The world looked on in horror as the trial of Dominique Pelicot revealed a network of sexual abuse that seemed unthinkable: dozens of men in a 50km radius of his French town who were enthusiastically participating in the rape of his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, while she was in a drug-induced sleep.The 51 men who stood trial – and were found guilty – had responded to a request from Dominique Pelicot to join him in assaulting Gisèle while she was sedated. Many among us felt that this case must have been an aberration, a one-off network established by a uniquely predatory man who has since been brought to justice.
But some journalists sensed that this might not be the case. An investigative team at CNN – Niamh Kennedy, Saskya Vandoorne and Kara Fox – intuited that if 51 men in one small town were willing to engage in drug-facilitated sexual abuse, it’s likely that men outside that particular corner of France had the same criminal intentions. They thought there might be men like this right here in the UK – and they were right.
After a months-long undercover investigation, published on 17 April on the CNN website with an accompanying short film on YouTube, the team collated evidence of a vast online network made up of men all over the world, including in the UK, who were colluding to drug and sexually assault the women in their lives. These men were giving each other tips about how to slip the narcotics to their victims undetected, coaching each other about how to check that their victims were sufficiently sedated, and even selling each other the drugs they needed to carry out their abuse plans. The chat groups read as though they were “sharing tips about how to build a barbecue,” says Kennedy .
It didn’t stop there. When these men had successfully abused their victims, with the help of the advice of their co-conspirators, they uploaded videos of the assaults for the consumption of their fellow abusers. They even paid each other to livestream assaults.
In a huge win for investigative journalism, Dutch authorities confirmed on Friday that they had located the servers of the main website in the CNN investigation and taken the site offline.
But the CNN team’s investigation makes clear that, unfortunately, the sheer number of men signing up to these “rape academies” means that it won’t be long before there is a new home for their criminality.
Speaking to the Nerve, Niamh Kennedy took us behind the scenes of this groundbreaking investigation.
You’ve just completed an important investigation. Can you tell us a bit about the headlines of that investigation for our readers who aren’t aware of it?
Sure – I carried out a six-month-long undercover investigation with my CNN colleagues Saskya Vandoorne and Kara Fox into an online network of men from all around the world who were teaching each other, in closed group chats and on a website, how to drug and rape their partners, and how to get away with these kind of assaults.
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One man would write in a question, like: ‘I'm interested in drugging my wife.’ Then someone would answer and say: ‘Well, I did this five years ago, this worked out’
My colleague Saskya and I had spent a lot of time looking into the Gisèle Pelicot case, and it became clear to us very quickly that this wasn't a one-off phenomenon. This was actually a very much larger issue. And this led us to make the case for why we needed to go undercover on a website called motherless.
And you have some big news about the impact of this story to share, is that right?
I do have a big news development: on Friday, Motherless was taken offline by Dutch authorities. Its servers are in the Netherlands and it has now been completely taken offline.
So can you tell us a bit about Motherless: what is it, and what is this phenomenon that's referred to as ‘sleep content’?
So motherless is a porn website that describes itself as a “moral free space” where anything hosted there lives forever. It hosts a variety of content, but one niche that it has become known for is “sleep content”. Sleep content is essentially videos which show what appear to be unconscious women, heavily sedated, having non-consensual sex acts performed on them. A very common feature is this thing called an “eye check”, where a man up the woman’s eyelid to show that she is in fact heavily sedated.
Can you tell us about the Telegram groups you infiltrated?
So we'd made an undercover Telegram account with a fake name and we got access to a private group of these men. It was super organised – it had tabs with different areas where these men were organising themselves. For example, there was a general forum section where you could ask questions. One man would write in a question, like: “I'm interested in drugging my wife. She looks like this, she drinks this much, what should I do?” Then someone would answer and say: “Well, I did this five years ago, this worked out.” One other guy would say “you should try this drug”. It was like they were sharing tips on how to build a barbecue.
And then there were also so many revenue streams, which I found also horrifying. There was a livestream area, which I focused on a lot, because it was quite interesting to me, in terms of legal gaps as well, about how this could be prosecuted. So there would be men offering $20 and they would turn on their camera and say that they would livestream themselves raping their drugged wife.
Another area in which they were making money was also selling these things called “sleep liquids”, which are really powerful sedatives. And none of this was happening on the dark web. That's the thing that people find astonishing – the links would bring you on to mainstream web platforms where you could use well-known payment platforms – although the men selling these liquids seem to prefer to be paid in cryptocurrency.
And you also did an amazing job of speaking to survivors. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that?
For all the cowardice of the men in the group chats, the bravery of the women who had experienced this and were choosing to talk about it and raise awareness was stronger. We spoke to two survivors in the UK and one in Italy.
One of the women, Zoe, had been with her partner for 17 years. One day, he came home after a church service, he wanted to have a conversation, and then he sat down and reeled off this list of wrongdoings to her. He said: “I've been taking our son's sleeping medication, I've been putting in your tea while you're sleeping, I've been tying you up and raping you and documenting this, and this has been going on for a long time.”
It completely devastated her family. And her case is very interesting because she didn't immediately go to the police about it – because she worried about the family, preserving the family, what would people say about her son. And again, for me, the selflessness of women in these situations is remarkable. Eventually, she did go to the authorities and her ex-partner is now in prison.
Can you tell me a bit more about what's happened since you published the story?
One part of the story that we [predominantly Saskya] spent a lot of time on revolved around this Polish man called Piotr who claimed that he was drugging and raping his wife. He was quite brazen in the messages that he was sending, and the images as well. We managed to find this man in Poland. He has now been arrested by Polish authorities and charged with rape, and he should stand trial later in the year.
There’s also been a huge amount of engagement from lawmakers both in the UK and the EU. In the EU, European parliamentarians have really engaged with this issue. In the UK, we’ve had positive responses from the House of Lords, including Helena Kennedy.
I wonder if you have any tips or reflections for other investigative journalists, and how you were able to cope with this – how you were able to keep on reporting this story even though it must have been very difficult?
That's a really nice question to be asked. None of this was linear. On one level, it's hard to reconcile because there's the reason you go into this work, I think, which is to expose injustice. And then when you come across it, it's almost great, because you're like: “I knew this was happening. And now I can prove it.” But then when you get into the conversations and you're seeing the content, it's gutting. It's really tough.
So my advice in terms of navigating that is to constantly be making checks with yourself and to have a really good team around you, as well, that you can really rely on. Saskya and I were constantly messaging each other and supporting each other and listening to each other, and talking out loud about how things made us feel. I personally engaged with a lot of counselling throughout it, and also talked to friends and family members about it too.
A CNN journalist, Clarissa Ward, has this very good adage for any kind of reporting like this. It's like being in a restaurant and you get to taste the best meal in the world, you get to have this unforgettable experience, but you do have to remember that at the end of the experience, there's a bill that you have to pay. And sometimes the bill is the toll that it takes on your mental health. And you can try and put off paying, but eventually you have to pay the bill. You gain something, but you lose something too. So you just have to be willing to accept that.
So it’s important to not feel ashamed of the effect it has. It's a really hard, stressful thing to go through.
I think that's such an important point, and one that isn’t discussed often enough among investigative journalists who cover things like this: that we don't need to be ashamed of the toll it takes.
Yeah, because it shows you're still human, which is really important. Sometimes I feel like there's this conflict between the journalist side of you that is practical and is able to find the facts and construct the narrative, and then the emotional side of you as a human being that is like: what if this was happening to someone I know? Or just the fact that this is happening on such a mass scale, what does it say about humanity? And you want to be able to come out of any project with both of those parts of you still intact.