Sex, Lies, and Hidden Cameras: Wife of Indian American Tech Billionaire Says He Sought Open Marriage in Bitter Divorce Drama

Divorces are never easy. They are challenging and emotionally complex processes, often involving a bitter financial or custody battle. There’s also bitterness, name-calling, stress, and, in some situations, a lot of drama.

One such case, involving a Silicon Valley couple, is currently making headlines. Prasanna Sankar, the co-founder of Rippling, a San Francisco-based workforce management company, and his wife, Dhivya Shasidhar, are going through a bitter custody battle. While Shasidhar has accused Sankar of mental abuse and pressure for an open marriage, Sankar is saying his wife had an affair. 

Sankar, who is currently on the run in India and is hiding from police, in a March 23 post on X wrote, “My name is Prasanna, who previously founded Rippling (worth $10B); I’m going through a divorce. I’m now on the run from the Chennai police, hiding outside of Tamil Nadu.”  In a series of subsequent posts, he shared his side of the story. “Recently our marriage broke down after I discovered she was having an affair with a person named Anoop for 6+ mos.” He and his wife were married for 10 years, he said in the post, and the couple has a 9-year-old son.

My name is Prasanna, who previously founded Rippling (worth $10B); I'm going through a divorce. I'm now on the run from the Chennai police hiding outside of Tamil Nadu. This is my story.

— Prasanna S (@myprasanna) March 23, 2025

In his X thread, Sankar posted screenshots of what he claimed were text messages between Sashidhar and Anoop Kuttysankaran in which she allegedly asked him to buy extra-large condoms.

Almost two weeks after Sankar’s post on X, Shasidhar, in an April 4 interview with The San Francisco Standard, refuted Sankar’s allegations and told her version of the story. According to the publication, she collaborated her account with “court documents from their international custody dispute and a trove of emails, photos, and other records.”

Sashidhar and Sankar met in 2007 while studying at NIT Trichy, where Sankar was “ranked as #1 coder in India,” according to his X post. A few months after they started dating, Sankar came to California, and Sashidhar went “to the University of Cambridge on a prestigious scholarship,” she told The San Francisco Standard.In Silicon Valley, “Sankar raised $7 million for his company Likealittle, a social media platform for anonymous flirting, aimed at college students,” which “flopped,” Sashidhar told The Standard. 

In 2013, before their wedding, Sankar reunited with Sashidhar in the Netherlands, where she was working for Shell. Sankar returned to San Francisco in 2015, joining Parker Conrad’s healthcare software startup Zenefits as director of engineering, Sasidharan told The Standard. The company was valued at “$4.5 billion,” The Standard said, but in 2017, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation discovered that it had misled investors. Vanity Fair reported about “raucous workplace culture, including employees having sex in the stairwells.” Subsequently, Conrad resigned. Sankar quit.

In 2017, Sasidhar and Sankar joined Y Combinator with their startup Rippling, which promised businesses a single platform for running human resources, devices, and finances. A year earlier, the couple had a son. During her testimony at a court hearing in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington in January this year, she has described Sankar as “very neglectful” as a husband and father, according to The Business Standard. 

Sex also became an issue between the couple. Sasidhar described in court how Sankar “repeatedly pushed her for intercourse” despite her “pain from complications during childbirth.” He threatened consequences if she failed to provide it, she told the court. 

Sasidhar recalled an email Sankar sent her in 2019, where he described “contacting several escorts to ask for photos and rates, before getting cold feet.” In another email from the same day, Sankar asked Sashidhar for “an open marriage,” she told the court. But, Sankar told The Standard via email that his marriage was “sexless” at the time, and he “had several conversations with her to understand why this was the case.” He also admitted to asking for an open marriage. 

Sankar quit Rippling in the summer of 2020, but he didn’t find another venture, Sasidhar said. Instead, he moved his family around the world as he sought ways to hold onto as much of his wealth as possible, she said. Sankar, who owns an estimated 9 percent of Ripping, according to Forbes, became a billionaire in 2022. 

The family first moved to Washington state. During this time, Sashidhar was working remotely for Microsoft as a senior program manager. She alleged in court that Sankar would pressure her into taking time off work for sex, often at a hotel, “threatening  to find other partners if she failed to comply.”

As she got busy caring for their son, Sankar ”fell in with a crowd of high-society hedonists,” and engaged in “frivolous sexual behaviors with many partners/prostitutes,” Sasidharan testified.

Toward the end of their two-year stay in Washington, Sankar proposed a move to Singapore. In court, Sasidhar described it as “another attempt” to evade U.S. taxes. “He believed that doing that while he was living in the U.S. would be, you know, attracting the attention of tax authorities,” she said in court. “He wanted to avoid that.”  

In his testimony, Sankar told the court that before moving, he “switched from a green card to an O-1 visa so he could avoid paying exit tax on unrealized capital gains from Rippling.” He also told the court that he had assured his wife that their move was “temporary so that he could avoid paying more U.S. taxes.”

But, things got worse in Singapore, Sasidharan told the court. She was laid off from her Microsoft job and was unable to work while on a dependent visa through Sankar. He had a tech worker visa and was working on a crypto startup based in India and registered in the Cayman Islands.  At this time, according to Sashidhar’s court testimony, Sankar would often tell his wife that she was “entitled to none of his money despite what she felt were earlier assurances to the contrary.”

As she got busy caring for their son, Sankar” fell in with a crowd of high-society hedonists,” and engaged in “frivolous sexual behaviors with many partners/prostitutes,” Sasidharan testified. She refused when he would “encourage her to have sex with his friends,” she said, noting that it “scared,” “violated,” and “destroyed” her. That’s when she knew “our marriage broke,” she testified. 

Then Sashidhar “discovered hidden cameras throughout their Singapore apartment, including in a bathroom used by their son,” she told The Standard. Sankar admitted in court testimony to installing the cameras, saying “he used them to make sure his wife wasn’t sleeping with anyone else — and to use as evidence against her in future proceedings,” the publication said. 

The couple agreed to divorce, but Sashidhar said she refused to sign a financial settlement without consulting an attorney. On Aug. 31, 2024, a physical altercation ensued, in which Sashidhar alleged Sankar punched her in the chest twice. Sashidhar reported the alleged abuse and the hidden cameras to the Singapore police. But in his X post, Sankar said his wife “filed a fake police complaint” against him as she was “unhappy” with the financial settlement. 

After the confrontation, Sankar left for India and then to Kazakhstan. He took their child’s U.S. passport with him. After returning to Singapore, Sankar was cited by authorities for voyeurism over the hidden cameras, as per The Standard report. Last October, Sankar limited Sashidhar’s access to bank accounts,. She received an emergency U.S. passport for her child “so they could return to Washington state, where she filed a domestic violence restraining order against Sankar,” she told The Standard.

Before Sasidhar left for the U.S. with their son, Sankar filed a stop order to prevent their son from leaving Singapore. But that got approved after they left. So he applied the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, described as “a multilateral treaty that establishes proceedings for the return of children who may have been wrongfully removed from their home country.” 

Sasidhar returned to Singapore with their son, where Sankar was, but soon after, they all moved to India. Sankar claimed on X that his true motive for the move was to spare Sashidhar trouble with authorities in Singapore after she took their child to the U.S. “Since she had violated laws in Singapore, she negotiated with me to instead come to Chennai, our home town and settle down here,: h wore on X.

Just days after returning to Singapore, the couple moved to India. When they arrived in India, Sashidhar and Sankar agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding, which Sankar posted on X. “We signed an MOU,” he wrote, adding that Sashidhar would receive around $1 million, along with $5,000 a month in spousal support.

On March 3, after Sashidhar left the child in Sankar’s custody, he took their son to India and has not returned. She hasn’t seen her son since then.