Weeks since Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar publicly accused his wife, Dhivya Sashidhar, of an extramarital affair, Dhivya has now apparently made serious charges against him, including sexual coercion, stalking, and compelling her into an open marriage.
As per The San Francisco Standard, which obtained court documents, emails, photos, and other evidence, Dhivya also provided a personal interview of her experiences. She alleged that Prasanna coerced her into sex even when she was in physical distress due to post-childbirth complications and spied on her every day, including taping her in the bathroom.
“Prasanna would visit and say, ‘See, sex is a basic necessity for me. You must do it. It doesn’t make any difference, like, you know, how much hurt you are’,” she said to the outlet.
“He would literally, like, say that, you know, ‘If you don’t do it, then I want to go outside and get it,'” she claimed.
The pair, who have been together for ten years and have a nine-year-old son, are currently engaged in a custody dispute. Prasanna had previously posted screenshots on social media that he said proved Dhivya’s affair with another man, including hotel reservations and text messages.
In her court testimony, Dhivya also blamed her husband for pulling her and her son across continents in a bid to escape taxes. She testified that he had first taken them to California in 2020, where she was working from home for Microsoft, and later to Singapore against her will for the same money reasons.
The report also referenced a 2019 email from Prasanna in which he confessed to calling up various escorts:
“I’m extremely sorry for the distress this caused to our marriage. I commit to never putting our marriage in this situation again,” he said.
In another email, on the same day, he proposed an open marriage to Dhivya. In response to The Standard, Prasanna admitted that his marriage was ‘sexless;’ when this happened and stated he had “multiple conversations with her to try to figure out why this was so. I, in a fit of temper, spoke about opening up the marriage to other sexual partners,” he said. “We decided not to do it.
In her testimony, Dhivya also claimed that Prasanna would make her leave work just for the purpose of having sex with him or else threaten to look for others. She also claimed that he utilized their overseas transfers as a method of hiding his increasing wealth from tax authorities.
Prasanna himself had earlier accused Chennai Police of harassment, alleging he was falsely accused in a case of kidnaping a child.
