Tamil Nadu CM has an active legal case filed by the woman who married him in 1999 and raised his children for over two decades. The case alleges infidelity. The press hasn’t asked him a single question about it.
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Tamil Nadu got a new Chief Minister. The screens were full of confetti, saffron marigolds, and a woman in a seafoam-green saree fighting back tears in the front row. That woman was Trisha Krishnan. The woman who wasn’t there, who hasn’t been in the same country as her estranged husband for months, was Sangeetha Sornalingam, the wife who married Vijay in 1999, raised two children with him, and then watched him, allegedly, check out of the marriage long before he checked into politics.
Nobody on social media seemed particularly bothered about that part.
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In February 2026, Sangeetha Sornalingam walked into the Chengalpattu Family Court and filed for divorce from Joseph Vijay under the Special Marriage Act. This wasn’t a rumour or a tabloid fabrication. It was a legal petition, with numbered clauses, filed before a sitting judge.
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The petition, as reported widely, states that in April 2021, Sangeetha discovered that Vijay was involved in what the document calls an “adulterous relationship with an actress.” The language used is unambiguous: ‘betrayal and violation of marital trust.’
The actress is not named in the filing, reportedly to protect privacy, but the document goes further than the infidelity allegation. It describes emotional withdrawal, verbal hostility, “constructive desertion”, a legal term for when a spouse doesn’t physically leave the home but creates conditions so hostile that the other partner is effectively forced out.
Sangeetha allegedly had to live separately ‘within the same house’ while Vijay continued travelling and appearing publicly with the woman in question.
She made reconciliation attempts between 2021 and 2025. Four years of trying to save the marriage. Four years of, reportedly, being promised it would stop, only for it to continue. The petition describes the experience as causing her “deep emotional pain and mental suffering.”
The next court hearing is scheduled for June 15, 2026. The man whose case is being heard will, by then, have been sitting in the Chief Minister’s chair for over a month.
The timing of Vijay’s oath ceremony on May 10 made it impossible to separate the political from the personal. Within hours of the swearing-in at the Jawaharlal Nehru Indoor Stadium, Trisha Krishnan’s presence in the front row had gone viral.
Cameras caught her visibly emotional as Vijay delivered his maiden address. She arrived in a blue saree with her mother, Uma Krishnan. She reportedly hugged Vijay’s mother Shoba before leaving.
The next morning, Trisha posted on Instagram with the caption: “The love is always louder.”
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The internet lost its mind, in admiration. Words like “iconic”, “queen”, “she won” flooded the comments. On X, posts celebrating Trisha’s presence at the ceremony racked up hundreds of thousands of likes. She posted an Instagram story with the text “IYKYK”, and fans decoded it breathlessly, as though it were a divine message rather than a cryptic nudge toward speculation.
Nobody asked the obvious question: what does “love is always louder” mean when a woman has just spent four years in court alleging betrayal?
There is a cultural script that gets activated whenever a powerful man opts between a wife and another woman. The wife, usually the one who stayed home, raised the children, kept her distance from cameras, and did what society told her a good woman should do, is cast as the obstacle. The other woman, especially if she is glamorous and publicly celebrated, becomes the romantic heroine.
Sangeetha Sornalingam fits every box of what South Indian society traditionally valorises in a woman. She was quiet, devoted, absent from public life, fiercely protective of her family’s privacy. And, she reportedly moved to London with her children, managing her family business in the UK, while her husband’s political star rose in Chennai. She didn’t give interviews. She didn’t post cryptic Instagram stories. But she went to court.
And for that, she has been rendered essentially invisible in the public conversation.
This is not a new story. It is the oldest one. The woman who endures, who documents her suffering in a legal petition, who asks for what she is owed, is almost never the one the crowd cheers. The crowd cheers the woman who showed up in silk and wept prettily. That is not Trisha Krishnan’s fault. She owes the public nothing, and she owes Sangeetha nothing in terms of her choices. But the ‘public’ response to this situation; the uncritical glorification, the hashtags, the breathless fan theories, deserves serious scrutiny.
To cheer for a narrative of romantic love while actively ignoring a woman’s documented allegations of infidelity and mental cruelty is not progressive. It is the same old patriarchy wearing a new filter.
Here is where this stops being purely a personal matter and becomes a legitimate political question.
Vijay built his public image, and his entire political identity, on the idea of being a man of the people, a clean break from the corrupt, entitled political class that Tamil Nadu has dealt with for decades. His party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, won 108 seats on that promise. People voted for him. They voted for the idea that he was different.
A sitting Chief Minister has active divorce proceedings in a family court in his own state. His wife has alleged, in a legal document, that he conducted an extramarital relationship for years, that he lied about ending it, and that he treated her with verbal hostility and emotional cruelty. These are not anonymous gossip. These are allegations made under oath in a court of law.
The question isn’t whether these allegations are proven. Courts decide that. The question is: why is nobody in the political or media establishment asking Vijay to address them?
If a woman politician had an ongoing infidelity case in family court, the discourse would look nothing like this. She would be asked, at every press conference, to comment. Her moral fitness for office would be debated on prime-time television. Her silence would be called stonewalling. But because Vijay is a man, and a beloved one at that, his silence is treated as dignity, and his estranged wife’s court petition is treated as a footnote.
A Chief Minister who pledges justice and accountability for Tamil Nadu’s people should at minimum be able to answer for the allegations made against him in a Tamil Nadu court. That is not asking for too much. That is the minimum standard any public servant should meet.
This is less of an attack on Trisha Krishnan, and more on the ‘Thalapathy’. She is not on trial here. She has made no public admission of anything, she has filed no legal document, she has taken no oath of office.
But Vijay has taken an oath. He has accepted power. He has asked 80 million people to trust him with their state.
Sangeetha Sornalingam, meanwhile, is a woman who made repeated attempts to save her marriage, delayed legal action for the sake of her children, and ultimately went to court when nothing else worked. That is not a scandal. That is a woman using exactly the legal recourse that a democratic society provides.
The least Tamil Nadu’s new Chief Minister owes her, and the people who elected him, is the same transparency he demanded from those who came before him.
Whether the court finds the allegations true or false is a matter for the judiciary. But the silence, the fan worship, and the convenient erasure of a wife’s documented suffering from the public conversation? That is a matter for all of us.
Love may be louder. But justice has to be louder still.
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