'I was so pained and horrified...': When Sanjay Khan refuted allegations of slapping Zeenat Aman, called it 'PR attack'

On Tuesday, November 7, Zeenat Aman revealed that in May this year, she underwent surgery for a condition know as ptosis, which caused her eyelid to droop further and further, leading to obstruction in her vision in the last few years. She also stated that it was because of an injury that she had suffered many decades ago, which damaged the muscles around her right eye.

 In 1978, Zeenat had reportedly tied the knot with producer-actor Sanjay Khan in the presence of two eye-witnesses in Rajasthan. Just a year later, their marriage was annulled. It was Sanjay's second marriage as he had tied the knot with Zarine Khan in 1966, with whom he has three daughters and one son, the most famous of them being Sussanne Khan and Zayed Khan.

In January 1980, the film magazine CineBlitz had shared a detailed account of how Sanjay assaulted Zeenat publicly in Taj, Mumbai. As per the media report, Sanjay dragged Zeenat on the floor, pulled her by the hair, and thrashed her brutally in December 1979. Though Zeenat never directly talked about this harrowing incident in any of her interviews, Sanjay said that no such incident happened when he launched his autobiography The Best Mistakes of My Life in 2018.

In an episode of Rendezvous With Sim Grewal in 1999, Zeenat shared that she has suffered physical abuse and violence in her life, but has chosen to block those memories. "For many years, in my mind, it’s been obliterated because I think that’s what the human mind does. When there is something distinctly unpleasant, you just close your mind to it and pretend that it never happened and you promise yourself that it will never happen again. And that’s how you cope", she had said.

While promoting his autobiography five years ago, Sanjay said to Hrishikesh Kannan, "I was so pained and horrified with the one-sidedness of the entire story because nobody even asked me that what happened. This was a well planned PR attack against me which came like a blitzkrieg. I was even accused of her eye going out...she is losing her eye which is not right. If you see ’81, ’82, ’83, ’84, she has done several films. There is evidence to the fact that she has perfect eyes. Later on in life she became a little squint because her mother was squint a little bit. It was a hereditary thing that was labelled one me that I slapped her, I never slapped her, and this was blasphemy."

The two actors were paired opposite each other in the 1973 thriller Dhund and the 1980 romantic drama Abdullah, which was directed by Khan himself.

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