Superstar Aamir Khan’s daughter Ira Khan has revealed she was sexually abused as a teenager by a person whom she “sort of knew”. The revelation comes a month after Ira Khan had revealed that she has been clinically depressed for more than four years.
In a 10-minute video posted on Instagram, the theatre director said it took her about a year to understand to make sense of it, following which she confided in her father and mother Reena Dutta. “When I was 14, I was sexually abused. That was a slightly odd situation in the sense that I didn’t know whether the person knew what they were doing, I sort of knew them. It wasn’t happening every day.”
“It took me about a year to be sure that they knew what they were doing and that’s what they were doing. I immediately wrote my parents an email and got myself out of that situation,” Ira Khan said in a clip .
The 23-year-old said once she was out of that situation, she didn’t feel bad anymore, but she would often beat herself up and feel “silly” that she let the abuse happen. “I wasn’t scared. I felt like this wasn’t happening to me anymore and it is over. I moved on and let go. But it was again not something that has scarred me for life and something that could be making me feel as bad as I was feeling when I was 18-20 years old,” she added.
Ira Khan said even her parents’ divorce didn’t “traumatise” her as it was amicable. Aamir Khan and Dutta separated in 2002 after being married for 16 years. The former couple is also parents to son Junaid Khan. Ira Khan said they are not a “broken family” and everyone is friends with each other. “My parents were very good about being parents to Junaid and me even after divorce and when people would say ‘oh I am so sorry that your parents got divorced’, I would be like why? It’s not a bad thing.”
Ira Khan said divorce of one’s parents could be damaging for children but it wasn’t something that scarred her. “I remember most of it, but it felt like my parents’ divorce didn’t bother me. So, that can’t be a reason why I was feeling so sad.” Ira Khan said she kept wondering why was she feeling depressed despite being fairly privileged. She said when she felt suffocated or cried, she didn’t reach out to her closed ones as she did not want to burden them.
“(I thought) It’s not like anyone can help me through this because there’s no reason for me to feel like this because nothing bad has happened to me. I shouldn’t feel like this. I don’t have any reason to feel like this. “And so my own sense of privilege, my own sense of feeling that I had to have a good enough reason to feel like this made me not talk to anyone,” she added.
