The feds are probing whether a millionaire couple accused of enslaving and torturing two Indonesian women at their ritzy Long Island home were aided by their four kids – including their eldest, shopaholic daughter, who says her favorite movies include “Human Trafficking,” a gritty sex-slave drama.
Pooja Sabhnani, 22, her sisters, Tina, 20, and Dakshina, 19, and her brother, Rahul, 17, the children of Varsha Sabhnani and her husband, Mahender, are under investigation in the victims’ barbaric, five-year ordeal in which they were beaten, tortured, starved and forced to work 21 hours a day, a law-enforcement source told The Post.
Pooja, a 2006 graduate of the Parsons School of Design who works for her parents designing packaging for their lines of trendy, international perfumes, says on her Friendster.com Web site that her favorite movies include “Human Trafficking,” a two-part miniseries that aired on the Lifetime cable channel in October 2005.
The harrowing drama, starring Mira Sorvino and Donald Sutherland, reveals the brutal torture of young women kidnapped, drugged, raped and sold into sex slavery.
On her Web site, Pooja says her other favorite movies include the horror film “The Shining” and “The Transporter,” a flick about slavery in which an Asian girl is trussed up in a bag and stuck in a car trunk.
She says she loves “shopping, fashion designing, watching movies, reading magazines . . . did I mention shopping?”
Pooja worked with defense lawyers to help her parents after they were arrested at their Muttontown mansion Monday night and went to their arraignment Tuesday, sources said.
She and her siblings are being investigated “to see if they had any part in the abuse,” the law-enforcement source said.
Prosecutors say Varsha inflicted “Cruella De Vil” punishment on one of the women, “Samirah,” 51, beating her repeatedly in the face, slicing her behind the ears with a paring knife, forcing her to run up and down a flight of stairs 150 times and to gulp down 25 chili peppers at a time.
Her husband did nothing to stop her, prosecutors say.
Samirah and the other victim, “Nona,” 46 – who was forced to take 10 icy showers in a row – are recovering at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, L.I. They will be offered special visas to allow them to remain in the United States, with the option of returning home later, sources said.
At 5:30 p.m. Monday, 15 federal immigration agents armed with a battering ram raided the Muttontown mansion and left with a door, apparently one that was stained with Samirah’s blood when she got a beating.
While they were there, Pooja, hiding her face under a hoodie, arrived home in her black Porsche Cayenne SUV. She didn’t talk to reporters.
The Sabhnanis moved to Muttontown in 1993 after selling their home in Hicksville to Rekha Chichara and her husband, Jitendranath.
Rekha said she was shocked by the arrests. “When I came to see the [Sabhnanis’ new] house, I remember seeing a maid sitting in the kitchen,” she said. “She was very well dressed. I was thinking she was very lucky. She seemed like she was part of the family.”
A neighbor in Hicksville described Mahender as “a very religious, God-fearing man.”
“I cannot imagine that he would do something like this,” he said. “He was very loving to his kids. They were an excellent family.”
A friend said Mahender and his son, Rahul – who attends Syosset HS – regularly worship at the Guy Gobind Singh Sikh Center in Plainview. “The high school is in shock,” the friend said. “Teachers can’t believe it.”