Eight years after the abduction and sexual assault of a top female actor in Kerala shook the state, a 1,500-page judgment by the Ernakulam Sessions Court leaves no doubt that a grave crime occurred. According to District and Sessions Judge Honey M Varghese, the prosecution was able to prove the crime itself beyond reasonable doubt, but what it failed to establish was that Malayalam actor Dileep or any other person had conspired to commission or orchestrate it.
On December 8, 2025, the court convicted six men for abducting, wrongfully confining, sexually assaulting the actor, and recording the assault in February 2017. At the same time, it acquitted Dileep and two others of conspiracy and evidence-destruction charges. The judge questioned why the police did not probe if a woman had commissioned the crime as that is what Pulsar Suni had told the survivor.
Accordingly, the judgment issued by the court moves in granular detail through what it accepts as proved — the abduction, the assault, the recording of the visuals — and what it rejects: the prosecution’s attempt to link those acts to a wider conspiracy masterminded by Dileep.
‘No amount of suspicion can substitute for evidence’
On the night of February 17, 2017, the survivor was abducted while travelling from Thrissur to Kochi. A gang of men forced her vehicle to stop, restrained her, and sexually assaulted her inside the moving SUV, and the assault was recorded on a mobile phone.
From the beginning, the prosecution’s case rested on two major strands:
The direct involvement of the six accused in the abduction, confinement, and the sexual assault.
An alleged criminal conspiracy in which Dileep was said to have commissioned the crime due to personal animosity towards the survivor.
While the court accepted the first strand in its entirety, it rejected the second. “A suspicion, however strong, cannot replace proof beyond reasonable doubt,” Judge Honey Varghese observed.
Survivor’s testimony accepted — and tested
The court cited Supreme Court precedents to reiterate that a survivor’s testimony alone can sustain a rape conviction if it inspires full judicial confidence. The apex court’s rulings caution against insisting on routine corroboration in rape cases, viewing it as an unnecessary hurdle that adds insult to injury in a patriarchal context.
Accordingly, the judgment relies on the survivor’s testimony to convict the six accused, supported by medical evidence, forensic material, her immediate disclosures at producer Lal’s residence, and the memory card containing the assault visuals.
But at the same time, when the survivor’s testimony is invoked to establish motive or conspiracy involving Dileep, the court subjects it — along with corroborating witnesses — to far closer scrutiny, repeatedly questioning why certain details emerged later in the investigation and not in earlier statements.
This tension runs through the judgment.
A verdict structured around 46 questions
Judge Honey Varghese organised the verdict around 46 points to test the case.
The first 19 points cover the February 17, 2017 attack. This includes whether prime accused Suni and second accused Martin planned the crime after learning of the survivor’s travel to actor Remya Nambeesan’s home in Ernakulam; whether Martin picked her up as the driver; whether a tempo traveller rammed the car to fake an accident; whether the accused confined and assaulted her inside the vehicle; and whether the assault was filmed and later copied to a memory card.
Judge Varghese said yes to all 19 points. She also accepted the prosecution's case that the convicts destroyed the evidence and absconded before being arrested.
However, the prosecution’s core conspiracy allegation — that Suni carried out the assault at Dileep’s behest — was rejected. The prosecution alleged that the motive lay in Dileep’s hostility towards the survivor, whom he believed had disclosed his relationship with actor Kavya Madhavan to his then wife, actor Manju Warrier.
The prosecution’s theory was supported by the testimonies of the survivor, Manju, and filmmaker Geetu Mohandas, who deposed that Dileep’s hostility towards the survivor dated back to 2012. Manju told the court that she discovered private messages between Dileep and Kavya on an old phone and, seeking clarity, visited the survivor’s home in Thrissur in February 2012, along with Geetu and actor Samyuktha Varma. According to the survivor, after this meeting Dileep blamed her for the collapse of his marriage, became openly hostile, and used his influence to isolate her professionally — a resentment the prosecution said later formed the motive for the crime.
The court, however, gave little weight to Manju and Geetu’s accounts, noting that certain details and dates were mentioned only in later statements and not during the initial investigation.
The court also said that the survivor’s statement that Dileep and she didn’t talk to each other during the rehearsal from the ‘Dileep show’ in Nedumbassery in May 2012 was “unbelievable.”
The survivor had said that during the show’s tour in Europe, Dileep had threatened her while travelling in a bus. This was rejected, saying, “It is highly improbable that accused no.8 [Dileep] during the show sat along with her and threatened her in the presence of other members.” The court also asked why she didn’t inform anyone at the time.
The court also said that an interview the survivor gave in 2015 to Deccan Chronicle alleging that an actor had taken away her chances was merely an oral testimony, and there was no “convincing evidence to substantiate that claim.”
The court also rejected the testimony by producer Jeevan Nassar that Dileep had rebuked him for working with the survivor on grounds that he could not recall the exact date of the meeting and other particulars.
The judgment also said that Bhama, a Malayalam actor, attended the AMMA rehearsal camp but clearly denied that Dileep threatened the survivor or that she ever told the survivor so. The court said the survivor’s claim about Bhama’s statement surfaced much later, and rejected it as unreliable. The court did not consider Bhama as hostile.
With Siddique, the court said it was not believable that he would give a statement against his close friend Dileep in the first place to the police.
To support its case against Dileep, the prosecution had also relied on multiple pieces of physical and digital evidence, each of which the court examined and ruled insufficient. “The evidence adduced by the prosecution falls short of establishing a criminal conspiracy between [Dileep] and [Suni],” it stated.
Discarded evidence
One of the prosecution’s key claims rested on the handwritten letter allegedly authored by Pulsar Suni from jail and addressed to Dileep. The letter, written in April 2017 and dictated to a fellow inmate, narrated the assault and sought financial assistance, which the prosecution argued showed that Suni had acted at Dileep’s behest.
However, the court noted that the letter surfaced only after the first final report was filed and found no evidence that Dileep had received it, responded to it, or acted on its contents. While the letter described the crime and contained ransom-like demands, it did not establish any prior agreement or instruction from Dileep. In the absence of proof linking Dileep to the letter beyond its authorship by Suni, the court held that it could not be relied upon to prove a criminal conspiracy.
Further, the forensic analysis of phones and memory cards revealed no communications or data transfers linking Dileep to the assault or its recording, it added.
One of the most contested aspects of the case was the change in hash value of the memory card containing the assault visuals. A hash value functions as a digital fingerprint — a unique identifier meant to ensure the integrity of electronic evidence. Under Indian law, investigators are required to record this value at the time of seizure. In this case, discrepancies in the hash value were cited by the prosecution to suggest that the memory card may have been accessed or tampered with.
The court, however, rejected claims of evidence destruction through memory card tampering, holding that prosecution failed to establish proof linking hash value changes to Dileep.
The court accepted that the chain of custody — from Suni entrusting the card to a lawyer on February 18, 2017, to its production before the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court, Aluva, on February 20, and subsequent forensic examination — remained intact. The visuals on the card matched the assault, and no alteration attributable to Dileep was proved, it said.
The judge attributed the hash value changes to routine handling and forensic processes rather than deliberate manipulation, and held that the prosecution had failed to establish tampering beyond reasonable doubt.
How far can conspiracy be inferred?
On criminal conspiracy, the judgment cuts in two directions.
In the case of the six men who were convicted, the court was willing to infer conspiracy from conduct before and after the offence — including the coordinated planning around the survivor’s journey, the staged collision, the division of roles inside the vehicle, and their collective flight afterwards. This, the court held, proved a conspiracy among them to abduct, assault, and sexually violate the survivor.
According to the judgment, this comfortably proved the “execution of a conspiracy hatched among them to insult, annoy and assault her physically, mentally and sexually and every one of them aided each other in implementing their decision.”
However, when it came to the alleged “mastermind” conspiracy involving Dileep, the court found the evidence insufficient.
Claims that Suni and Dileep met at Santhigiri College in Thodupuzha during the shoot of Georgettans Pooram were rejected because no object was recovered from the alleged meeting spot and no independent witnesses corroborated the meeting. Cell phone tower location data, the court held, could establish presence in an area but not an agreement or conspiracy.
The prosecution had also alleged a conspiratorial meeting between Suni and Dileep at Dileep's residence on December 26, 2016. The late filmmaker Balachandrakumar, a crucial witness in the case, had deposed that he visited Dileep’s house on this date, where he met Suni and saw him with a packet of cash. The court, however, said there were no other witnesses or records that confirmed that such an event happened. It also rejected Suni’s phone conversation to a friend that he had met Balachandrakumar.
Prosecutors also presented that Suni and Vijeesh visited Laksyah, a boutique linked to Dileep's wife Kavya, on February 22, 2017, to hand over assault visuals. The court ruled this out because primary witness accounts were inconsistent. Further, no physical evidence like the visuals or handover records was produced.
The court held that the main witness in this regard, a Laksyah shop employee, gave conflicting stories about the visit. He first told police that Vijesh, the fourth accused in the case, alone visited the shop days after the assault, asked about Dileep, Kavya, and her father, and took a visiting card. But in magistrate court, he denied any visits or incidents. In trial, he stuck to denial, claiming police pressure. Later, he flipped again, saying both Suni and Vijesh visited, he was bribed by Kavya's driver and Dileep's lawyer to lie. The court rejected him as unreliable and inconsistent.
Further, no supporting proof was also produced.
Where the ‘sterling’ witness stands
The judgment devotes hundreds of pages to filmmaker Balachandrakumar, whose 2021 disclosures triggered a further round of investigation against Dileep. Initially presented as a “caged witness” who broke free from Dileep’s influence, his testimony was meant to establish that Dileep viewed the assault visuals at his home on a tablet, and that there was a wider network of attempts to influence judges and investigators.
The court, however, has systematically undermined him in the judgment.
Though the court confirmed that Balachandrakumar had visited Dileep's house in November 2016 and clicked a photograph with him, this solitary evidence was deemed insufficient to corroborate his claim of seeing Pulsar Suni there. The court said there were significant inconsistencies that contradict the prosecution's own record.
The prosecution alleged that on November 15, 2017, visuals from the assault were screened on a tablet at Dileep's residence. The court rejected this, finding Balachandrakumar unreliable due to contradictions in testimony. Also, the tablet was not submitted as evidence.
Balachandrakumar said that a caretaker of Dileep threatened on a specific date, but records showed that caretaker had quit Dileep's job months earlier, making the threat impossible, the court noted. Further, it said, Balachandrakumar’s phone records proved he contacted TV reporters before the alleged threat date, which it believed suggested that this was planned media exposure rather than a reaction to danger.
The court also rejected WhatsApp chat backups he produced, accepting forensic testimony that the chats were manually compiled PDFs rather than authentic application exports. His earlier messages describing Dileep as innocent further contradicted his later claims.
The court therefore declined to treat him as a credible witness.
Severe but not maximal sentencing
On sentencing, the court stopped short of the prosecution’s hinted push for life terms, and imposed 20 years’ rigorous imprisonment and fined Rs 50,000 each for criminal conspiracy to wrongfully confine, assault to outrage modesty, assault to disrobe, hurt, gang rape, as well as for violation of privacy and sharing sexually explicit material under the IT Act.
In addition, the convicts were sentenced to one year of simple imprisonment for wrongful confinement and one year for causing hurt, and 10 years of rigorous imprisonment with a Rs 25,000 fine (six months’ imprisonment in default) for kidnapping.
Prime accused Pulsar Suni received additional sentences of three years’ imprisonment and a Rs 1 lakh fine for violating privacy, and five years’ imprisonment and a Rs 1 lakh fine for sharing sexually explicit material. Martin Antony was separately sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and a Rs 25,000 fine for destroying evidence.
All substantive sentences will run concurrently. If realised, the fines will be paid as Rs 5 lakh in compensation to the survivor.
Read our detailed coverage of the Kerala actor assault case over the years here.