Long Live The Predators: How The #MeToo Movement Became A Thing Of The Past

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 8, REVERENTIAL obituaries poured in from across the country, with people from every discipline remembering the actor Nana Patekar, who had died earlier that day. From personal anecdotes to his cultural impact to his contribution to cinema, everyone hailed the man, with the familiar refrain reserved for the departed: “gone too soon.” Yet, amid this collective outpouring of grief and admiration, not one influential star appeared willing to acknowledge an inconvenient part of that legacy: just eight years earlier, Patekar had been accused of sexual harassment by actor Tanushree Dutta. It was an accusation that helped ignite Bollywood’s #MeToo movement, briefly forcing an industry where predatory behaviour has long flourished with impunity to confront its own culture of silence.

And eight years later, that silence seems to have returned. It appears that the Hindi film industry has effectively entered its #MeToo revisionist era, where nearly every prominent figure called out during the movement has found a way back into the mainstream. Vikas Bahl, Sajid Khan, Rajkumar Hirani, Alok Nath, Kailash Kher, Subhash Ghai—the list is long, and the allegations vary in nature and extent. Yet for many of those accused, the movement appears to have amounted to little more than a temporary hiccup in otherwise flourishing careers.

The reasons are both structural and cultural. Structural, because defamation laws can be weaponised to intimidate and silence survivors, particularly in a country where those in power enjoy vastly greater access to legal resources and institutional protection. Cultural, because production houses and studios routinely invoke the absence of a formal complaint or criminal conviction as a convenient justification for continuing to employ those facing serious allegations. In an industry where commercial viability so often outweighs moral accountability, the question is no longer whether someone was accused, but whether anyone “really cares about the accusations” especially when they can still turn a profit.

The case against Patekar was dismissed on limitation grounds, but it is important to remember that the court did not rule on whether the allegations were true or false. He was not exonerated.

The absence of a criminal conviction is a particularly diabolical argument for studios to make. It conveniently ignores the very reason the #MeToo movement existed, and why it needed a hashtag in the first place: established institutions, from the legal system to workplaces, had failed to provide survivors with any meaningful semblance of justice. Twitter screenshots, Instagram stories and first-hand testimonies became an informal, public mechanism of accountability precisely because the systems entrusted with examining evidence, protecting complainants and delivering justice had so often failed them.

Of course, it was a flawed system. How could it not be? It wasn't intentionally designed or institutionally supported; it emerged organically, out of desperation and a collective refusal to remain silent. What it offered was a sense of solidarity and strength to people who had endured intimidation, gaslighting and isolation, often while struggling to hold together their careers, relationships and social lives.

It was never meant to be a permanent substitute for due process. It was meant to force institutions, particularly those controlled by people with outsized influence, to confront what they had spent decades looking away from. It was meant to compel them to exercise their own judgment, and to stop protecting people whose misconduct they knew about or had good reason to investigate. It was to recognise that accountability need not begin and end with a criminal conviction. Did anyone at the height of the #MeToo movement really think the accused are going to prison? Hardly. Their expectations were far more modest. Speak to any survivor and they say the best-case scenario they hoped for is that there’s an economic cost to their actions; that their access to work is hampered so those spaces are safe from predatory conduct.

Some simply wanted an apology. Even that was denied. Because an apology would be an admission of guilt, and guilt is an alien concept for those who intentionally harm people.

Instead, the industry largely chose the path of least resistance. Rather than confront friends, colleagues and powerful collaborators, it marginalised those who spoke out and gradually welcomed many of the accused back into its fold. The people who risked their livelihoods to expose a culture of abuse were left to bear the consequences, while those they accused were afforded the one thing the movement had sought to disrupt: the privilege of carrying on as though nothing had happened.

This cultural regression is also reflected in the cinema Bollywood has increasingly embraced in recent years. Films like Animal, Kabir Singh alongside a growing wave of mythology-inflected narratives that elevate their male protagonists to a near-divine status, have ushered in a more aggressive resurgence of the hypermasculine hero: whose possessiveness is romanticised as love, whose violence is framed as protection and whose authority over women is presented as an almost natural order. Women, meanwhile, are frequently reduced to people who must be protected or possessed, rather than individuals with agency of their own. Not every film endorses the behaviour it depicts, of course, but the commercial appetite for these narratives is revealing. At a time when women fought to reclaim control over their own stories, popular cinema seems increasingly fascinated by men who insist on controlling them.

BUT AS THE HORRIFIC CORNELL7 CASE—WHERE the survivor Jane Doe has been doxxed, shamed, huned—tells us, Bollywood’s collective amnesia isn’t unfolding in isolation. It is part of a much larger cultural retreat from the progressive politics that, for a brief moment, seemed to be reshaping public discourse. Across the world, the rise of the manosphere, the growing influence of reactionary men’s rights activists, and the mainstreaming of anti-feminist rhetoric have created an ecosystem in which the very idea of holding powerful men accountable is increasingly portrayed as an assault on men themselves.

And I particularly think that the transformation of Twitter, once the platform that helped amplify #MeToo, into Elon Musk’s X, with its increasingly hostile, right-wing digital culture, is perhaps the most telling metaphor for this reversal. The same public square that once gave survivors a voice now offers an enormous audience to those determined to discredit them, often amplified and celebrated by the richest, the most powerful, and the most insufferable man in the world.

The most telling shift is how the language has transformed itself. Any demand of accountability is interpreted as a witch-hunt while feminism is largely dismissed as woke excess. Allegations of sexual misconduct are reframed as attempts to destroy successful men, while those who speak out are subjected to extraordinary scrutiny of their motives, memories and personal lives. The accused are increasingly cast as victims of a culture that apparently went too far, while the women who challenged that culture are written out of the narrative.

In that sense, Bollywood hasn’t merely forgotten #MeToo.

It has adapted remarkably well to a world that is increasingly comfortable dismissing it. The industry no longer needs to publicly defend the men it once distanced itself from. It simply needs to wait until the conversation moves on, and the next commercial opportunity presents itself.

Eight years on, as someone who reported extensively on the #MeToo movement, I am often asked: “But what changed, man? What was the point of it all?”

I finally have an answer.

The budgets of the men accused. Those have gone up.

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