By 2018, things were finally looking up for Arya Menon.

Originally from Kerala, Arya had spent nearly a decade carving out space for herself in the Hindi film industry. She had acted in a few roles, including alongside Shah Rukh Khan in Chak De! India, experimented with costume design, and eventually turned to production. In 2016, she produced Famous in Ahmedabad, which won the National Award. By the summer of 2018, Arya had worked as a producer on the Netflix series Sacred Games, a show that redefined Indian streaming television in many ways. 

After years of navigating a precarious industry, her career finally seemed to be stabilising.

But then, towards the end of the year, the ground beneath the entire industry shifted.

On the evening of October 11, 2018, a journalist posted a tweet titled: “Sajid Khan has preyed on women in the industry for years. Here’s my story. #MeToo.” 

The post was part of the #MeToo movement — a global reckoning that saw women break years of silence to call out  sexual harassment and abuse enabled by powerful men in their workplaces.

Arya knew Sajid Khan. She had interned in the same office where he used to work.

Arya was very aware of Sajid’s behaviour and the kind of damage he could do to a young woman’s confidence.  

The journalist’s tweet detailed how, in the early 2000s, when she was a young reporter, she had been assigned to interview Sajid Khan. She wrote that he invited her to his home, where he boasted incessantly about his genitals. At one point, he left the room and returned with his penis exposed.

When she tried to leave, he blocked her path and forced his tongue down her throat. She ran out in shock, crying on the train ride to the office, where she had to file the interview. Years later, when she was assigned to work with him again, she warned him to behave. Sajid reportedly laughed and said, “You are fatter than you used to be. I won’t touch you with a barge pole.”

After her tweet, more than a dozen women, including his personal assistant, accused Sajid Khan of sexual misconduct, coercion, intimidation and abuse. 

Arya was not surprised. Sajid’s conduct had been an open secret in the industry. He was known to make lewd jokes about female actors and behave in what used to be termed a “sleazy” manner with women colleagues. 

In Hollywood, the #MeToo movement started gaining traction in October 2017, with multiple women accusing the powerful producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, sexual assault and harassment. 

A year later, the movement had reached the doorstep of the Hindi film industry. Cases were being filed, women faced threats of counter-cases, and social media was flooded with accounts naming actors, directors, producers, and editors across the industry.

By then, in Hollywood, the fallout was already underway. Harvey Weinstein was walking up the New York City courthouse in handcuffs. Actor Kevin Spacey had just been dropped from House of Cards. Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS Corporation, has resigned. Actor and comedian Louis CK lost his projects and representation. 

In Mumbai, too, for a brief moment, it seemed as though the industry might finally be forced to confront itself. Accountability appeared to be somewhere within reach.

Arya began to wonder whether she should speak up.

Even as she was debating this decision, production on the second season of Sacred Games came to a sudden halt. Filmmaker Vikas Bahl was accused of sexual assault, leading to the dissolution of Phantom Films, the production house he co-founded which made films like Queen, Masaan, Udta Punjab, and Sacred Games. 

These developments reinforced what Arya already feared: speaking out came at a cost.

In November 2024, Arya met me at a coffee shop in Mumbai. The recent release of the Hema Committee report — a Kerala government-appointed inquiry into sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the Malayalam film industry — had once again stirred conversations around #MeToo. Still, Arya remained unsure.

Since the movement, things have improved in many ways, she said. “But calling out men still means losing your job and everything you’ve worked for.”

While formal redressal mechanisms now exist, consequences have been uneven and often temporary. 

No name embodies this contradiction more than that of Sajid Khan. 

In December 2018, with multiple women having publicly levelled allegations against him, the Indian Film & Television Directors’ Association (IFTDA) conducted an inquiry and imposed a one-year ban on Sajid. At the time, it was hailed as a landmark decision — proof that the industry was finally willing to act. 

Eight years on, it is worth asking: Did Sajid Khan’s case set a precedent, or was it an exception? What became of the women who spoke up? And what does his return to work mean for the movement? 

Drawing on interviews with survivors, industry insiders, and internal disciplinary records, this article examines how accountability was framed, enforced, and ultimately curtailed. It asks whether the case marked genuine change in workplace safety or whether Sajid was simply the low-hanging fruit — punished publicly to protect the underlying power structures. 

Ultimately, what does Sajid Khan’s case reveal about the trajectory, and limits, of the Hindi film industry’s #MeToo movement?

‘Toothbrush and shorts’

On December 8, 2025, a court in Kerala acquitted superstar actor Dileep, accused of masterminding the abduction and rape of a leading female actor in 2017.