An orchestrated nightmare: A sexual assault that unmasked Malayalam cinema
Chapter 1: Nothing Personal
Manikandan got straight to the point.
“I’m accused number 3. I only watched what he did to her, I did not…” he said.
I met Mani on a hot February morning in Kerala’s Kochi. He parked his auto rickshaw, folded his mundu (dhoti), and watched me attentively. I suggested going to a restaurant so that we could sit and talk.
Mani is almost six feet tall. The sleeve of his khaki uniform wound a little too tightly around his biceps. He had three piercings on both ears. The studs that embellished them glistened. A silver chain hung heavy around his neck. In his WhatsApp display picture was an eagle perched on Mani’s shoulder, staring into the camera.
Mani has two young children. He lost his mother a year ago. Her photo was mounted just past the handlebar of his auto. As we walked to the restaurant, he spoke with an unexpected sense of familiarity. “Since I give people a lot of advice these days, I’ll give you one — even if you see someone dying on the road, don’t save them,” Mani said. “I wouldn’t.”
Once we sat down, he insisted that we both eat. “My wife gave me the confidence to speak to you.”
In 2021, after spending nearly five years in prison, Mani secured bail in a high-profile case of sexual assault.
Though Mani claimed innocence, a police investigation found that he, along with five others, had hatched a criminal conspiracy to kidnap a famous film actor and sexually assault her.
The crime — which took place on the night of February 17, 2017 — involved some of the biggest names in Malayalam cinema. On one end was the survivor of the assault, a popular south Indian actor Gayathri (name changed). On the other, a superstar who was accused of orchestrating the sinister plot that led to the assault: Dileep.
Seven years ago, Mani was a man in a hurry — he wanted a better life for himself, and he wanted it fast. To him, that meant getting closer to the power circles in Kochi, his hometown.
Just as Thiruvananthapuram is the political hub of Kerala, Kochi is where the glamour of the Malayalam film industry resides.
A friend once described Kochi to me as a city that is always trying to be one — a wannabe city. Everyone wants to be someone. Everyone is writing a script for a movie or knows someone who is. Everyone is friends with an actor or is one themselves. Everyone is always trying to get out of Kochi or knows someone who is.
Mani’s aspirations led him to the movies too. Around 2014, he found employment as a driver for producers and actors in the Malayalam film industry. Back then, he had a lot of friends — other drivers, artists, and people within the industry whom he travelled with and spent nights drinking with.
He no longer kept in touch with most of them. “I wake up, go to work, and get home,” Mani said, “And remind myself not to help anyone.”
I asked him why he felt this way.
Mani said it all began around 7 pm on the night of February 17, 2017, when he received a call that he said he “should never have answered.”
The call was from Sunil. Most people knew him as ‘Pulsar Suni’. He also worked as a driver in the film industry. Many of the people I interviewed said that his name got the prefix ‘Pulsar’ because he famously stole a specific kind of two-wheeler, Bajaj's Pulsar bikes. When I met Pulsar Suni's mother, she claimed that the moniker was just a testament to his love for the bike.
Mani said Pulsar Suni asked him to come along while he dropped off a Tempo Traveller. When Mani reached the Adlux Convention Centre in Angamaly, about 20 minutes away from his home, Pulsar Suni was waiting with another friend, who was also a driver.
Mani immediately noticed that Pulsar Suni was quite preoccupied. “He kept pacing and texting someone,” Mani said.
Roughly 90 kilometres away, Martin Antony’s phone kept buzzing. Martin was also a driver in the film industry. That night, at around 7 pm, he had picked up Gayathri, who is based in Thrissur. She was to travel from Thrissur to Kochi to record a promotional song for an upcoming movie.
By 8.30 pm, two more drivers from the industry joined Pulsar Suni. Mani was told that they were waiting for Martin to let them know when he was close.
Over the course of the next two hours, the lives of these seven individuals — Gayathri, Pulsar Suni, Mani, Martin, Saleem, Pradeep, and Vijesh — connected by cinema, divided by class, were about to be changed in ways they could not have imagined. For Gayathri, not by choice.
The ripple effects of that night echoed across Kerala.
The News Minute combed through nearly 900 pages of publicly-available court documents in the case. Over the past six months, we interviewed about 30 people — actors, directors, producers, and technicians from the Malayalam film industry; police officials; and those who were accused of the crime, including Dileep. We pieced together how that night, the events that led up to it, and its aftermath, continue to expose, divide, and haunt the Malayalam film industry.
At its core, this case featured a “megalomaniac” superstar, a female actor who refused to be silenced, and six hired criminals.
But the story did not end with them.
Even as many resolute women within the industry stood by their colleague, a battery of powerful men sought to protect each other at all costs. The state was compelled to rush to action, some of it was eventually buried.
During this time, the people of Kerala were left to grapple with a swirl of conflicting narratives: was this a case of a hero being maligned, or of a hero exacting vengeance because he felt slighted by a woman?
On that night of February 17, around 9 pm, as Gayathri’s car whizzed past the waiting men, Pulsar Suni’s phone beeped with Martin’s message. The signal had been given.
As Pulsar Suni took the wheel of the Tempo Traveller, the four other men, including Mani, clambered into it. Suni drove fast. Within minutes, he had intentionally rammed into Gayathri's vehicle.
Mani said he instinctively stepped out of the Tempo and apologised to the driver, Martin, whom he claimed not to have known back then.
Martin asked Mani to “talk to the madam” in the car.
Vijesh, one of the other drivers with Pulsar Suni, immediately jumped into the back seat and asked Mani to get in. “Inside, I was stunned to see Gayathri,” Mani said. “I'd only seen her on screen before.”
An award-winning actor who had filmed over 90 movies in Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu, Gayathri was a well-known celebrity.
“She asked me, ‘Don't you know who I am?’ I almost laughed and said, ‘Of course, who wouldn't know you madam?’” Mani smiled as he recounted the exchange.
Once he got over his astonishment, Mani claimed, the absurdity of the moment struck him. Vijesh and he flanked Gayathri while Martin began driving. The car now had Gayathri, Martin, Mani, and Vijesh.
Gayathri told the police that when the men entered the car, she assumed they got in because they were angry about the accident and wanted to talk to Martin. Instead, to her shock, she said, the two men held her down and restrained her.
Pulsar Suni and the two other men followed Gayathri’s car in the Tempo Traveller.