. But Anurag Kashyap recently took to his twitter and released a statement in which he apologises to the young women and admits he knew about the matter.
In his statement, Anurag said that he was misguided by those charge of the legal department.
While they did bar Vikas from entering the office premises, suspended him he also stated that he named and shamed him privately amongst whoever asked about it and took away his signing authority, they still could not fire him from the job as their contracts did not have a clause that would allow a co-owner to be fired on such grounds.
Take a look at the full statement below
My statement in light of the recent HuffPost article and breaking up of Phantom . There are two pages.. pic.twitter.com/WCAsaj6uFR
— Anurag Kashyap (@anuragkashyap72) October 7, 2018
In his statement, he also spoke about how he reported the incident to a publication on an anonymous basis. He said that nothing has been under wraps and the story has been out for more than a year. He also stated that the women decided to keep the incident from him for quite some time, as she thought he was suffering from depression after the film Bombay Velvet failed to do well at the box office
He also said that though the victim trusted him completely, she knew that he was depending on others to handle legalities and he feels that this is why she felt that he would not see through the plan of stripping Vikas of power in the company.
“This could perhaps be why she eventually backed out of signing the document that was being put in place capturing the terms of how this would be dealt with" his statement stated.