NEW DELHI — Eleven days after a Delhi judge decided she would stand trial, Jacqueline Fernandez went to the country’s highest court to argue she should never have been charged at all.
The actor on Tuesday moved the Supreme Court against the framing of charges in the money laundering case built around Sukesh Chandrasekhar, the convicted conman accused of running a 200 crore rupee extortion racket from inside a Delhi prison. The plea, reported by NewsX, is listed for hearing on Wednesday, June 11.
It is the narrowest of escape routes, and the last one available. On May 30, the Patiala House court ordered charges framed against Fernandez under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, and on June 3 the charges were read out formally to her, Chandrasekhar, his wife Leena Maria Paul and more than twenty others, Deccan Herald reported. She appeared in court and denied them. If the Supreme Court declines to intervene, the next stop is a full trial.
The trial court’s reasoning, in the order she is now challenging, was blunt. The judge found prima facie material that Fernandez received luxury gifts from Chandrasekhar despite knowing of his criminal antecedents, and that she acted in connivance with him to conceal the use of proceeds of crime. Those two findings, knowledge and concealment, are precisely what separate an accused launderer from a deceived recipient, and they are what her lawyers must now dismantle.
Her defense has not changed in four years: that she was one more person Chandrasekhar fooled. The Enforcement Directorate alleges the gifts, delivered through an intermediary named Pinky Irani, ran from designer bags and jewelry to cars, all sourced from money extorted from Aditi Singh, the wife of a jailed former healthcare promoter, while Chandrasekhar orchestrated the racket by phone from his cell. Fernandez has maintained she did not know where any of it came from, and that the relationship itself was built on an elaborate impersonation.
The case has shadowed every professional move she has made since the ED first summoned her in 2021. She has never been arrested, but she has been stopped at airports, named in successive chargesheets and made to watch Chandrasekhar conduct a jailhouse publicity campaign of love letters and birthday declarations that her lawyers called harassment. Through it she has kept working, in Hindi films and increasingly in international projects, with the case a permanent asterisk on the bookings.
For the industry around her, the legal question underneath is uncomfortably practical: when does accepting expensive gifts become a crime? Bollywood’s economy of gifting, brand seeding and unbilled luxury runs on exactly the kind of transfers the ED has spent four years treating as evidence. A trial court has now said that knowledge of the giver’s record can convert receipt into laundering. If that standard survives, it reaches well beyond one actor.
It lands in a season when the industry’s legal entanglements keep multiplying, from production houses suing each other over song catalogues to filmmakers finding their names in foreign court files. None of those carries the personal stakes of a PMLA trial, where process alone can consume years.
What Wednesday’s hearing will actually decide is narrow. The Supreme Court is not being asked to rule on her guilt, only on whether the trial court was wrong to find a case worth trying. Courts set that bar deliberately low at the charge-framing stage, which is why such challenges rarely succeed, and why her lawyers chose to climb to the top of the system rather than stop at the Delhi High Court.
Several things remain unknown. The bench that will hear the plea had not been announced by Tuesday night, the ED has not filed its response publicly, and neither Fernandez nor her counsel has commented beyond the filing itself. Chandrasekhar, who has never been reluctant to comment, has so far said nothing about her plea either.
On Wednesday morning she will be a line on the Supreme Court’s cause list, one petitioner among dozens. Whether she walks out of the case or into a trial, four years of limbo end where they were always going to: in a courtroom.
