On the morning of 8 December 2025, when the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court announced that Malayalam actor Dileep had been acquitted of all charges in the 2017 abduction and sexual assault of a popular Malayalam actor, the reaction across India was that of an expected and exhausted kind of fury. It shocked nobody.
We should have been raging in the streets. But given that we’re living the Sisyphean sequel nobody asked for, fighting one battle after another (from environmental crisis to economic failures), we have become selective in our rage. A bit too limited. All while the powerful and corrupt walk away scott-free, benefitting from systems they built, systems that rarely allow true accountability.
A Crime in Transit and A Missed Opportunity
This was a case that could have ushered in structural reform and shaken a system that has increasingly grown more unreliable over the years. The case stretched across eight years, consuming police resources, legal attention, industry alliances, and public outrage. It mobilised a first-of-its-kind collective of women actors, the Women in Cinema Collective, to demand structural reform.
The survivor, despite being a public figure with significant support, was forced to navigate a legal structure that repeatedly undermined her credibility and comfort. And at the end of this long-winding road, we confronted the bleak truth that securing justice in India remains an exhausting ordeal.
On 17 February 2017, the survivor was abducted in a moving vehicle, assaulted for two hours, and recorded on video. The early arrests happened quickly. The police took the driver, Martin Antony, into custody the next day. They arrested NS Sunil, alias Pulsar Suni, soon after. A letter reportedly written by Suni from jail suggested he had been hired to carry out the attack and had not been paid. This letter shifted investigative attention toward Dileep.
According to the prosecution, the motive was personal. The survivor had allegedly revealed Dileep’s extramarital affair to his then-wife, Manju Warrier, leading to a fallout. Investigators argued that the assault was revenge.
The Long Trial, Pulsar Suni and A Confession That Never Reached the Courtroom
The trial began in March 2018. Two prosecutors resigned. Twenty-eight of the 261 witnesses contradicted their earlier statements and turned hostile. The survivor petitioned for a change of judge more than once, alleging distressing courtroom behaviour.
The memory card holding the video of the assault was found tampered with while in judicial custody. Forensic reports confirmed that it had been accessed repeatedly in 2018 and again in 2021, altering its hash value.
This should have been a turning point. Instead, it became a footnote in a long list of institutional failures.
One of the most disturbing elements of this case is the account published by The News Minute journalist Nidhi Suresh. In her long-form piece “Inside the Twisted Mind of a Hired Rapist,” she describes multiple conversations with Suni, who might only have to serve twelve and a half years in prison despite receiving a 20-year sentence along with co-convicted Antony, Manikandan B, Vijesh VP, Salim H, and Pradeep. Since Suni has spent seven-and-a-half years in pre-trial detention, it will be counted towards his full sentence.
During these interviews, Suni admitted to the crime in clear, unambiguous terms. Suni told Suresh that he had abducted the survivor. He told her he recorded eight video clips of the assault. And he claimed he did all of this under Dileep’s instructions, a direct allegation implicating the actor as the mastermind.
Suni said he wanted to be “honest,” crediting a jail yoga teacher for inspiring this newfound stance. Yet once he took the stand, he lied under oath. He denied being in the car, refused to reveal the money trail, and distanced himself from the conspiracy.
When Suresh asked why he lied so brazenly, Suni shrugged. “In court, you can only speak like that,” he told her. His testimony weakened the case. They also exposed the fragility of any conviction that depends on a hostile witness in a system that cannot protect him or the survivor.
The final verdict acquitted Dileep but convicted the six others. In effect, the system punished the men who carried out the assault while absolving the one who allegedly planned it all.
The Kerala government announced plans to appeal. But we know that appeals move slowly. Survivors continue to suffer as public memory diminishes and attention shifts.
The Ecosystem of Misogyny
India has strong laws on paper but the Dileep case is part of a larger pattern. The Hathras rape survivor died after a brutal assault and was denied dignity in death when police cremated her body without her family’s consent. The Bilkis Bano convicts were released early and welcomed with garlands. Sexual assault conviction rates in India remain low, often below 30 per cent, with witness intimidation and evidence mishandling cited as common reasons.
Laws alone cannot fix a culture where women who speak up or dare to have a mind of their own are punished by process and society, long before their cases ever reach judgment.
Take the case of how many female film critics received death and rape threats over their reviews of a propaganda film like Dhurandhar (2025) the same week the Dileep acquittal happened. When I reviewed Uri: The Surgical Strike way back in 2019, I was threatened with violence and assault. Years later, writing about Chhaava (2025), the script remained the same; I was called a “commie traitor,” threatened with violence and assault, and then there was the barrage of misplaced patriotic rage.
The Dileep verdict is not just about one case. It is about a system that protects the powerful at every turn.
This case, like so many others, shows how patriarchy operates inside institutions and determines who is believed and who is discredited. Even with public solidarity and the backing of other influential women from the Women in Cinema Collective, the survivor could not break the structural power arranged against her.
We, in India, are a society that asks victims and survivors (who are mostly women or other minorities) to absorb humiliation quietly. The powerful bend the process. The vulnerable break navigating it. In India, justice, especially for women, continues to remain an aspiration rather than a guarantee. It might arrive, but mostly it does not. Many wait to die, some others wait to live, and many die waiting for an absolution that may never come.
(The author is an independent film, TV and pop culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)