Social media influencer Apoorva Mukhija, aka The Rebel Kid, was embroiled in a controversy following her appearance on Samay Raina’s India’s Got Latent. Her comments against a contestant made her the target of online hate. The incident even forced her to remove all her posts from Instagram, in addition to causing her financial harm. However, the damage was not limited to her and her career, but it also reached her parents. In a recent interview on the YouTube channel Yuvaa, Apoorva Mukhija recalled how the trolls found her parents’ accounts, and flooded them with abuse.
She said, “I was not relevant enough to be part of this scandal first of all. I was like I have the least amount of followers on the table, so stop it. It was a lot. People found my parents’ account. My mom’s account was public. My mom got a lot of ‘R’ words and rape threats and slut shaming.”
Three days later, when Apoorva called her brother, she realised her mother was not keeping well post the controversy. “I called my brother, I was like, ‘Ghar pe sab kuch theek hai?’ He told me mom’s BP is around 180/120. I googled it and realised it was like an SOS. She could have gotten a heart attack, and then he told me about all the comments she received. I freaked out and asked, ‘How did mummy react?’ He said, ‘Mom just wrote I am very proud of my daughter and then she disabled her comments.’ That really hurt me because I wanted to do a lot of things for my mom.”
Speaking about her dad, an emotional Apoorva shared, “My dad, while we were growing up, always said ‘samaj mein izzat rehni chahiye (we should be respected by the society).’ I just felt like, in a second, he lost all of that. He always told me ‘Gaali mat diya karo, videos mat banao…’ and everything he was scared of came true, and I put them through all of that and they didn’t complain even once. So I felt that this was not the cost to pay.”
In the same interview, Apoorva Mukhija shared that her rebellious attitude has a lot to do with her childhood and the kind of environment she grew up in. “I started abusing because my dad said ‘girls can’t abuse.’” She shared how these biases rules made her question things and do everything opposite to what she is being taught. “He never said ‘koi bhi gaali nahi dega (nobody can abuse)’. My dad was against girls being an actor or model. They saw it as a really dark place.”
She also addressed the rumours of her not being on good terms with her parents, especially her dad.
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She shared, “It is not like my dad ever said anything incorrect, he was right in some ways. But there was always a gap between how he communicated and how I saw things. He used to be like, ‘Don’t leave the house’, ‘don’t wear a certain type of clothing’ as these are your years to focus on studies. And he was not wrong. But, life is not so unidimensional. You are doing a bunch of stuff at the same time. We just never saw eye to eye on anything and we just never took out the time to understand what the other person in trying to say. For him, I was always the child who disrespected him and didn’t listen to him. For me, he was always the villain arc.”
Apoorva shared that her perspective on her relationship with her father changed after the Samay Raina controversy.
“When this entire fiasco happened, I was all over the news and I didn’t have the guts to tell my parents that this is what has happened. I can’t go and tell them ‘maine gaali dediya’. My dad just texted me one message. He was like: ‘No matter whatever happens, I am always standing with you.’ And suddenly all of that happened in the past didn’t matter. Even my closest friend didn’t write that.”
Apoorva joked, “Now, I can’t say anything against my dad. He has taken all my content away from him.”