Vikramaditya Motwane, co-founder of Phantom films with Vikas Bahl, Anurag Kashyap and Madhu Mantena, has issued a statement addressing the sexual harassment allegations against Vikas Bahl.
On Saturday, the dissolution of Phantom Films was announced following the allegations and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap took to Twitter on Sunday to release a two-page statement on the matter. “My statement in light of the recent HuffPost article and breaking up of Phantom. There are two pages,” his tweet read.
Following this, filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane, another partner at Phantom Films, apologised for the incident and called Bahl a “sexual offender”.
“I didn’t hear about the incident between Vikas and the girl when it happened in 2015. The first time I heard of it was in March 2017, when Anurag called me and told me about it,” Motwane wrote on Twitter.
— Vikramaditya Motwane (@VikramMotwane) October 7, 2018
Motwane also revealed that they immediately took action about this.
“We offered suspending Vikas from the company for a long period of time, not letting him produce or direct, taking away his signatory rights as well as sending him to rehabilitation. She (the complainant) agreed. So did Vikas, who had no memory of the incident.”
Motwane concluded by apologising to the victim and promised that no such incident would happen again.
Earlier, the Huffington Post report said many people, including Anurag Kashyap, had been aware of the incident for a long time but did not do enough.
According to the Huffington Post, the dissolution of Phantom Films could be attributed to the allegations against Vikas as he is the co-owner.