A Malayalam filmmaker has been arrested over a complaint from a leading actress who accused him of stalking and defaming her by spreading lies through a series of social media messages.

Police arrested Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, 45, from Parassala in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday amid high drama with the filmmaker going live on Facebook yelling, “they (police) are trying to kidnap and kill me,” even as cops who had travelled from Kochi bundled him into a van.

The actress, Manju Warrier, had on Wednesday lodged a written complaint and submitted it in person to the Kochi police alleging intimidation and several offences under the Information Technology Act against Sasidharan, with whom she had worked in the 2020 film Kayattam (Climb) that was shot entirely on an iPhone.

Sasidharan had taken to Facebook on April 27 to controversially declare his “admiration” for the actress and claimed he had “expressed my love to her” while adding: “Don’t assume I have been chasing lovelorn.”

He had made certain claims about Warrier that she construed as defamatory. The details of the post cannot be revealed since the matter is under consideration of the police.

The tenor of his subsequent social media posts had, however, changed drastically with Sasidharan claiming that Warrier’s life was in danger and she was in the complete control of two of her personal staff.

In a Facebook post on May 3, Sasidharan claimed: “I have sent an email and a text message to Manjuwarrier about my apprehensions and mentioned that I am planning to reveal my doubts in social media before I put my first post. I have not received any reply from her.”

He repeatedly claimed that Warrier’s silence meant that she was in danger. “I have concrete reasons to believe that her life is in danger. I think people are trivialising it because her social media handles are active,” Sasidharan claimed in another post on May 3.

On Wednesday he posted a copy of his letter to the President and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court regarding “the alarming law and order condition in the state of Kerala” in which he addressed a range of issues such as a woman’s death due to alleged illegal organ donation and the perceived threat to Warrier. “I had this suspicion that her life is in danger and she is in confinement,” he claimed.

Sasidharan shot to fame with his critically acclaimed movie Sexy Durga that ran into massive controversy over its title in 2017. The movie title had to be changed to S Durga.