Rhea Chakraborty and the taming of the trolls

At the cash register of Rhea Chakraborty’s brand store Chapter 2 Drip in Mumbai’s Linking Road, which she launched last May, prints by Polish surrealist Pawel Kuczynski stop me in my tracks. A gorilla in a suit eats green soup flecked with a tiny biplane—the proverbial fly. A carrot launches like a rocket, as donkeys watch a politician at a podium. A pig in a trench coat exits a grocery store after shopping for meat that might be its own. Kuczynski skewers the hollow heart of our hyperconnected society, much like Chakraborty’s minimalist unisex clothing nearby: tees with slogans such as Anti-Everything, Cancelled, Polarised, Un-Herd, Gaslit and Indifferent that Gen Z vocabulary has made catchphrases.

The actor turned entrepreneur drew these words from talks with her Gen Z team, who reject the tired script of dating, marriage, kids, and 9-to-5 jobs. “If you want to rewrite the rules, first break your own conditioning,” Chakraborty says. Essentially, be anti-everything. Words like ‘polarised’, ‘cancelled’ and ‘un-herd’ also echo the hell of her past few years. 

In 2020, she faced the full force of the illusory truth effect: If enough people say it, it must be true. The trolling against her was a blood-curdling cry for vigilante-style retribution in the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput, who she was then dating. The coverage of her story exceeded that of Covid-19 or the Hathras gangrape, according to one estimate. She was 27. It was the same year Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe was forced to correct his creator JK Rowling: “Transgender women are women.” Cancel culture was peaking. 

Chakraborty had the markers of everyone’s favourite villain—a young, good-looking woman living and loving on her own terms. She joined the legions of young female celebrities who have been attacked for everything from their bodies and their clothes to their mental illnesses and their political opinions. Except, she faced actual criminal and legal consequences for something she hadn’t said or done. 

It took five years for the CBI to concede that she was innocent, five years of the worst kind of trolling, living with serious charges and even some jail-time. “I didn’t find the world to be a safe place. I didn’t feel the joy in going out. I went through my fair share of PTSD,” she tells me. “So, even if a man came running towards me to open the door, my body would react differently.” In March 2025, the central agency gave her a clean chit. Her learnings from this trauma are worthy of our attention.

Chakraborty believes trolling is the perfect vaccine against the bottomless pit of external validation, and every celebrity should experience being cancelled once in their lifetimes. “This changed everything for me because I understood that the external stuff really doesn’t matter,” she says.

Now, she can reference that time dispassionately. “I have not been trolled for a while and it feels really, like, what happened? Like they don’t care about me anymore,” she tells me. “The only way you can catch people’s attention today is through trolling. No one cares about the positive stuff. For instance, 50 million people will watch the arrest and maybe, if you’re lucky, one million will understand the clean chit.” She likens it to stopping to watch a fight on the road—a well-known Indian habit. Silver lining? The sheer scope of the trolling made her a household name. Today, she uses social media strictly for promotions—of her podcast, her clothing brand, her collaborations, and occasional holiday content—steering clear of personal updates like who she is dating.

As the tagline of her fledgling brand declares, Chakraborty is writing her own sequel. Chapter 2 is both the clothing brand she started with her brother Showik and a podcast she hosts (along the lines of Monica Lewinsky’s Reclaiming, about taking back what has been lost). For Chakraborty, the moniker also represents a new way of living, with more privacy and different life goals. “I want to be financially independent. I want to have enough money to pay any lawyer worth their salt at any given point if I have to. I can just be like, ‘RTGS, see you in court,’” she says, making the gesture of transferring money on her phone with a single click.

She pitched her clothing line to one of the guests on her podcast, businesswoman Ashni Biyani, and convinced her to invest ₹1 crore in the company. Chakraborty says the dramatic exchange happened spontaneously. Her podcasts are warm, intimate living-room chats where guests share anything from battling bulimia or bankruptcy to the secrets of co-parenting. In a recent episode with actor Huma Qureshi, Chakraborty revealed that she is considering freezing her eggs. On other episodes, Chakraborty has discussed the issue of having children, and in the season finale she confirmed that she would indeed freeze her eggs this year. For now, her work takes precedence. “I think one goal at a time is nice,” she says.

It doesn’t escape her that her audience for all her business ventures are likely the same folks that trolled her. “Every single person that I speak to on a daily basis is someone who has had a troll-y thought about me. That’s just my life,” she says. “You may have had this.” I assure her I only saw her as a sitting-duck victim of a lynch mob, but I’m not sure she’s convinced.

Her terrace apartment in Bandra brims with that healing combination of art and plants. A sign bans photography. She figured out a while back that revenge is pointless and the only way forward is forgiveness. She forgave friends who melted away, accepting that they were just a scared “audience” when her world first turned upside down. “I’m not angry anymore,” she shares. “I used to be very angry. Anger only causes acidity. I think forgiveness has been a very hard but important part of my healing. I want peace, I want to make money, and I want to be happy, and I genuinely don’t care about the noise.”

The noise was the first to go. Stripping life to its basics helped her get through the tough days. She turned vegetarian for three years, eating mostly khichri and bananas to fix her gut. She emptied her wardrobe. She borrowed money from friends as her accounts were frozen and did therapy every Wednesday for three and a half years. “I lived very minimalistically. I’m like, I don’t need any of this. I don’t go out anymore,” she says. “I just wanted to remove all the noise, all the clutter, just everybody just stop and move away.” She carved out space to understand what really mattered, leaning on her five girlfriends—producer and TV presenter Shibani Akhtar was one of them—some of whom had known her since the army brat moved to Mumbai at 17 to follow her Bollywood dream.

Her last film was Chehre in 2021, alongside Amitabh Bachchan and Emraan Hashmi. And that dream still lingers somewhere but will only be revived for a role that makes her feel “wow, I really want to do this”. Everything else has changed. That wow effect will be soon on display, when her Succession-like new show, Family Business, featuring Anil Kapoor and Vijay Varma, releases on Netflix. “I feel like every trauma has a gift and I feel like my trauma has given me the gift that everything will be better, always,” says the actor, who is more famous for her role in the reality show MTV Roadies than her outings in films like Jalebi, Bank Chor, and Mere Dad Ki Maruti.

Call it her theory of relativity. We measure success, health, wealth, and happiness not in absolute terms but by comparing them to how much others have or by how our past selves experienced these. She applies the same rule to the trauma she experienced, classifying that as “worst” and describing the obstacles she now faces as “normal bad”. A fire at work? Normal bad. Vendor delays? Normal bad. “Things that normal people stress about, I don’t stress about,” she says. She weighs these against the pain and problems of the inmates she met in her nearly month-long imprisonment in Mumbai’s Byculla Jail in 2020.

Conversely, the idea of normalcy—a rajma-chawal meal, good sales numbers—holds special value. “Happiness is in the smallest of things,” she shares. “I think just being able to be peaceful with my family and have a normal life has been so hard for me. Just being able to walk on the street, go to the gym, go for a meal has been so difficult for so many years.” The Narcotics Bureau of Control returned her passport that was seized five years ago. “While other people strive for bigger, larger things, my striving has been for normalcy. It is special to me,” she adds.

These past years, many advised her to leave the country, move cities, but Chakraborty stayed put. “For me, my only answer or revenge to the trolls was that I will do as I please, and I will do it well,” she says. “And it’s taken a fair amount of time, but I think we’re here now.”

The clothes at her Bandra store act as “silent armour”, a reminder of the ‘smash patriarchy’ T-shirt sent to her by an NGO months before and one that she wore when she was being questioned by a central agency. “It spoke for me when I couldn’t speak for myself,” she says.

She hopes her clothes will build community, not just be a “dhanda”, and describes her fashion line as a “warm hug”. “It’s like, hey, you’re going through this shit too. You’re not alone. It’s okay to not be okay,” she says. Relatively speaking.

Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru, Ridhima Sapre. Photography: Soujit Das. Stylist: Naheed Driver. Set Designer: Nikita Rao. Art Direction: Harry Iyer. Bookings editor: Nikita Moses. Multimedia designer: Mehak Jindal. Visuals Editor: Ria Rawat. Hair: Umang Thapa. Makeup: Riddhima Sharma. Assistants: Esha Gupta. Production: Peanut Butter Productions. Artist Reputation Management: Spice.