"Yes I did it (raped her)" Pulsar Suni said without flinching. It was our first meeting. I had not expected him to be this straight forward about it.
In February 2017, he along with five other men abducted a top female actor. Suni raped her in a moving car and recorded the visuals on a phone. Super star actor Dileep was accused of masterminding this crime.
On December 8, 2025, a lower court acquitted Dileep of all charges. Suni, was convicted of rape and abduction.
As soon as the verdict was delivered, Suni asked his friend who was present in court, to sneak in two shots of alcohol. He turned around to me and said "Okay bye, you will come see me in jail right?"
No remorse, no fear. Just a chilling, cold-blooded casualness.
This is not Suni's first abduction. For nearly two decades he has been working as a driver within the Malayalam film industry. But, he said, everyone knows him more for his crimes — for doing the dirty work, for "top actors and producers."
Since the age of 19, he has repeatedly found himself in and out of jail. Narcotics, theft, robbery, money laundering, kidnapping and now rape. “This is who I am now. I don’t know how to be anything but a criminal,” he told me.
Many of you might wonder why we spent so much time speaking with a rapist. But this is a story that offers us not just a glimpse into the mind of an unrepentant criminal but also exposes how the Malayalam film industry made room for men like him.
Before I met Suni, he had unsettled me because he was a rapist but after we met, he scared me because of who he was despite it.
As a journalist, I had trained myself to be interested in the grey, to be cautious of neat stories and suspicious of linear narratives. But this was a frightening shade for grey — It was not his extraordinary capability for violence, but the stunning ordinariness with which he met people. It was not his ability to be brutal, but his art of portraying himself as a sensitive man. It was not his display at being thoughtful, but his finality in everything, ultimately, being about only him.
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