Reham Khan, the former wife of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan, said that she and her family have been the victims of a smear campaign ever since her marriage and eventual divorce with the popular Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician.
“My innocent children, they had nothing to do with this, and people have taken liberty to talk about them. There is a smear campaign, there is social media attacking them,” she said in an interview with the BBC on Thursday.
“And this has been happening for over 10 months. This was happening during the marriage as well, and we watched it silently because I was in a position where it was very difficult to then engage in a war of words,” she said.
Reham said that despite the fact that “two people are involved in a relationship”, it is easy for our society to malign the woman.
“When a woman gets divorced, I think it’s very easy for a community to jump on a bandwagon and demonise her but the woman doesn’t have to be a criminal to be going through a divorce. Becoming a divorcee is almost like a license for anyone to just start maligning them,” she said.
She said that all sorts of accusations were leveled at her from all corners without any investigation.
“The divorce and the marriage is of course behind me but to then conjure up all sorts of accusations—wild accusations which are completely baseless and no one has actually had the decency to actually investigate whether there had been any instance of poisoning or whether I was a spy,” she said.
