The Supreme Court has declined to intervene in the anticipatory bail granted to Malayalam film star Vijay Babu in the rape case being investigated against him. The Supreme Court maintained the Kerala High Court’s judgement and emphasised that the actor-producer will not leave Kerala without prior permission from the court. Babu has also been ordered not to make any social media posts on the matter.
The supreme court overruled the HC’s proviso in the anticipatory bail decision, which said that Babu may not be probed beyond July 3, 2022. ‘We make it plain that the petitioner may be probed until July 3, 2022, if required,’ said the court. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided to hear the Kerala government’s and an actress’s petitions challenging the High Court’s award of anticipatory relief to Babu. The actor was granted anticipatory bail by the High Court on June 22. The release came with the condition that Babu ‘surrender’ to the investigating officer (IO) on June 27 for questioning.
‘He may be interviewed for the next seven days, until July 3, and he shall not contact or interact with the victim or any of the witnesses in the case,’ the HC added. The court further ordered him not to leave Kerala and, if a new passport was provided to him, to relinquish it. The court further stated that if the IO plans to arrest Babu, he would be freed on bail upon the execution of a Rs 5 lakh bond with two sureties in the same amount.
Babu claimed in his High Court petition that the rape case was launched against him to blackmail him. He is accused of sexually assaulting a female actor and revealing the victim’s identify during a Facebook live session. In his appeal, the producer-actor also claimed that there is a ‘pattern’ of fabricating sexual claims against anybody in order to destroy the image of someone who is prominent in society and for the sake of publicity. Babu said he was innocent and was ‘very offended’ by the authorities’ one-sided attitude in making him a ‘scapegoat for the sake of news and the media’.
The lady, who acted in films made by Babu’s production company, filed a police report on April 22 and documented, in a Facebook post, the physical abuse and sexual exploitation she reportedly underwent at the hands of the producer-actor for one and a half months. During Wednesday’s hearing, Senior Advocate R Basant, who was representing the victim, told the court that the victim was in her early twenties and new to the profession, thus she would not make such charges against someone so powerful unless they were real. He further stated that Vijay Babu revealed her identity on Facebook Live in order to ‘pressurise’ her, and that the actor fled to Georgia after the lawsuit was filed since Georgia lacks an extradition treaty.
Senior Advocate Jaideep Gupta, representing the State of Kerala, argued that filing an FIR would not prevent Babu from committing subsequent offences. ‘The existence of an FIR does not prevent him from committing subsequent offences. He is a highly powerful guy in the film industry, and the evidence and witnesses are from the film industry. This example demonstrates his proclivity to erase the evidence. He erased WhatsApp texts from the previous 15 days’, Gupta stated. The court stated that message deletion occurred on both sides within the same time period, implying that there must be some common agreement. The case was heard by a vacation bench of Justices Indira Banerjee and JK Maheshwari.
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