Fans defend Canadian-Indian actress Sunny Leone grilled over porn past in TV interview

People are rushing to the defence of Canadian-Indian actress Sunny Leone after an interview she did with a veteran TV journalist in India who repeatedly – and allegedly aggressively – brought up her former career as an adult film star.

Leone, who was born in Sarnia, Ont. and is of Indian origin, is a controversial figure in India for having made the leap from the adult film world to Bollywood in 2011. She is also one of the most sought after celebrities, being the country’s most Googled person in India for four years running. Forbes India Magazine also named her 45th on the 2015 top 100 celebrity list.

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But when the 34-year-old sat down for an interview with Bhupendra Chaubey, anchor of CNN-IBN’s talk show The Hot Seat, she was met with a barrage of hostile questions about her career as an adult film actress.

The 30-minute interview which first aired on Jan.15, shows the anchor repeatedly question Leone over her past.

“Do you not sometimes get affected that your past, the past that you were a ‘porn queen’, will continue to haunt you? Or maybe it will continue to pull you back?” Chaubey asks.

He went on to question if she is “literally lowering the level of the fine art of cinema” and if she thought “it’s your body that will ultimately take you everywhere?”

Chaubey’s added:  “I am wondering whether I am getting morally corrupted because I am interviewing you.”

Leone answered the questions calmly, insisting that she had no regrets about her previous work.

“Everything that I’ve done in my life has led me into this seat, so it’s a chain reaction that happens. It is stepping stone to something bigger and better,” Leone responded. “That’s what life is about. When you’re young, the decisions you make lead you to who you are as an adult. I don’t have any horror stories.”

The anchor’s line of questioning drew an immediate backlash from fans and Bollywood actors taking to Twitter to praise Leone, including Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars.

Chaubey later defended himself on his blog following the interview.

“Sunny Leone is a newsmaker in her own right because of what was going on in her past, the circumstances she operates in today and the manner in which she deals with criticism which is bound to come her way,” he wrote.

“I simply did the job of asking questions, yes, which were perhaps moral in nature,”

The controversy over Leone also highlights the country’s complicated relationship with pornography.

The Indian government imposed a temporary ban on pornographic websites in 2015, but despite the ban the country is one of the world’s largest consumers of online porn.

PornHub, one of the world’s largest adult websites, found in its 2015 year in review report that India was the third biggest market of the year replacing Canada, who fell to fourth.

The U.S. and the U.K were the first and second largest markets respectively, according to the report.