Ravi Mohan: no films until my divorce is settled

Ravi Mohan walked into a room of channel microphones at his office on Saturday afternoon, flanked by his co-brother Prasad, and told the press he is not releasing a film, and not stepping onto a set, until his divorce is final. Vivagarathu kidaikkum varai padam nadikka maatten, he said. I will not act until I get my divorce. My upcoming films will not be released either. The decision is not a tactical pause. It is a man saying he cannot do the job anymore until the rest of his life is in order.

He has been silent for two years. By his own admission, that silence was the mistake. “Ravi Mohan is very soft,” he said of himself in the third person, the way a man does when he is trying to describe what he is no longer willing to be. Whatever you tell him, he listens, he understands, he compromises. That was the version the industry had grown used to. The version sitting behind the microphones on Saturday was a different one. “I am not a soft person anymore. I am going to kick back like Karate Babu.”

The framing was simple, and it was personal. He was not there to talk about cinema. He was there to address the audience he has worked for since 2003, the people he keeps describing as the ones who fed him across 23 years and a 95% success rate. He named what has been happening to him over the last two years as cyberbullying. He named the people he says are pushing it as a coordinated group with money behind it. He invited anyone who wanted to provoke him to come to his office and do it in person, face to face.

The address landed days after Keneeshaa Francis, the singer who has been seen with him publicly through the divorce, posted her own explosive note saying she was leaving Chennai, walking away from social media, walking away from her career, and that the public and the trolls could have Ravi now. Ravi did not name her in those terms. He defended her instead. She was the person who stood by him when no one else did. The cyber pile-on against her, in his telling, was what drove her out, and the people who set it in motion will hear from him. He spoke of how she had got down and worked at the launch of his banner Ravi Mohan Studios, fixing screen cloths and approving placements herself, and he contrasted that with what he framed as a luxury life run on his money. He denied being emotionally manipulated, in Tamil. En velaiye azhagaana pengaloda nadippadhu. Appo pogadha naan dhaan ippo emaatha porenaa? My very job is to act alongside beautiful women. The man who never gave in then, is he really the one cheating now?

The hardest moment came when he showed the camera his own wrist. He had begun hurting himself, he said, after they stopped letting him see his children. He spoke of having got up the next morning anyway and shown up at his shoot, because he had given his word and he was going to keep it. He spoke at length about his two sons. The school fees he is still paying every year, running into 50 lakh rupees. His younger son, who sits down to play chess with him at night, and to whom he intentionally loses. The phones he said have been confiscated. The bodyguards he said are now following them to school. He looked into the camera and said his children should watch this video.

He pointed to his wrist and said this is what happens to a man who is not allowed to see his own children.

Prasad, his co-brother, sat beside him for most of it. Ravi described him as another witness to what he says he lived inside that family. Prasad, he said, had walked away from the same household long before he did, while he himself had stayed and clung to the marriage to protect the boys. If anyone needed evidence, he said, he could put together a dozen pieces of it. The line landed less as a boast and more as a man telling the room he knows where the receipts are kept.

There were sharper claims threaded through the address, the kind that travel with defamation notices behind them. He spoke of a three-letter actress, the one he called the Idli actress, who he said had once tried to ruin three heroes in his own family, and asked what qualification she had to lecture anyone about feminism. He spoke of AI-generated evidence being prepared against him, and of real evidence he says he has waiting in reserve. He spoke of a joint bank account that flagged every swipe back to his ex-wife. He spoke of being kept inside his own family’s production house “like a serial artist” and “like a snake in a basket”. He pointed to Peranmai, the 2009 film he made about a rape survivor, and to the dialogue from it that still gets quoted at him, as his record on women. His mother, he said, had not raised him to treat women badly. Some of this will be settled in a courtroom. Some of it will not survive the next news cycle. The audience that has watched him since the days of Thaam Thoom will sort the wheat from the chaff in its own time.

On the cyberbullying he was specific. There is a limit, he said. He has the accounts. He has the insults. He has been quietly screenshotting for two years. Each one will be submitted. The girl, meaning Keneeshaa, had been driven out by them, and that account, in his words, is not closed.

What will stay, and what was clearly the reason he called reporters in, is the announcement itself. He is not acting until the divorce is over. He does not know when his next film will release on screen. He is asking the people who have stayed with him for 23 years to wait a little longer.

He closed on something concrete. If cinema does not want him for a while, he said, he has hands and legs. He is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer with the Arangetram on record. He can teach. He can survive. When his conscience is clear, he said, that is all he needs to live his life. Don’t provoke him. Give him a small break. He will come back.