Rida Tharana isn't taking the trolling quietly.

A day after The Traitors Season 2 crowned her and Krystle D'Souza as co-winners on September 3, criticism started piling up online, much of it aimed squarely at how Rida played the game. Her response, posted soon after, was blunt about the discomfort and unwilling to concede the point.

"I don't think my win belongs only to the Traitor I became," she wrote, pushing back on the idea that her final-stage turn as a Traitor is the only thing worth judging.

Her argument, in short: look at the whole season, not just the last act.

Rida entered the Karan Johar-hosted show as an Innocent. By her own account she was ambitious and strategic in that role, sharp enough at one point to correctly identify a Traitor while playing the game straight. That's the version of her the early episodes showed. Then the game flipped, and so did she.

Becoming a Traitor, Rida admitted, wasn't smooth. She didn't dress it up as some grand villain turn. "Was I the bravest betrayer? Not at all. I was terrified. I struggled with lying. I sobbed. I asked myself," she said, describing a stretch where the emotional weight of the game caught up with her.

That honesty is doing some work here. Instead of leaning into the cold, calculated Traitor persona that reality shows usually reward, Rida is asking her critics to sit with the version of her that struggled, that got emotional, that didn't find deception easy.

"And somewhere between being an Innocent and becoming a Traitor, making good decisions and bad ones, trusting people, betraying people, breaking down and continuing to play... I made it to the end," she wrote.

That line is doing the heavy lifting of her defence. Her case isn't that she was the best Traitor of the season. It's that she stayed the same person through both roles, and that consistency, not the betrayal itself, is what got her to the finish line alongside Krystle.

Whether that lands with the section of viewers already unconvinced by her win is a separate question. The Traitors format has always split audiences this way. Some viewers reward ruthless gameplay, others want to see the person underneath it, and Rida's statement is a bet that enough of them will side with the latter.

For now, the show has its winners, the trolling hasn't stopped, and Rida has said what she wanted to say. Whether Season 3 brings back this exact debate, or a fresh cast to argue over, is the next thing to watch for.