Actor Rhea Chakraborty has opened up about how the fallout from the 2020 investigations following Sushant Singh Rajput’s death affected not only her acting career but her entire family’s ability to work. Speaking to filmmaker Farah Khan, she said that after she and her brother were released from jail, film offers disappeared and companies were unwilling to employ Showik. “We were cancelled by society,” she said, describing a period in which the family was largely sitting at home without work. Years later, the siblings say that experience became one of the reasons they stopped waiting for conventional opportunities and built their own clothing business.

Rhea Chakraborty Says Society ‘Cancelled’ Her Family

According to Rhea Chakraborty, the professional damage continued long after the intense media attention of 2020 began to fade. She said filmmakers were no longer offering her roles, while Showik Chakraborty struggled to find employment outside the entertainment industry. “No corporate was willing to take him on,” she said during the conversation with Farah Khan. The siblings have made similar comments before. In a June interview with Neha Dhupia and Angad Bedi, Rhea said nobody was signing her after 2020, while Showik said people initially promised to help him find a job but no offer eventually materialised. Those claims remain their personal account of what happened. No hiring records or statements from prospective employers have been made public to independently establish why particular opportunities did not materialise.

Showik Chakraborty Says His IIM Plans Were Disrupted

The consequences were not limited to employment. Rhea said her brother had scored 97% in CAT and secured admission to an IIM. The family had even paid the fees. Then came the events of 2020. She said Showik Chakraborty was arrested before he could complete the first trimester, disrupting the academic path he had planned. Showik was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau in September 2020 in a drugs-related investigation that emerged after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput. Rhea was arrested separately a few days later and spent 27 days in jail before the Bombay High Court granted her bail in October 2020. The events unfolded during the broader COVID-19 lockdown in Maharashtra, when normal work, education and movement were already heavily disrupted. For the Chakraborty family, the legal proceedings and public attention added another layer of uncertainty.

Rhea Says Her Father Also Lost a Job Opportunity

Rhea has now said the fallout extended to her father as well. Her father, Indrajit Chakraborty, is a former Army doctor. According to her account, he had been offered a senior position as a medical superintendent at a hospital. She claimed that after the hospital discovered he was her father, the opportunity disappeared. Like the employment claims involving the siblings, this has not been independently verified through the hospital or employment documents. It nevertheless forms an important part of how the family describes that period: not simply as one actor losing film roles, but as professional opportunities drying up across multiple members of the household.

What Actually Happened in the Sushant Singh Rajput Cases?

This part needs careful distinction. In August 2020, the CBI registered a case after Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead at his Mumbai home in June that year. Rhea, her family members and others were named in allegations that included abetment of suicide and financial wrongdoing. Nearly five years later, in March 2025, the CBI filed closure reports and said there was no evidence to proceed against those named. The agency concluded that there was no involvement of Rhea or her family in abetting Rajput’s death. But that should not be confused with the separate NCB drugs case. Rhea and Showik had been arrested in that investigation, and proceedings connected with the NDPS case continued after the CBI closure report.

As recently as April 2026, a Mumbai NDPS court ordered bank accounts belonging to members of the Chakraborty family to be unfrozen because the NCB had failed to comply with mandatory procedural requirements. The court specifically did not decide the underlying drug allegations on their merits. That makes it inaccurate to simply say every criminal proceeding “ended without conviction.”

How Rejection Led to Chapter 2

After struggling to find work, the siblings began discussing what they could build themselves. That eventually became Chapter 2 Drip, an apparel brand they co-founded. In an earlier interview, Rhea said the idea was partly inspired by the slogan T-shirt she wore at the time of her arrest, which became widely circulated during the intense media coverage surrounding the case. She and Showik Chakraborty said they wanted to build clothing around messages that allowed people to express themselves. Indian Express has reported that Chapter 2 Drip is now estimated to be valued at around ₹40 crore. That figure should be treated as a reported valuation rather than an independently audited measure of the company's worth.

The siblings have framed the business as their response to a period when neither expected conventional employment to return.

Life After the COVID-19 Maharashtra Lockdown Period

The COVID-19 lockdown in Maharashtra formed the backdrop to one of the most intensely covered entertainment stories of 2020. Five years later, the legal and professional picture looks very different. The CBI has filed its closure report in the death investigation. Rhea has returned to entertainment through reality television, podcasts and other projects, while the siblings continue to work on their apparel business. But Rhea's latest comments focus less on the comeback than on what happened in between. She says the impact was measured in lost film roles, a disrupted education, job applications that went nowhere and an opportunity her father allegedly lost because of the family name.

Those experiences cannot all be independently verified from the interviews alone. What can be established is that Rhea Chakraborty and her family faced years of investigations and legal proceedings after 2020, while she now says the reputational consequences extended well beyond the courtroom. Chapter 2, in that sense, is more than the name of their brand. It is the name the siblings chose for the period in which they decided to rebuild after waiting for opportunities that, according to them, simply stopped coming.