A n June 2014, police arrested hotel owner Lekhnath Bhandari in Butwal for raping a 14-year-old girl who was his housemaid. During police interrogation, Bhandari admitted to having raped the girl repeatedly. She was pregnant with a seven-month baby when he was caught. But Bhandari never went to jail, he got a Dalit man to marry the girl who is now raising a four-year-old baby. During the trial, Bhandari’s lawyers claimed police coerced him to confess to the rape and that his sexual relationship was consensual. Public prosecutors argued it was still rape because she was a minor, and produced a birth certificate which showed the girl was born on 10 January 1999 and was just 14 years old when Bhandari forcibly had sex with her. But defence lawyers presented a fake birth certificate, claiming she was born on 1 November 1995, and so had already turned 19 at the time of the crime. The new document was issued by a local VDC three days after Bhandari’s arrest, but the court still gave more credence to that dodgy document rather than the girl’s original birth certificate. The judge ruled she was not raped but had consensual sex with her employer. The Appellate Court upheld the District Court’s verdict, but the Supreme Court, acting on a writ petition, recently agreed to re-examine the case. The girl is still waiting for justice. Bhandari used his money and his proximity to political power to get himself off the hook, making this an iconic case, emblematic of the state of impunity in Nepal today. Activists say cases like these embolden men to assault, rape and even murder women and girls without ever answering for their crimes, leading to the current epidemic of rape in Nepal.