When Prakash* (name changed) accompanied his relative, the Kerala actor–survivor of the 2017 sexual assault case, to the police, they were given a warning. A high-ranking police officer told them the case would eat away at their time and resources and test their patience. The question was whether they were ready to fight it. “She said yes, and that changed everything,” Prakash recalled eight years later, in April 2025.
Prakash was privy to how she pushed through the long and winding trial, which not only tested their patience as they had been warned, but also revealed the true colours of people and the justice system.
“We realised that nothing is absolute, not even solidarity. When a woman decides to hold her ground against powerful harassers, all equations change. Everyone scurries to ensure their own safety,” he said.
Among the prosecution witnesses who turned hostile in court were some of the survivor’s closest friends and colleagues, who she considered as chosen family.
The abduction and sexual assault happened in Kerala’s Kochi in February 2017. The case became sensational after the charge sheet named her colleague and actor Dileep as the eighth accused for allegedly masterminding the crime.
Her journey, further complicated by a volatile ecosystem of cyber scrutiny, popular morality, and shifting power equations, is very telling of what it takes for a woman, no matter how privileged, to stand up for herself.
It also lays bare the complex, often hypocritical gender conscience of the Kerala society.
“Though she is strong-willed and knew the road ahead would be agonising, each time something actually went wrong, she was shocked. It is strange how different one can feel inside from how one must appear to the world,” Prakash said.
Praksh recalled that just a few months into the investigation in 2017, she had to shoot two films she signed earlier. One required her to travel to the United Kingdom. “She went through hell, feeling all kinds of extreme emotions that a human being can feel,” he said.
What awaited her back home, to add to a distressing trial, was people shifting sides. Prakash said that it was as if everything was revealing itself before them – people became turncoats, and the system was letting its claws show.
“Her husband, friends, some colleagues, a few journalists, and even some politicians and police officers all stood by her. But I am not sure many people saw how her positioning was complicated by the expectation to remain perfect to be ‘deserving’ of justice,” he added.
Actor Rima Kallingal, one of the founding members of the WCC, observed that she found it disturbing how a woman had to endure so much to be celebrated. While on the one hand, she must appear vulnerable to be accepted, on the other, she must also be a culmination of strength, she said.
“In our society, it feels as if a woman has to walk through the worst to be heard or even taken seriously. It is harrowing to watch,” Rima noted. In an uncanny coincidence, this is what transpired in the trial court on December 12, when sentences were pronounced.
On December 8, the Additional Special Sessions Court (SPE/CBI – III), Ernakulam, presided over by Judge Honey Varghese, had acquitted Dileep for lack of evidence.
Sunil Kumar, alias Pulsar Suni, who was the prime accused, along with Martin Antony, who was driving the survivor’s car on the night of the assault, and Suni’s aides Manikandan, Vijeesh VP, Salim H, and Pradeep, were found guilty.
On sentencing day, the prosecution argued for maximum punishment, invoking the brutal gang rape and murder of a woman in New Delhi, more widely known as the 2012 Nirbhaya case. But Suni’s lawyer Pratheeksh Kurup called the actor's assault “not as grave as Nirbhaya”, the reasoning being that the rape itself was “not as brutal”.
Such a comparison of violence goes beyond the courtroom. It morally stems from our collective imagination of who a ‘perfect victim’ is, based on her ‘degree of suffering’, like Rima pointed out.
However, this pressure to be perfect was exerted on the Kerala actor survivor right from the next day of the assault. In all the films she did after, her characters had to be ‘agreeable’, and her clothing ‘modest’. Her conduct was audited at every step, and any human shortcoming could make her a woman ‘who deserved to have endured violence’.
It is quite interesting to note that actor Manju Warrier, Dileep’s former wife, also went through a phase of being ‘modestly dressed’ and ‘soft-spoken’ when she was making a comeback to films after her divorce from Dileep in 2015.
There was much public appreciation about how she was not ‘made up’ and did not appear to ‘project her beauty’. The fact that she did not take any alimony from Dileep also enhanced her worth in a social setting that rewards women for ‘not making a scene’.
The common thread that reveals itself here is how women are left with no choice but to either be defined by their trauma or their gender roles to negotiate any kind of respect in a patriarchal society.
They are either the perfect victim or nobody at all.
Speaking to me a few months before the verdict was out, screenwriter Deedi Damodaran, also one of the founding members of the WCC, admitted to telling the survivor to expect the worst, to prepare for failure.
“We say these pessimistic things out of experience. Such cases generally pan out in ways that eventually disadvantage the survivor. Often, there is also a compromise deal, which capitalises on the sense of shame and exhaustion that may have already set in for the survivor. But this case, she always told me, is going to be different,” Deedi said.
Deedi added that, though it is extremely unfair to expect such unmatched determination from survivors of sexual assault, it is her grit that flipped everything on its head.
Deedi was referring to the formation of the WCC and the release of the Hema Committee Report, which confirmed the existence of ‘casting couch’ and sexual exploitation in Malayalam cinema.
When news of the assault first broke out, there was disbelief and shock. A ‘quotation to rape’-- someone hiring another person to commit rape– was unheard of until then.
It was also a time when conversations about systemic sexual harassment in the Malayalam film industry were minimal, though the practice remained an open secret. However, by December 2025, when the trial concluded, a lot had changed.
From the formation of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) to the release of the Hema Committee report, the gender conversation in Kerala underwent major shifts.
“The actor’s transformation from victim to survivor is what has been so explosive. Kerala’s complex gender conscience was stripped bare, and we can now see what this ‘progressive’ state puts even such a woman of ‘privilege’ through,” Deedi said.
Writer-director Anjali Menon has had no personal closeness to the survivor of the 2017 case. But she said that when the crime happened, there was no doubt in her mind that she would stand by her.
“And like me, thousands of women supported her without even meeting her. That is because, as women, we know how a power-driven, patriarchal system responds to us,” Anjali said.
Anjali, one of the core members of the WCC, added that the case was about fraternity for her. “It really brought out how the Malayalam film industry treated women for decades. And it was important to empower someone who chose to stand up, to shift the narrative,” she said.
The shift Anjali mentioned rolled out in multiple ways.
The assault happened in a pre-Harvey Weinstein world when the #MeToo movement itself was received with a lot of suspicion and victim-blaming. In Kerala, too, gender justice was not acknowledged in the entertainment industry, though exploitation in the sector was a known fact. Mainstream Malayalam films were somewhat breaking out from the pattern of passing off obscenity as humour, with a young crop of actors and filmmakers making headlines.
But there was still no vocabulary or forum for women themselves to articulate how harassment pervaded their workplace, in overt and covert forms.
When reports of the actor’s sexual assault first came in, media houses referred to her as a victim. It was the WCC that insisted on using the term ‘athijeevitha’, meaning ‘survivor’, after she decided to fight the case in court. The aim was to shift the narrative of shame.
The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (A.M.M.A), an organisation dedicated to the welfare of actors working in the Malayalam industry, came under pressure to expel Dileep, one of its major power pushers. But he was later reinstated, leading to several female actors, including Remya Nambeesan, Rima Kallingal, and Geethu Mohandas, resigning from AMMA in protest.
Slowly, the gender conversation in the state and the industry began bifurcating into two camps – those who supported the survivor and those who were eager to defend Dileep.
The former had consequences.
Actors like Remya Nambeesan, also a close friend of the survivor, as well as members of the WCC, lost work. It was almost as if the intangible but omnipresent, all-male, “power mafia” of the Malayalam film industry, as the Hema Committee report calls it, had shadow-banned them from work.
Cyber attacks broke out against the women who supported the survivor, labelling them as “feminichis” – a spin-off of ‘feminist’ – to brand them as man-haters.
Dileep, on the other hand, went on to have several movie releases that year, including Ramaleela, which went on to become the highest-grossing Malayalam movie of the year.
This revealed how complex Kerala’s conscience was beneath its outer veneer of progressiveness and literacy.
After Dileep was arrested in July 2017 and remanded to custody, several men’s rights organisations mushroomed in the state, anchored on the narrative of how women ‘trap’ men of reputation and why the law ‘sides with women’. The herculean task of navigating such an ecosystem fell upon the survivor and her family.
The fight was not just for justice, but it was also against the loss of her privacy and personhood, which were being dissected by people, almost with a sense of entitlement.
But Prakash said that going to the police was not a difficult decision for the survivor and the family. “Ours is a family where we are always encouraged to stand up for what’s right. Despite knowing that it would open up unwarranted public scrutiny for her, going to the police was our only plan when the assault happened,” he said.
Prakash added that he believes those who committed the crime were sure that the survivor would not put so much at stake. “The crime itself, I felt, was committed out of a belief that she would keep quiet to protect her image, and they could perhaps keep blackmailing her. But she was sure that she wasn’t the one who should be feeling shame,” he said.
However, what followed in court was an entirely different story. “That phase showed us some of the worst days of our lives,” Prakash said.
What Prakash was speaking about is how, on one hand, a revolution was beginning to take shape, but on the other hand, the justice system was bringing the survivor, who set massive cyclical change in motion, to her knees.
After the trial began, the survivor requested a woman judge, and Judge Honey M Varghese took over in 2019. But later, in 2020 and 2022, she went to higher courts seeking the judge’s removal, citing bias. The court, however, declined her pleas.
Her concerns included the judge’s alleged rude treatment of prosecution witnesses, allowing victim shaming in court, and the non-disclosure of forensic evidence, which was in her custody.
“She broke down several times in court. What a criminal trial puts a survivor of sexual assault through is a nightmare,” Prakash said.
Sandhya Raju, a senior advocate who has closely followed the case, told TNM that the justice system or society is not used to women boldly speaking about what happened to them.
“We like helpless women. Our justice system is wired to make sure that the accused is given a fair trial, not really to protect the victim. The idea is that no innocent person should be punished. But what about the mental state of the victim?” she asked.
Sandhya also observed that when she started her career 25 years ago, she too thought a female judge would be more empathetic. But over time, she has realised that it is not the judge’s gender but their attitude as a custodian of justice that is crucial.
“In a sexual assault case like this, the victim and the accused are not equal in terms of power. But the judge is forced to treat them equally. A woman judge often also faces the additional pressure not to appear too soft or considerate because then she might be accused of being biased towards the survivor,” she said.
Sandhya’s observations reveal how complex a criminal trial is and how, most often, a survivor is forced to account for the entire system’s empathy deficit with her own strength.
She added that women who cry in the witness box are sometimes seen as more ‘genuine’ victims than those who speak with conviction.
“Unfortunately, a court is a place of psychological warfare. And in a patriarchal country like ours, courts often work on stereotypes, not facts,” Sandhya said.
She also added that sometimes advocates do not prepare survivors to face the cross-examination by the accused’s side, thinking that appearing confused or devastated in the witness box would earn them some sympathy and, thereby, justice.
“The judiciary can be creative if it wants. Like in criminal conspiracy, when you can see that someone is involved in a crime, it’s not okay to let them off just because finding proof is difficult,” she said.
What Sandhya observed is true of many sexual assault cases involving powerful men, like the Bishop Franco case. In such scenarios, the individual men are repositories of institutional and social capital, which allows them to get away with brutality.
On December 8, after the trial court acquitted Dileep, he blamed his former wife Manju Warrier, the media, and ‘criminal’ investigating officers of hatching a conspiracy to tarnish his image. His demeanour transformed into a display of might, which he had been holding off until then.
A week later, he released Bha Bha Ba to announce his comeback. The film’s plot is centred on the abduction of a central character by Dileep’s protagonist. It also features several dialogues in which he resolves to ‘give it back’ to those who ‘spoiled his life’.
As mentioned in the beginning, when the assault happened in 2017, the world was in its pre-Harvey Weinstein cocoon. But by December 2025, when the trial concluded, Gisele Pelicot, a retired grandmother who was sedated and raped by over 50 men, solicited by her husband, was among Time Magazine’s 'Women of the Year'.
Gisele’s statement, “shame must shift sides”, galvanised a sort of mass catharsis among survivors of sexual assault worldwide. But the outcome of the trial in the actor assault case, unfortunately, underlines that while shame may someday shift sides, justice often remains incomplete.
The actor-survivor herself wrote on social media a few days after the verdict that she was failed by the trial court, and that not all people are equal in this country.
A week later, bogged down by cyber harassment and loss of morale, she wrote, “I should have just kept quiet…and later, if visuals of the sexual assault surface online, I should end my life…”
One of her closest friends, who was with her on the day of the verdict, said that it is hard to tell someone who has woken up in a battlefield for the last eight years to be strong.
“How much stronger can a person be? But she tends to process her emotions in waves, and when she finally comes out of turmoil, she chooses to do what must be done.”
Read our comprehensive coverage of the 2017 actor assault case here