In a moving note on Instagram, a prominent Malayalam actress shared that she was sexually harassed at a mall in Kochi on Thursday. She said she was groped by a man while shopping with her family.
She spoke of how she confronted the man, and that she was angered by the fact that they ‘walked away without guilt or trouble’. “Two men walked past me in a generously spaced aisle in Lulu hypermarket which barely had people crowding and one of them not so accidentally grazed his hands on my back while walking past me. Because it caught me off guard I couldn’t react immediately. I wanted to give him the benefit of a doubt but you know when something is just not right, you feel it,” the actor wrote on her Instagram stories.
She said she went blank for a minute, "trying to process this’. “I walked towards them, but they completely ignored me. I made sure he knew I understood,” she wrote.
She wrote that the men followed her again and tried to talk to her sister and her. “As I type this I can think of a thousand things I could have told them and a hundred things I could have done. But I didn’t. I just couldn’t. I just wanted to let this out here so I could feel a little relief. To feel that I have done something about it knowing fully that they walked away without guilt or trouble. Knowing that they might do it again, it angers me,” she wrote.
She urged women to be on their guard, and hoped they have the courage to react to such incidents. “Being a woman has been very tiring, to be on guard every minute as you step out of your house. To watch my clothes when I bend and turn. To guard my chest with my arms in a crowd… And on the days I’m home, I worry about my mother, my sister, my friends who have to do the same things. It is all because of these sick men. You take away our safety. You take away our comfort and the joy of our womanhood. I despise you,” the actor wrote.
To the men reading her post she said, “If you have done anything remotely inappropriate to a woman, know that you are the lowest form of life and you don’t deserve anything but hell. And to all the women reading her post, she said, “I hope you have the courage to give a tight slap on the face of such men.”
After her social media note garnered attention, the police have registered a case and identified the man from CCTV visuals at the mall, Manorama Online reported.