Bollywood actor Aamir Khan’s daughter Ira, on Monday, revealed that she was sexually abused as a teenager by someone she “kind of knew.”
The youngster opened up about it in an Instagram video, mentioning how it took her over a year to realise that her abuser knew exactly “what they were doing,” after which she spoke about it with her father and mother Reena, reported The Indian Express.
“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,” Ira says in the video.
“I immediately wrote my parents an email and got myself out of that situation. Once I was out, I didn’t feel bad anymore. I wasn’t scared. I felt like this wasn’t happening to me anymore and it is over. I moved on and let go.”
Ira spoke about sexual abuse in the context of her fight with clinical depression, about which she opened up in October. In the video, she counted three major life experiences that had affected her but not to an extent to cause depression.
Besides the abuse, Ira mentioned her parents’ 2002 divorce was amicable so she never felt traumatised by it. She went on to speak about suffering from tuberculosis at the age of six, admitting that she lucked out and recovered fast.
Ira said remembering these incidents made her realise she had “no reason to be depressed,” which only isolated her from her family and friends because she felt unable to answer their questions. Besides, her understanding of her privilege for being a superstar’s daughter forced her to look away from confronting her emotions.
“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. So my sense of privilege, my feeling that I had to have a good enough reason to feel like this, made me not talk to anyone,” Ira concluded.
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