Part One: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

There exists online a community of websites and users who encourage, pay and teach each other in how to drug and sexually abuse women. Robert explores the case of one particular website, Coco, in France, along with in one specific offender, Dominique Pelicot. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know, worst people in all of history, all that good stuff. And to talk about some pretty terrible people and a pretty terrible thing that happened this week with me, my good friend, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome back to the show.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here as always.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Hey, Bridget.

• 0:28Robert Evans?

  Yes, we're so happy to have you.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  You want to tell the folks about your, your new audiobook?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah. Speaking of things that might make you feel icky or uncomfortable or weird, have you two ever heard about folks who are experiencing intimate relationships with AI companions?

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  Boy, howdy, have I. Both from that movie, Her, and then since in the real world.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I have always been fascinated by movies like Her and Ex Machina and Blade Runner. I kind of grew up-

• 1:01Robert Evans?

  Ex Machina is pretty fun. Ex Machina is pretty fun.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Ex Machina is good, although it does sort of show the dark side of like, what happens if you surround yourself with sexy bots?

• 1:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  But yeah, so I have always been kind of fascinated by the intersection of bots and AI and the people who want to connect with them. And so I have a new audiobook out called Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy.

• 1:20Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  That basically tries to answer the question of, why are we all so fascinated with technology and people getting emotionally close to it?

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And what are the risks? Like, what do we lose when tech companies like OpenAI are vying to be where we go for emotional support?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37Robert Evans?

  Well, you know, Bridget, I suspect part of the answer, at least for a lot of the men who find themselves in love with chatbots, is that like, it's a, it's like a woman, but she doesn't have any will of her own, right?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:50Robert Evans?

  And that's really relevant to the episodes we're doing today. We're not talking about AI chatbots, but we are talking about something else that the internet and the tech world has enabled that's pretty horrible. As we're all well aware, over the last 20 or so years, our civilization has handed the proverbial wheel over to a bunch of assholes who created websites right around the time you and I graduated high school, right? And of these men, Mark Zuckerberg has probably done the most damage. But if we count PayPal as a website, and it is, then Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are in the mix. And to be honest, I don't know if I think like Musk or Mark has more of an edge, given the last couple of years, but they're all sort of up there. And anyway-

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Don't forget Spiegel.

• 2:30Robert Evans?

  Don't forget? Sure, of course. Now, wait, Spiegel?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Isn't that his name? Evan Spiegel?

• 2:37Robert Evans?

  Who the hell is that?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  The Snapchat guy.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, I don't think about Snapchat. Does anyone? What has he done?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  He goes under the radar a little bit.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's the Snapchat guy. And when I think of him, I think of how he created all those like, filters. Well, he didn't personally, but created an app with all those filters that caused so many people to have-

• 2:55Robert Evans?

  All the EDs.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Have an unhealthy relationship with what their face actually looks like.

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  And, you know, have an, and it just caused a bunch of fraud and give people body dysmorphia.

• 3:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, probably was a bad idea, or at least a flawed idea. And look, there, all this is to say, we should be asking ourselves as a, as a society, what should we do to men who get rich off of creating websites that ruin people's lives at scale, right? How should we handle them? That's a salient question to everybody listening, whether in the, you're in the United States, or Canada, or India, or, for example, France, which is where we're going to be talking about primarily today. This week, I'm going to tell you the story primarily of one website, although we're going to talk about a couple of different websites. And the specific site that we're going to focus on most is certainly lower on the bastard list than Facebook, or Twitter, or Telegram, in terms of like,

• 3:54Robert Evans?

  the actual aggregate amount of damage it's done. But that doesn't mean that it's minor. And in fact, the stuff that this website specifically enabled is much more horrifying than what you tend to hear of on any of these other sites because of the clientele that it solicited. And the website we'll be talking about this week was called Coco, or coco.fr for most of its life, because it was a, a French website. And yeah, so far, the reason why we're talking about this is that France has recently become the only country on earth to take real steps to try and punish founders of websites and tech companies, right, for the, the damage that their sites have done. They've gone after the founder of Coco, this website that we're going to be talking about. And they've also gone after Pavel Durov,

• 4:35Robert Evans?

  the founder of Telegram. Now, most Americans probably haven't heard about Coco, at least not very much about it, but Coco was an anonymous chat site that turned into a den of bigotry, violence, and sex crimes. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Have we heard of stuff like this happening before?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I've heard of Coco and that pattern, because, and I'm sure Bridget has too, because women on the internet.

• 4:59Robert Evans?

  It's all over.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm pretty sad to say. And it's one of those topics where, even as people who cover and talk about dark tech and internet stuff, even for me, I'm like, ooh, this makes me feel like I want to take a shower after hearing about this.

• 5:12Robert Evans?

  I, we, I gave a warning to you and Sophie a couple of days before we did these episodes, just because like, I was like, I can't, people can't, like, I knew you guys were aware of this story, but it just is too intense to not deliver a little bit of like, a heads up. And so I'll say it for the audience, too, heads up, this is a bad one, folks. It's a real bad one.

• 5:33Speaker 03

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• 5:38Robert Evans?

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• 6:37Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 6:52Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 7:18Speaker 07

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 7:44Speaker 06

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 8:03Robert Evans?

  The founder of Coco is an asshole named Isaac Stedel. He's going to be one of our bastards today, but we know very little about him, other than that he was born and raised in Vacluse and the Var, which are two places in southeast France. He was probably born around 1980 or 1981, given that we know he graduated college in 2003 and was 44 in 2025. He earned a degree in computer science from a university in Toulon. I found remarkably little about the man's early life besides this, and essentially nothing direct that would lend any understanding as to his motivation. There's not like, a quote from this kid being like, "One day, I'm going to create a website that helps French people be horrible sex offenders."

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  We don't, and we kind of do have that with like, Mark Zuckerberg, actually, right? We have like, the, "You can be unethical and not break the law, and that's how I live my life" quote. We don't get any of that from Isaac.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Hee hee.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, hee hee. Don't forget the hee hee. Load-bearing hee hee.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  A load-bearing hee hee, for sure.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  As a slight tangent, what do we think about Jeremy Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg in the new Social Network movie?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I'm here for it. I know it's controversial.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Me too, me too. No, I'm with you.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  When you watch the trailer, he's doing the voice so well. I'm here for it. What do y'all think?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  I'm into it. I'm very into it. I don't know.

• 9:22Robert Evans?

  I don't know. I don't, I don't have a strong opinion of Jeremy Strong, to be honest.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  But drama-

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Did you watch Succession?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, Jeremy Strong dramaturgically could play Mark Zuckerberg.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I love Soapy. I love, like, you know ball when it comes to Jeremy Strong. Yeah, you clearly know ball.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm fascinated. I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie.

• 9:44Robert Evans?

  All I've got to say about that is I, I loved, I mean, I didn't love, I loved the movie, that Jesse Eisenberg came out recently with him and Karen Colkin in Poland.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a great movie.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  What is it called? Fuck. A Real Pain.

• 9:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm forgetting the fucking, A Real Pain. Great movie.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really good.

• 10:02Robert Evans?

  And it caused me to reevaluate Jesse Eisenberg because I'd hated him for years. And I realized, I thought I had heard something about him being bad, or I thought that, and I thought that like, maybe I just didn't like his, I didn't, I hadn't really interrogated it. I just had a negative reaction to him. And I enjoyed that movie so much that it caused me to realize, oh no, you just did such a good job of playing Mark Zuckerberg, a man I despise, that like, I associated the two of you for years, and in a completely unfair way. And then I found out he's like, giving a kidney to a stranger. He's apparently a nice man.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  He's a good one, yeah.

• 10:31Robert Evans?

  I judged you poorly, Jesse.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  He was asked to play Zuckerberg, and he refused. He was like, I don't want to keep playing this asshole. I don't want people associating me with him forever. No, thanks.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  Look, Jesse, I apologize, but also it is kind of a compliment. Like, you really disappeared into that role to the extent that it gave me some problems. Anyway, back to Coco. The founder of this website, Isaac Steedle, we don't know a whole lot about him, but yeah, he goes to, he grows up in southeast France, graduates college in 2003, and earns, he's a computer science major, right? There's not a whole lot about him beyond that. Because this is a French case, I had to rely on Yandex or Russian Google to translate several websites. So, some of these quotes might sound a little odd, that's why. "One article in RMC by Mathieu Belliard describes Mr. Steedle as 'a mysterious man who started the website that would make

• 11:21Robert Evans?

  him infamous, Coco, the same year he graduated college, 2003, with quote, 'the help of his parents and 2,000 euros in capital.'" So that does tell you a little bit. His family's got some amount of money that they're able to throw that around. That's not a crazy amount, but it's not nothing. And his parents are supportive of what's going to turn into a website for perverts to do bad things, right? Not that being perverted is bad, but this kind of perversion is. "The website initially looked something like what the video people are going to be seeing now. There's an almost pea-green background, and the big center image is a coconut spilling milk onto the floor. In a way, I think it's suggestive of cum. Maybe that's just like, where my ad goes here, but they're like, I think they're suggestive, it's a little suggestive, right?"

• 12:06Speaker 01

  This is suggestive of semen, for sure. I mean, come on.

• 12:10Robert Evans?

  That's not really a coconut milk spills. It looks more viscous, yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Don't like it.

• 12:16Robert Evans?

  Don't love it. "Directly above the spill is a login box where you can log in by identifying your gender, picking a pseudonym, giving an age, and entering your postal code. Coco's slogan was, 'This is a website for nice people.'" And it was a free chat site. I would describe it as initially most similar to an early and primitive version of the app Telegram. There are different chat rooms that are based on like, the region you're in, and based on like, your topic of interest, like what kind of thing you want to talk about. And it's all anonymous, right? You could put your real name in, but you can put any name in, and they're not taking any, they're not verifying, like, you don't have to do anything that would actually like, make you directly traceable to the account that you have on this site.

• 12:59Robert Evans?

  So it's about as anonymous as anything that's not like, super encrypted is going to be, right? But when I say anonymous, in this instance, that's what I mean. Users can register in just a second or two, and are asked, we're asked to confirm that they were at least 18, but they can also change their displayed user age later. I'm not sure if that was an intentional feature, or just something that they didn't think about, but it certainly becomes a major selling point on the website. Because people are both going, are going to spend a lot of time pretending that they're younger or older than they are. Just as kind of a spoiler for where some of these things, some things go here. "In its early years, at least, it seems that Coco was one of many different regional anonymous chat platforms.

• 13:44Robert Evans?

  There were different websites kind of like this all over the world. There's some similarities between this, as I'll talk about, and like 4chan. It was very French, but it was not otherwise super noteworthy. Now, again, I haven't come across enough direct information about Isaac Steedle to give you his specific motivation, but it was probably some, it may have been just as simple as money. He may have just wanted to get rich, right? And he does, as a result of this website. It's probably useful here for me to zoom out and give people a little context on the internet circa 2003, in case you're too young or too old to have been really keeping up with things back then. We were still deep in the throes of Web 1.0, and modern social media was on its way, but embryonic. You had kind of some of the first, you know, MySpace, I think, was out by 2003, but Facebook

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  isn't really around, Twitter certainly isn't. Like, the, the stuff that like, is going to become known for, like, as social media is not really out yet, but there-

• 14:37Speaker 02

  I was knee-deep in Zanga.

• 14:39Robert Evans?

  Zanga, yeah, exactly. And there were a few online communities that had become large businesses by providing an anonymous hub for people to communicate and do business, and talk about things that they were attract, like, talk about their perversions, right? You know, the Something Awful forums had been created by Richard Kianka back in 1999, and by 2003, had something like 100,000 registered members, if I'm remembering from like, the banner things back when I was visiting in 2003. Each goon or member of the website paid $10 to join, plus another $10 for each time they were banned and wanted to reactivate their account. So being banned on purpose, or as a bit, became parts of the culture at Something Awful, and a method of fundraising. People would get like, intentionally banned,

• 15:22Robert Evans?

  they could re-register or whatnot, like, at times. It was just sort of like a thing that was a part of the culture of the website. And I'm bringing this up because Isaac is going to copy this tactic in a way that I suspect was directly pulling from Something Awful. Isaac was also probably familiar with 2chan and 4chan. 2chan was the Japanese precursor to 4chan. 4chan itself started in October 2003, the same year that Coco got started. And 4chan began after Richard Kianka forced an exodus of members of the Something Awful forums by banning hentai. Illegal file sharing prior to that was common in both communities, right? It'd come in Something Awful, and after this, it's common in 4chan. And it's something that the owners of the websites don't profit from directly, which is part

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  of why Richard eventually banned it, but they profited from the sites becoming active and popular hubs of communities that are doing file sharing, right? So there's, there's some precedent for, if you start this big place where people can communicate anonymously, and give them a place to discuss anything, to post anything, and to like, share porn and whatnot illegally, that's a great way to get a lot of members, and then you can advertise on the site and make money, right? The reason I'm bringing this up is that I think this is probably what Isaac is looking at when he's crafting Coco. I'm sure he's aware of these things. Craigslist does not bear a lot in common socially with these other online communities, but its creation and growing popularity by 2003 is also relevant to the story. After being founded in 1995, and is an email distribution list, Craigslist

• 16:51Robert Evans?

  quickly expanded beyond its initial Bay Area birthing pond by 2000. In 2003, it had opened hubs in dozens of US cities, and this had caused massive, genuinely unintentional disruption to a number of industries, including newspapers, by effectively killing the classified ad business. And I suspect Craigslist was probably of interest to Steedle as well, because it offered a way for people to gather and do business online with the potential for quite a bit of anonymity. In fact, Craigslist scams soon became a legendary aspect of the website's success. So all of this stuff is cooking in the post-dot-com-bust-latter days of Web 1.0, when Isaac Steedle decides to create a website of his own, right? I'm bringing this up because I think this influences him. "Coco quickly became known as a place where

• 17:36Robert Evans?

  people could seek out dates and casual hookups, as well as text-based erotic encounters. Over the years, as social media took off, Steedle rebranded Coco as 'the first free online chat site.'" That's a dubiously accurate tagline. I think I can recall a couple free online chat sites before that, but-

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 17:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. He also described it as "a social network where you can reconnect with your friends," which was an odd tagline, given that anonymity was a founding principle. I think he was just trying to ape off of Facebook's popularity with that tagline, because there's nothing about Coco that would enable you to like, reconnect with lost friends. That's not how the website was designed.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  So weird.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this really does sound like he was combining a lot of things from popping off kind of early social media platforms, and just sort of trying to make it his own thing.

• 18:25Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And I, there's a, we don't know, maybe he always intended this to be a place where people would like, sell illegal pornography that they would make, and other horrible things. But I kind of think he was just looking to do anything that would get him a business, right? I think that was probably his initial, you know, plan more than anything. "One future user, who would be convicted for crimes he committed due to his use of Coco, told a court that Coco had at first seemed like a place to discuss hobbies. And he listed chess and music as specific hobbies that he was into, and that he came to Coco to engage in. He told the court, 'As the years went by, all the predators and scammers started coming to Coco.'" So at least in that sort of account of things, and I wasn't

• 19:07Robert Evans?

  on the website, I don't speak French, so I kind of have to go by these accounts, if that's accurate. It did start as more of a normal, general community, but there was always an aspect of it that was like, predatory, that involved like, people scamming each other, and that involved people like, trying to share or make illegal pornography. And that just became more and more dominant over time. Ireze.com, which documents internet culture, describes Coco as having been created for amorous encounters and seems to suggest that the chat branding was never more than an obfuscating tactic. They note that, over the years, Steedle, quote, "shifted the strategy by making it lack moderation in order to become more attractive to users," which apparently included criminals. And I think you could also- Sorry.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I have a clarifying question. It sounds like they started, from what you just read, it sounded like they started with some moderation and then shifted to basically have no moderation when they kind of leaned into this sort of illegal scam vibe.

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That is what one source says, and I don't know if that's perfectly accurate, but I think that there was more moderation and there were more attempts to kind of clamp down on the worst aspects of the community. And they gave, Steedle not just gave that up, but started leaning in to the darkest interests of his community members, to the people who were making illegal pornography and carrying out scams and the like, right? And increasingly, people are going to be doing like, because it becomes a hookup app pretty quickly, people use it for that. And then it also becomes a way for people to fake hookup, like to convince gay men to come out where they can beat them, right? That's a major thing people do with coco.com.

• 20:47Robert Evans?

  But it's also a major gay hookup app because there's just not a lot of options for that in France at this period of time, right? Which is what makes it a profitable place for predators, you know? Somewhere around, this starts somewhere around the 20 teens is when you first start seeing a large number of attacks on people getting traced back to Coco. I'm not saying that's where it actually, I think it probably went on earlier than that, but the stories all kind of come from around the start of the Trump era, really. These began as seemingly consensual encounters, according to an investigation in Le Parisien by Maxime Poule. Quote, "A person is tasked with luring a victim, discussing with her to gain her trust, giving her a meeting place to meet, and then redirecting her towards several men who pass by and rob the victim."

• 21:31Robert Evans?

  So that's happening too. People are just getting like beaten and robbed, but there's also a lot of like homophobic attacks, right? Because this is such a well-known hookup app for gay men. As that Le Parisien article notes, "Numerous traps were set by homophobic aggressors to assault, rob, and sometimes kill homosexual people after they had been giving a meeting place via the online chat." So that's all pretty bad. And that is, again, that takes a while. The site's founded in 2003. This is all really starting to come out by like 2018, 19. But there's a reason that I brought up Craigslist and online communities where file sharing was a common focus, right? And started by talking about that, because Coco, more than anything, becomes an illegal

• 22:14Robert Evans?

  clearinghouse for videos and photographic content that was always sexual and, again, basically always illegal, right? And this means there was a lot of CSAM, a lot of child sexual abuse imagery being shared on there as well as being made. People would like advertise kids and advertise like filming and whatnot. But there are also a lot of videos featuring non-consensual sexual acts that involve adults, right? And not just sexual acts. People, it becomes very popular to post like pictures of women out in the world and whatnot that you snap without them realizing. So crucially, Coco is not just a place where people come to share these things. It turns into a place where people request them and even start putting together funding

• 22:59Robert Evans?

  to produce new content. So people, through their time on Coco, they start out being like, hey, I've got this video I took, or this, you know, I drugged this girl and I took a video of what I did and, you know, send me some money if you want it or whatnot. And people start like requesting new stuff. And it turns into businesses. Folks start making like actual businesses, producing non-consensual pornography and the like, and use Coco as a distribution hub. It's not the only website they're doing. A lot of these people are, you know, trying to get folks to follow them in other websites, including Telegram, but this is happening by like the late 20 teens. And it happens in a lot of ways.

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  But one of the things that Coco becomes really known for is it's a website where you can facilitate the real world abuse of people and even get to partake in it, sometimes for money, sometimes just in order to help somebody else create pornography, right? This was organized on an ad hoc basis by individuals in different chat rooms. And because very little of what went on was documented in any way, I'll have to provide you with an example that illustrates how the wider site functioned. And we only know of this example because it's an extremely famous court case, right? We're going to focus a lot on this one case that's very famous because it's the only real case of abuse or of this stuff happening in Coco that we have documented to like a really significant degree.

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  But this is a particularly exceptional case, but by no means the only one. So, starting no later than 2011, users on Coco had created a chatroom named "A Son Insu," which means "Without Their Knowledge." This was a place where people, mostly men, could discuss a very specific fetish, raping or otherwise sexually touching an unconscious woman, generally drugged without her knowledge. Now, a number of people who are in this broader world are into what's known as consensual non-consensual roleplay. There's a version of this where like everyone is aware of what's happening and it's role playing, right? These are scenes. And it's important that I emphasize that what went on in the "Without Their Knowledge" forum was not this kind of roleplaying, right?

• 25:10Robert Evans?

  A BBC investigation by Laura Gozy described the chatroom as a place where "men shared photos and videos of women taken surreptitiously." Like, the whole point is that they're not consenting. So I want to make that really clear. This has nothing to do with the other thing. Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  I'm so glad that you made that distinction because, you know, if anybody is even adjacent to consensual adult kink spaces, nobody takes consent more seriously than folks who are in those communities. And I hate when, I hate that it's so easy to conflate this illegal content that is breaking the law and is horrible with what consenting adults do. Because kink communities where folks are consensually interested in things like consensual non-consent, they take consent very seriously. And it's just really unfair to conflate them, but also very easy to conflate them. So I'm glad that you made that distinction.

• 26:04Robert Evans?

  It happens all the time. This has nothing to do with that, in part because their fetish is that it is not consensual.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:11Robert Evans?

  They're not interested in like playing or pretending. Like, they, like, yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  They could, I mean, that's the thing is like, they could. If somebody wanted to explore this in a legal and consensual way, that avenue exists.

• 26:24Robert Evans?

  I know a bunch of people who do, right?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Same.

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  And it's, yeah, it's very important that's not at all what's going on here. Now, from what I have read, I suspect that the vast majority of the conversations that went on in this chatroom were not, did not involve real abuse, right? There were sad gross men describing their fantasies, sometimes pretending their fantasies were reality, but describing fantasies. The worst behavior most people in the chatroom would have gotten up to would be taking non-consensual photos of like women at the gym or of their romantic partner sleeping, right? And that's the majority of the content. But a small number of people do things that are pushing that, that already very fucked up envelope way, way, way further, right? And often it starts with someone just wanting to post some like candid shots of like their

• 27:10Robert Evans?

  girlfriend or their wife asleep, right? And then it kind of escalates because people push them and they're like, hey, would you do this? Could you do this? Could you do this? Why don't you try drugging her, right? Stuff like that will occur a lot. Like many similar online ecosystems, a large number of these more casual users also subsisted on the content generated by the boldest criminals among them. So while most members of this chatroom probably aren't doing anything at all or aren't doing more than taking the occasional like picture of someone at the gym, they are consuming the content created by people who are like actively drugging and raping women, and they're encouraging those people, they're asking them to do more, and they're sometimes paying them, right? So anybody in this, that's a member of this community, whether or not they're actually

• 27:54Robert Evans?

  abusing a person directly is participating in abuse. The whole chatroom, it seems like, pretty much was. Like, I, again, I don't speak French and I didn't have access to it when it was up, but that is, from what I'm reading, sounds like what was going on.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  It sounds like a real ecosystem where even if you are, you know-

• 28:10Robert Evans?

  A freako system.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Being there makes you a cog in this, this machine, essentially.

• 28:15Robert Evans?

  Yes. And if you want to be a cog in the machine of capitalism, why not buy some of these products?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Much better machine to be a cog in than this one.

• 28:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I guess. Yeah, than this one, for sure.

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• 31:11Robert Evans?

  We're back. All right, so, starting in the 2010s, among the boldest members of the Without Their Knowledge chatroom on Coco was Dominique Pelicot. Per an article in Le Monde by Lorraine de Futcher, Dominique, quote, filmed his daughters-in-law in the bathroom, using a telephone hidden in a toiletry bag, then posted the images on Coco. His grandchildren talked about his insistence on playing doctor or agreeing to buy them toys only if they were to undress. And we're going to talk a lot about Dominique today and tomorrow because he has since become the most infamous sex offender associated with Coco and arguably the most infamous sex offender in modern French history.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:51Robert Evans?

  And while his actions do represent the most extreme minority of users on the site, I have to really emphasize that, given its size, the size of the website, the length of the time that it was operating and the anonymity involved, there's no way he's the only user who committed crimes on this scale. He simply can't be. Like, I just don't believe that at all. Now, I think it might be, he might be the only one who committed crimes in the scale against like a middle-class white lady. That's entirely possible. But, yeah, we'll see. So Dominique Pelicot was born in 1952, according to French newspaper Le Monde. Nowhere seems to have his exact birth date, except for the Astro Databank, which is an astrology-based

• 32:32Robert Evans?

  wiki that cites its source as a French lawyer named Marc Bruin, who himself was citing a birth certificate. I don't know how trustworthy this is, but it's the only place I found his birth date, you know, with my casual searching. And it gives it as November 27, 1952. This isn't directly relevant, but it did provide me with an astrological chart for this sex criminal. So here's his astrological chart, if that shows any of you guys anything. Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Shout out to the astrology girlies.

• 33:00Robert Evans?

  I don't know what to do with that, but I found it, so you're seeing it now. I try to describe stuff to the listeners. I don't know how to describe an astro, it looks like an astrological chart.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Somebody out there is like, oh, of course, his rising is this, it makes so much sense.

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  Oh, obviously. The green squiggly thing and the red squiggly thing both have lines in the circle thing in the middle, obviously. I don't know what any of this means.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Somebody is gleaning something from this, for sure.

• 33:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, somebody's learned a lot here.

• 33:26Robert Evans?

  So Dominique was the second child of Denis and Juliet, well, Denis Pelicot and Juliette Rousseau. His mother had first been married to Andre Pelicot, Denis's brother, or Denis's brother? So what happened there, right? That's kind of a weird situation. Writing for the New York Times, Catherine Porter describes what happened pretty bluntly. After his mother's first husband abandoned her and their two children, she married his brother, with whom she had two more children. One of those was Dominique. So is that my key you went on? This is not a healthy family. This is not, not good place to grow up. Dominique is not going to have, like, his, the dad that, you know, he has, the brother of the guy who abandoned his family, Denis, is like an abusive asshole, right?

• 34:10Robert Evans?

  Like, he is a very aggressive man and a very cruel man, and a man who does a lot of sex crimes. The Pelicot family raised their children, who were simultaneously half siblings and cousins in central Paris. Decades later, after Dominique was revealed as a sex criminal, he would make claims that he had been abused in his childhood, and those claims have been partly substantiated. He told his wife and several of his friends about this years before he got caught with anything. Here's how a separate article in Le Monde, this one by Henri Sekel, described Dominique's claims about his childhood. "A few years after Dominique Pelicot's birth, his parents adopted a girl with an intellectual disability, Nicole, who became a victim of incest in her new family." And

• 34:50Speaker 01

  That's horrific.

• 34:51Robert Evans?

  This is, it's really bad. After his Denis wife dies, he basically marries Nicole. I don't know if they're legally married, but like, he, he just takes her as his, you know, like, it's really bad. And Jeanette, Dominique's half-sister, testified that she fled the house as a teenager to escape her stepfather's sexual abuse. That article by Sekel continues, "In addition to the verbal and physical violence of a father he vowed never to resemble and whose funeral he never attended, Dominique Pelicot's childhood and adolescence were punctuated by several traumatic events, the veracity of which is difficult to verify. The sexual violence, forced fellatio, he said he suffered at the age of nine by a nurse at a hospital, his very early confrontation with his parents' sexuality, with acts of

• 35:37Robert Evans?

  violence and domination by his father." And it's hard to say how true this is. He says he was basically raped by a male nurse at a hospital when he was a kid.

• 35:47Robert Evans?

  There's no way to verify that. We can definitely verify that his mom, that his mom was raped by his father because his other siblings saw this too. Dominique has a very strong memory of his dad raping and humiliating their mother. Like, that is a thing that seers him as a kid. I have no reason to doubt that. He later testified, "In every man, there is a demon. Mine came from childhood." And, you know, again, that's literally true, but you shouldn't take what he's saying is literally true because, quite frankly, a lot of people get molested as kids and don't commit the kind of sex crimes Dominique's going to commit. So, yeah, keep that in mind, too.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  That's what I was thinking, you know?

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Fuck this guy, but

• 36:26Robert Evans?

  No, every man doesn't have a demon. Like, people all, everybody's got shit to deal with, but that's different from what's going on with you, bro.

• 36:34Robert Evans?

  "When he was 14, working as an apprentice electrician on a construction site, Dominique claims he was forced to watch as several men gang raped." One of, it was one of the guys, like, the foreman's wife or something, she was drugged, and Dominique was eventually forced to participate, he says forced to participate. And he told his wife about this, again, well before he was arrested for anything. It's always worth interrogating how much we should trust these claims. Psychiatrist Laurent Leatt, who consulted on Dominique's mental health for the court case that came out of all this, seems to find Dominique's version of his own childhood to be broadly credible. He noted that Pelicot "comes from a family with a confused history and troubled reference points, marked by certain secrets and the existence of sexual relations between adults and minors."

• 37:17Robert Evans?

  So, again, it doesn't seem like anyone really doubts, he's probably exaggerating some things. He also is definitely blaming his own behavior on this, but I don't think there's any reason to doubt that he was abused quite a lot as a child.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  And that, I mean, this is a tale as old as time with cycles of abuse, so it's not really that difficult for me to imagine this.

• 37:37Robert Evans?

  It's not difficult to imagine that, but again, whenever he says, and this is why I did it, I know a lot of people. I actually do know, unfortunately, quite a few people who were molested as kids. You know, none of them have done is the shit we're about to talk about Dominique doing. So, he's blaming that on why he is the way he is. I don't. Dominique's future wife and chief victim, Giselle, backs up the description of Denis Pelicot as a monster. "When Dominique was still a child, his father took a job at a boarding house for disabled people." And Giselle writes in her memoir that she suspects, quote, "He must have sensed that there were vulnerable people and a domain over which he could rule." That's how she describes Denis. "He soon became the warden and the family moved into a house on the grounds."

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  Because Dominique's older siblings left home and went to school by that point, Dominique was, Giselle claims, "trapped with his parents and forced to live amid the comings and goings of physically fragile or mentally disturbed men." So he's spending a lot of time with all these very ill people in this boarding school that his father is lording tyrannically over. He's being abused by his dad, he's watching his dad abuse his mom, and he can't escape. He has to cycle long distances to a school that's very far from home, and he develops a reputation as a weird kid from out of town. Giselle writes, quote, "He became an outcast, ostracized for the theft of a suite that had actually been stolen by the pharmacist's son." Now, I don't know how true that is. I could all, I could see him lying to Giselle about

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  that, and maybe he did something significantly worse than steal a candy or someone else stole a candy. I don't know. Whatever the truth, football became young Dominique's passion, but he was constantly forced to endure the sight of his father abusing his mother. He begged her to leave for the first time when he was 14, but she never did. Now, in his testimony, Dominique painted a picture of a traumatized young boy who grew into a young man with dark and terrible urges. He claimed, "I have something inside me that I fought for a long time," and credited his wife, Giselle, for keeping him on the straight and narrow for so many years. And this is a lie, right? His initial claim is that like, when he first gets caught doing the crimes that we're going to outline is like, "Oh, I've always had this demon inside

• 39:45Robert Evans?

  me, and I fought it for decades, and then finally in my 60s, you know, I, my wife's goodness wasn't enough to like, keep me from, from, you know, doing horrible things." That's not accurate.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Very convenient narrative that also kind of puts the blame on the wife for her own abuse. Like, "Oh, she wasn't able to, to help me fight these demons any longer."

• 40:07Robert Evans?

  He simultaneously like, puts her up on a pedestal, because he always talks about her, even when he was in court, he talks about her like, she's, you know, a, an angel and can do no wrong, but also in the same way that like, yes, she, it was her who stopped me from doing things, right? Like, it was, it was her example that kept me on the straight and narrow, right? So he is, you're right, he is like, putting a degree of, blame's not entirely the right word, but like, yeah, that is fucked up. The couple met in the home of Giselle's Aunt Andree, who'd just lost her husband. Giselle was there to provide, visit and provide some comfort to her aunt, she's like 19, but per her memoir, A Hymn to Life, quote, "Almost as soon as I arrived, she started telling me about a young man

• 40:52Robert Evans?

  called Dominique she had recently employed. Now, by this point, Dominique had become a licensed electrician, and Andree had hired him to help her keep her husband's business going." And she really likes this guy. Dominique is, is good at charming people, which is often the case with psychopaths, they can be very glib and like, superficially charming. And he and Giselle hit it off immediately, right? The, she would describe it later as love at first sight. A month later, she attended a family camping trip with the Pellicos that sounded like a fucking nightmare. Denis was reportedly furious when the young couple laid their sleeping bags next to each other in a tent and accused them of trying to sleep together. He would later steal their family's, or their savings, like, when they get started as a couple. He's just constantly a monster to these, to these people as they're starting

• 41:37Robert Evans?

  their new life together.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  He probably feels his, his control slipping.

• 41:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I think it is that kind of situation. Like, he escalates his abusiveness against Dominique as Dominique starts getting out of the house, right? And Dominique does take Giselle up on the offer to flee his family and live with her in Paris. They move in together, they get married, and she describes, again, this is love at first sight. She, after she found out, because as a spoiler, he commits horrible sex crimes against her when she's drugged to unconsciousness. And even after all that, she still says like, "Yeah, I felt like it was love at first sight." And they were together for like, 50 years, you know? This is a long and seemingly, for most of its length, like, healthy, functional relationship. That's one of the really fucked up things about it. So initially, their primary

• 42:23Robert Evans?

  issue as a couple was enduring all the bullshit that Denis threw their way. Here's a representative story from Giselle's memoir. "Because he was only 19, Dominique, his father still controlled his bank account, and when he got wind of our plans, he emptied it. He bought a small farm and insisted Dominique do the renovations. I still have this image in my mind of Dominique right at the bottom of the well, as though he would never be able to climb out again, and was going to let himself be buried alive by his father, who was still trying to control our future. He stole from us, and we said nothing." So not a great relationship with dad there. But they persevere, they power through it. For his part, Dominique says, "This is what drew him to Giselle. She was the opposite of my mother, who was completely rebellious," right? In court, he describes Giselle as

• 43:06Robert Evans?

  "a saint whose love gave him the strength to deny the darker side of his nature, these perverted and cruel sexual urges that he had experienced since childhood," right? And we're meant to believe as a consequence of his childhood abuse. Now, again, we know this was a lie. She was, among other things, he was not keeping on the straight and narrow this entire time. We don't know how many sex crimes he committed outside of their marriage while they were married, but we know he committed some. In 1999, the couple got divorced without separating as a result of financial issues. They were eventually remarried in 2007. Giselle says they needed to do this to avoid her salary being garnished because Dominique's debts were so bad. This guy sucks on so many levels.

• 43:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he doesn't make a lot of money, you know, she would say, but as she said, because they're having kids too, he's an attentive father, he's an attentive husband, like, for the most part, it was a good marriage. Now-

• 44:00Speaker 01

  A little too attentive.

• 44:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and also, she doesn't like, it's not perfect. She cheats on him at one point, right? Good for her. And he cheats on her at another point. There's a period of like, six months where he moves out and he lives with another woman. It, this is, she, these are very French people, and her memoir is a very French memoir, because she writes very bluntly about like, "Well, you know, the, the infidelity was a problem, but once we had both done it and got through it, I think it actually improved our marriage, because we were able to talk more openly about things like our sex, and I was able to just say like, 'Oh, why don't you just go and fuck someone else if you want to be in another relationship,' right?" It's a very French attitude towards infidelity, where they were like, "Well, we finally got the cheating out of the way. Everyone has to do it, obviously, we're French, right?"

• 44:45Speaker 01

  We got it out of our system.

• 44:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we had to get it out of our system. Now, this is all happening sometime in the early 90s. During this time, but Giselle says it's while they were living together in Paris, Dominique is tied credibly to two sex crimes in the 1990s. We don't know about any of this until later, this all comes out after 2020 as a result of the, the bigger case against him. But he's tied definitively to a sex crime in 1999. Per Catherine Porter's New York Times article, "Mr. Pellico lured a 19-year-old real estate agent into a building on the pretext that he was interested in buying it. He pinned her to the ground, bound her wrists with rope, pressed a small bag of ether to her nose, and then pulled down her pants, but the effect of the drug soon dissipated, and she managed to escape."

• 45:32Robert Evans?

  Now, he's working as a real estate agent at the time. This doesn't come out until decades later as a result of a DNA match, when Dominique gets caught committing his other crimes. And he initially denied involvement in this, but when he was presented it with DNA evidence, he admitted to attacking this woman on impulse and fleeing once she escaped. In retrospect, Giselle can think of, thought of, because she talks about in her memoir, like, "There were a couple of days where he like, came home from work, like, really distraught and crying, and I just assumed he'd had a bad day at work," and she kind of thinks, "Oh, that may have been, you know, what it was," but she doesn't really know, and she certainly didn't have a sign that he was doing shit like this. We don't know how often this happened, but once that 1999 case came out, and he ultimately admitted to having attempted to

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  rape this woman, French police, who specialized in criminal patterns, found a link between this attack and a 1991 rape and murder. In this case, it was another real estate agent, Sophie Narm. This would have been, you know, during, I think, around the time they were separated, but it's a little unclear to me. Per Lorraine Defuches' article in The Monde, "They found several related factors. The victim's young women in their 20s worked in real estate agencies. The modus operandi is similar, with appointments made under a false name. The aggression was committed in the place visited, and there was the use of ties, and a chemical product to put the victim to sleep, and a bladed weapon."

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Who does that sound like?

• 46:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it sounds like Dominique, right? It sounds like his MO. He's denied committing this crime, he has been indicted for it. It seems very likely, the police, I think, lost the DNA evidence from that case, so they can't like, confirm this. But, number one, it seems like this was not an intentional murder. She died as a result of him drugging her and being careless, I think is probably what happened here. I don't know if there's a bunch more of these rapes. I go back and forth, because once they had his DNA, they pretty quickly found the first case, and then this second one. And so I kind of think if there were a bunch of certainly murders that had the same MO, they would have come up by now, right? That said, he definitely committed other rapes, right?

• 47:39Robert Evans?

  It couldn't have been just these two and then the stuff that he did to his wife, right? Like, there has to be things we don't know about going back god knows how long, maybe to his childhood.

• 47:49Robert Evans?

  I just, it's impossible to say, right? Giselle says that she never saw this side of her husband. Her memoir does include some events that in hindsight, you could see as like evidence something was wrong. But one thing she points out is that in the entire like 50 years they were together, something like that, he only ever struck her once. And, you know, that's bad, right? But honestly, in relationships that went lasted 50 something years and started in 1971, how many of them exist where like the husband was only violent once, right? It's not, you could be like, oh, he hit her because she was trying to leave. That was a sign that he was a murderer. Or you could be like, well, but that's still probably less spousal abuse than a lot of marriages in which the husband does not commit massive sex crimes.

• 48:33Robert Evans?

  So I don't know that we should see that as like a sign.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  One time is still greater than no times.

• 48:39Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, it's still, it's, I'm not talking, it's not a question of it being bad or not. It's a question of like, is this a sign that he was going to do something like this? And I just don't know that I think it is, right? Right? Because he, this is like not, not abnormal, unfortunately, right?

• 48:55Robert Evans?

  And it was not, she, Giselle is like, I don't, I didn't notice anything, right? Again, there were pieces that all of her family members had little bits of it, but nothing that would have really tipped them over, right? And a lot of stuff that in hindsight seems like signs that he was this kind of guy is stuff that Giselle at the time was just like, well, he's just a man. This is what men are like, right? He was aggressive and selfish in bed. She never had an orgasm until that affair in her mid 30s. And he grew increasingly interested in like degradation and name calling during sex the longer they were together. And again, these are things that like, in retrospect, we can see is relevant to his crimes, but also it's just stuff that a lot of people do, unfortunately, right?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Talk to your like, the young women who have sex with men in your life and you would be surprised to find that doing this stuff without consent or permission is not really that uncommon. So I can understand why she's thinking, this is just how men are. This is just what sex with men is like.

• 49:54Robert Evans?

  And, and she's, she's also thinking like, on the whole, he's a very gentle and like, because he, it's not as bad as a lot of relationships she's aware of. All of her friends are jealous of them. Like, they have a reputation in their friendship group as being like the perfect couple. That's how Giselle describes it. And I think rather than like looking through their past to be like, oh, there were signs, this man was a monster all the time, the more upsetting, but probably more accurate thing is that like, no, there really weren't. Like, there was not a lot that people would have put together, you know? Maybe if everyone had been talking about every weird thing they ever saw, but like most people maybe noticed one weird moment from this guy in the decades they knew him. And that's just not enough to guess that someone's going to do stuff like what he did, right?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:36Robert Evans?

  And it's really upsetting, but I think it's important to be like, yeah, some people can hide that well, who are this kind of predator, right? And that's very scary.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  And it's easy to think that people who do monstrous things are all monsters, like very extreme people that you can pick out of a lineup very easily, but the reality is, it's not the case.

• 50:55Robert Evans?

  No. And she has, she has a lot more stories of him being like an attentive and loving husband than stories of like weird creepy moments. Obviously, they stayed together for like 50 years, you know?

• 51:06Robert Evans?

  Once the couple retired, though, and moved to a house outside, so they, they moved to kind of like a semi-rural area because they want a place with a view. Their finances still aren't good because of all of Dominique's debts. He like fails, his last business is like, he takes on debt and he has like his 18-year-old son be like on paper, the owner of the business because like his credit's too shitty and it winds up needing a loan from fucking his wife. Anyway, it's bad. Like, he's bad with money, right? So the, the couple, they're not rich, but they're renting a house in a nice place and they're planning to spend their retirement there. She's got a decent pension, he's got a shittier one. And he's, he is really angry about that. He doesn't seem to understand why she has a better pension than his. And it's because like she worked more and was better at her job than he ever was.

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  He switched careers a bunch, you know?

• 51:55Robert Evans?

  So, once they move out of Paris and are living in the country in this place called Mazan, Dominique starts spending more and more time on the internet. Sophie Gilbert summarizes this kind of period of time in a review of Giselle's book for The Atlantic. "He's constantly on his computer. One day, his son's partner walks in on Dominique masturbating behind his desk, which Dominique seems unembarrassed about, so much so that you can't help but wonder whether he'd planned it. In fact, at some point, he set up secret cameras to film each of his two daughters-in-law in the shower. Then he posted the images online." And he's posting this to Coco, right? This is how it starts, is he's posting, he's posting, we know he posted pictures of his daughter that he or someone else took when she was asleep.

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  We know that he posted pictures of his daughters-in-law in the shower from like this camera, or not pictures, but video from these camera footage. And that's how he starts.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:46Robert Evans?

  Before he's being physically violent and drugging people, he starts by with these non-consensual photos and videos, right? So there is like an escalation period.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  I'd call that, I'd call that violence.

• 52:58Robert Evans?

  I mean, like, physical. I'm not, sorry, I'm not trying to minimize it. I'm just trying to say like, there's a ladder of escalation where he starts with things that do not.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  I just want listeners to understand that this guy is an absolute monster on so many levels, like just that alone.

• 53:12Robert Evans?

  Is very bad.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Is very, very bad. And unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

• 53:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, this is how he's warming up effectively, right?

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, yeah.

• 53:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And there are some, probably the, the biggest sign was that his email address is fatiche45, like fetish. And his family, his like kids noticed that as weird. It's like, why the fuck is this dad's email address? Like, what the hell is going on with him? And again, it's France. And a lot of the weirder, a lot of his like sexual, because he would periodically make some weird sexual comments, and it often got written off as like, well, he's a Frenchman, right? It's France, we're all French, right? Like, this is a, talk of sex and talk of like desire and whatnot is more common and less sort of stigmatized, right? So it also gets kind of, even though everyone in this story is French and they all think his email handle is really weird and kind of off-putting, right?

• 54:08Robert Evans?

  So there are little bits, but it's not enough that you would guess this guy is the kind of predator that he is. The community where Dominique spent so much of his time and the place where he uploaded secret camera footage of his daughters-in-law in the shower was again, Coco, Isaac Steedle's chat site for nice people. Dominique's lawyer would later claim that he started using Coco in 2011. I think he was using it earlier, but I don't entirely know. We know he starts drugging his wife in 2011. Now, in her book, Giselle points out that her husband was caught taking upskirt photos of women in a supermarket not far from their apartment, quote, "as early as 2010," which is the year he retired. So it's the first time that he gets caught taking upskirt photos of women out in a public place to post on Coco.

• 54:53Robert Evans?

  Obviously, he'd been doing it for some time before. I doubt this is the first time he ever tried it. He gets, and they don't take it very seriously in 2010. She never finds out about it. He gets like a 100 euro fine.

• 55:07Robert Evans?

  And very little happens at this point in time, right?

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Was he posting those images on Coco?

• 55:12Robert Evans?

  I don't know if he posted the ones he got arrested taking, but he was posting other images on Coco, yes.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:18Robert Evans?

  From Giselle's memoir, quote, "In 2010, the police clearly didn't think filming under women's skirts was terribly serious because he got away with a fine of 100 euros and I never heard a thing about it. She's written that, if she had known about this at the time, my life would certainly have changed and she would have, among other things, forced her husband to see a psychologist. It also would have made her more cautious about some of the things she experienced." Next, the fact that the police don't take this seriously is a part of why she suffers, right? I'm not, I'm not putting all the blame on them, but the fact that this is not something the cops care about much is a real problem. And it is, is why this is allowed to happen.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  This makes me so angry and I need folks to understand, like, it is so common that institutions and authorities just don't give a shit about violence, particularly sexual violence against women and girls. The perpetrators are able to.

• 56:08Robert Evans?

  Boys being boys, guys being guys.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  It's not a big deal, whatever, whatever. Maybe she wanted it, maybe the shirt, the skirt was short, whatever, whatever. They do nothing. And then that person learns, oh, I can escalate. Oh, I can do this more. And so I always, I mean, I think that she's exactly right that if the people that we think of as like the people who should do something actually gave a fuck and did something, think of all of the violence and escalation that could have been prevented. But like, I mean, I, he is responsible for his crimes, for sure, but there is a network of enablers that allowed him to escalate. Yeah, it's systemic, it really is.

• 56:44Robert Evans?

  Yes, there's a systemic aspect of this.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Locker room talk, or whatever they tried to excuse Donald Trump's horrific behavior as, locker room talk. That's what they're doing here.

• 56:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're, yeah, and it's, I guess, this is not harmless. It's not harmless to take fucking candid photos or take like upskirts or whatever of random women in public. Like, that's not a victimless crime, right? Even if they don't find out about it.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  And like paparazzi have been doing that for decades to, to young, young celebrities. And that's disgusting.

• 57:17Robert Evans?

  There's probably a line between that and this too, you could draw.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 57:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know what else is a line that we should draw? A line between now and you listening to these ads.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Oh, that was so dark.

• 57:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know, man.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  I know, it's brutal.

• 57:36Speaker 04

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• 58:04Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 58:24Speaker 07

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and.

• 58:52Speaker 06

  Came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  Listen to what happened to her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 59:09Speaker 07

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• 59:12Speaker 04

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• 59:13Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 59:21Speaker 07

  It's real.

• 59:22Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 59:28Speaker 06

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• 59:37Speaker 04

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• 59:38Speaker 06

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• 59:48Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 59:52Speaker 06

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• 1:00:02Speaker 07

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00:13Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, uh, nobody contacted Gisele about her husband taking up skirt photos at the fucking grocery store. And in 2011, Dominique decided to escalate from just posting whatever candid photos and videos of random women and his female family members he could get his hands on. And to do something more extreme. Now, he claims that as he grew more interested in the fetish content on Coco, he started encountering more extreme ideas. Per an article in the New York Times, he learned from another user, the method of drugging his wife for his own sexual pleasure. So he could do things to her that she would not permit while unconscious. Over time, he offered her to other men he met online. Dominique would bait the lure by offering photos of his sleeping wife in anonymous chat rooms.

• 1:00:57Robert Evans?

  And when specific users expressed interest, he'd message them directly and make an offer. Come over to his home at an appointed hour where his wife would be drugged, unconscious and ready for them.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  And

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:01:09Robert Evans?

  What he's, first off, someone online helps him figure out like, cause he had experimented with ether and he kills someone, probably, probably killed someone unintentionally using it. So he doesn't want to do that again. He's got a prescription for a benzo, um, I think it's lorazepam. And I think she had him just a prescription for some sleeping meds that she had been warned only to take a tiny fraction of. And he gets advice from another user who's apparently a registered nurse on Coco, who's like, don't give her more than this. Here's the perfect dose to knock her out. You're going to, and is telling her like, you want to mix it with these muscle relaxers because that way she won't clench up and, and you want to, if you give her this dose of lorazepam, you know, even if she wakes up, she won't remember what's happening because she's drugged, right?

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  Like, that's how benzos can work in high enough doses. Like you go away for days at a time. I remember the first time I ever fucked around recreationally with Xanax. And this is when I was like 17 or 18. I took like half a four bar and I remember walking down the street and then it was 26 hours later. And I had no memory of anything that happened in the interim, but I was apparently conscious for a large chunk of it. Benzos in high doses can do that.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  To that nurse? Fuck you.

• 1:02:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Let, let's look into that nurse. Let's look into that nurse also.

• 1:02:25Robert Evans?

  I don't know if that specific guy did get caught, but like, there have been a number of them who were involved in this site.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  I hope you feel shame till your last breath.

• 1:02:35Robert Evans?

  Worse than that for you, man.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  You were a fucking piece of shit. You were an absolute monster. Fuck you.

• 1:02:43Robert Evans?

  I don't, I don't know if they, if they found that guy. Cause I, I did not find a name attached with him in any of the reporting. I'm sure they're looking for him. They found a lot of people, but some people were better at on anonymity than others.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  I think you're correct there because I myself have followed this case very closely. And I do not recall a nurse being directly brought up in any of this. But fuck you, nurse, whoever you are.

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  Apparently a nurse who, uh, who taught him like the mixtures to use.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  That's, uh, that, that person is so unbelievably complicit.

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that very directly.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  So much for, so much for do no harm asshole.

• 1:03:17Robert Evans?

  It's not just this nurse. There's a whole chat room of people giving him advice and saying like, I'll do this and take a video of it. Do that and take a video of it. So outside of the dozens of men who ultimately do come to their home or homes in order to rape her while she's drugged, there's God knows how many, at least dozens, maybe hundreds of other men who are commenting, who are urging it on, who are like enjoying masturbating to the content he's making, right? Like, there's a lot of complicity outside of the people who are like legally directly involved.

• 1:03:49Robert Evans?

  Journalists with CNN obtained access to chat logs that Dominique painstakingly preserved while committing his crimes. Here's how they describe his MO. After initial contact was made on Coco, conversations then moved to Skype. Pellico often carried out preparatory video calls with the men during which he flipped the camera around to show them his unaware wife. He also shared intimate photos and videos of Gisele, several of which showed her being raped. In some of the messages, several men expressed their admiration for Dominique and shared the desire to do the same to their partners. Another defendant on trial wasn't accused of raping Gisele, but has been convicted with drugging and raping his own wife. Now, first, there's a lot more to talk about. I want to point out, because we started this talking about Isaac Steedle and the website Coco. And we're still talking, this is all happening on Coco.

• 1:04:34Robert Evans?

  There's a reason why I grounded this in the site and the founders of these sites. Because as I think I have established, Dominique was a predator well before he got access to Coco. Well, before he did anything on the internet, he was a predator, right? He probably would have preyed on his family members and his wife to some extent if he had never encountered this website.

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  Giving him this website was like giving a kid who fantasizes about a mass shooting, but lives in a country with no guns. If you were to like, go to a country where people can't buy guns and find a kid who's like obsessed with mass shootings and hand him an AR-15 and say, go at it champ. That's what Isaac Steedle does by making Coco. That's what this website is, right? It is a gun that is being handed out to any person like Dominique who wants to use it. And that's the moral issue here, right? When we talk, as there's, as we talk about the court case, because Steedle eventually gets charged for running this website, there's a lot of fucking, what I call, I think I'd like the dipshit end of like the free speech Crusaders, right? Which I consider myself normally, who are like, well, you know, you can't, you can't go after someone just for hosting a website where this stuff happens.

• 1:05:41Robert Evans?

  And like, I'm fucking sorry. If I were to buy and or own like a, a large venue and, and, and run like a farmer's market or something out of it, right? I own a building and I say, if you pay me a hundred bucks, you can set up every Saturday, you can set up a little booth and sell your wares. And it started out as people like selling like grocery, like food they'd grown or whatever, like little crafts. And then one day some guy comes in with a bunch of like ghost guns and like maps of a bunch of local schools. And another guy, day a guy comes in with like a, a table full of like CSAM, like fucking child sex abuse images. And I keep taking their hundred dollars and knowingly let those guys sell their products out of the building I own, I would go to prison, right? It's not a free speech issue.

• 1:06:24Robert Evans?

  You are owning and operating a place that has directly been like optimized to enable this kind of behavior. And you're very well aware that that's what people are using the site for. You don't have any kind of free speech argument in my fucking mind anymore, right? That's, that's where I land on this morally.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  I hard agree.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  You really summarized the kind of complexities of this argument well, you know? You, we're all sort of in the digital rights space and

• 1:06:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  I think, and I think it's complicated because this is all, the, the conversations about it today are happening against the backdrop of people trying to, you know, legislate the internet, age gate the internet, all of that. And so the conversations are particularly

• 1:07:03Robert Evans?

  Fucking encryption and shit, yeah.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. However, there's gotta be standards, right?

• 1:07:09Robert Evans?

  There has to be standards. Yes, sorry.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I just really agree. And I think

• 1:07:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  There's been such a big, complex argument within the digital rights and open internet movement about exactly what you just summarized, like where is the line? I would argue that perhaps the line is the one that you just made, right? The line where it's illegal content that is harming and abusing women and girls. Perhaps that's the line.

• 1:07:35Robert Evans?

  And if that's like the main use of your website is varying, allowing people to commit varying kinds of crimes against other people anonymously. If you are deliberately running a site to do that and enabling its function, like you are doing something wrong. And it's the, you know, this is not the main issue, certainly not with the series of crimes being committed against Gisele Pellico. But it is like, in terms of the fucking freedom of speech thing, if you care about freedom of speech, no one is more of a threat to our ability to communicate freely on the internet, to encryption, to privacy, than people like Isaac Steedle, who like force us to have to have these fucking legal debates by handing out the equivalent of a fucking gun to a kid who wants to shoot up a school, right? Like, that's what he's doing here.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Well said.

• 1:08:21Robert Evans?

  Anyway, not the primary issue, but important to say. So, back to Gisele. Obviously, this goes on, him bringing anonymous men over to rape her while she is drugged for a decade, right? At least 200 accounts of what she describes as gang rape over the years, often involving multiple people in a similar night. There are of course, physical consequences to all of this, even though she can't remember what's happening. Very significant ones. Gisele would wake up on many days with severe brain fog and would often like not have memories of like the day after too, because that's kind of what huge doses of benzos can do, right? Um, you know, you can lose days at a time, but she did notice she would wake up,

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  and there's no nice way to say this, leaking mysterious fluids, right? I think this is a mix of things, probably a lot of it is lubricant, but she would wake up like wet and was very concerned about this. So she went to the doctor. In addition to the fact that she's got brain fog, she's losing days, she has a lot of pelvic pain and she's waking up wet. So she goes to the doctor repeatedly. She gets MRIs and fucking CAT scans and all sorts of shit. And the doctors keep telling her, everything is fine. And one of the bastards here, we talked about the police and how they fucked up. The medical establishment and how it treats aging women is a side bastard here. And I'm going to quote from Gisele's autobiography.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  I mean, all women, to be honest.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but this is, I'm not denying that.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Specifically a geriatric stuff.

• 1:09:45Robert Evans?

  She's talking, yeah, yeah, I'll, I'll quote it here. "I spent a decade having endless medical examinations, blood tests, scans, multiple courses of vaginal pessaries, neurological tests, 10 years of going to see doctors who looked at me as if to say that, at my age, a woman can't expect much anymore. She ought to just relax and let time continue its demolition work. Never wondering what might be going on, never attempting a diagnosis. And Dominique, always there by my side, he knew." And one of the things she'll, she'll point out, like, I'm waking up wet. And they'll be like, well, this just happens to old ladies, you know? You're just losing control. Yeah, it's fine. Don't worry about it. Right? Wear a diaper. Um, and I know this is the French medical system, but honestly, you're a fool if you think her experience would have been any better in the US or the UK, for that matter, like, really, most places I can think of.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  It's like medical gaslighting, where essentially they're just saying, oh, she's just up, you're just uptight is the problem.

• 1:10:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. During one doctor's visit, when her physician made a note of the fact that she had severe bruising in her, like, pelvic area, her husband had the gall to quip, what have you been getting up to during the day?

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:51Robert Evans?

  Dominique, yeah. And of course, we know that, you know,

• 1:10:57Robert Evans?

  what Gisele was doing had nothing to do here, right? And everything to do with how Dominique spent his nights on Coco, right? That's what's actually at fault here. But she doesn't know, and she's not going to for years. And we'll talk about how she learns, what happens next, and what happens to Isaac Stedel and the Coco, and at least one other founder of a website that's enabled this horrible behavior. Uh, we'll talk about all that, as well as a different website, Motherless, and the Rape Academy, as CNN called it, that its bond, in part two. I shouldn't have gotten such an upbeat part two there. Bridget, how you, how you doing?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  It's pretty rough, you know?

• 1:11:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Um, I think you're covering this with a lot of grace and nuance, which I appreciate, but this conversation fucking sucks. This guy can eat shit.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  It has to happen, though.

• 1:11:49Robert Evans?

  He's a real asshole.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  We have to talk about these things. And, you know, but when, when we let Bridget know the topic for this week, one of the things that Bridget and I both agreed on is that the way this has been covered in the mainstream media has lacked empathy. And, uh, the way Robert wrote the script is quite the opposite. There's so much empathy in this script. And I think it's important to cover these stories, not just with the facts, but with your feelings. And this is horrific.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  I've been on bastards a few times. I don't think y'all have ever reached out to be, to give a heads up before.

• 1:12:23Robert Evans?

  Heads up.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Robert Evans?

  We usually don't. Because you know, like, with this show, genocide, murder, poisoning, rape, like, that's all child abuse. We talk about that stuff a lot, because it's, it's just, it's our milieu. But this, this is just such another level. I mean, I was talking to my partner about it. And just one of the things she said is that, like, yeah, it's kind of just impossible to ever, like, fully trust a man.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Robert Evans?

  Like, you never know. You never know.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  You never know.

• 1:12:54Robert Evans?

  And I don't know what else to take from this story.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I'm glad that y'all are talking about it. I also, I mean, I don't want to be too much of a downer, but I remember watching the coverage of this case in real time. And so much of the conversation was, while they're married, can a husband really assault a wife?

• 1:13:13Robert Evans?

  Right. Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  I just don't think we're, yeah. I just don't.

• 1:13:16Robert Evans?

  There's a number of quotes like that. Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  And that was the, the, one of, one of the dominant narratives that I remember watching in real time. And I just don't think that we're having the right conversation about sexual violence. And I think that people, it's, it might be easy to hear some of the more kind of historical bastards and be like, this guy was a genocidal homicidal maniac. He sucks. But then, when you hear about somebody committing sexual violence domestically to their wife, I think a lot of people are like, it's just domestic issues. This is a marriage. It's intimate. It's their business. It doesn't have anything to do with a wider societal issue.

• 1:13:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it, this, this couldn't be more obviously a wider societal issue. Not just the fact that, like, the police and the medical establishment had little parts in this, but the fact that all of these, they, they, they know at least, like, 70 different men partook in these, like, rape things. Like, 50 were, were convicted. But there's like 70 or so that they, they had pictures or videos or evidence of that, because Dominique's documenting all of it. Um, all of them within 30 miles of their home. These are not men pulled from all over France. These are, in some cases, like, guys that she saw at the grocery store and, like, recognized. He would encourage people to, like, he would tell some of them if they were, like, wanted to, you know, show up in a couple of nights.

• 1:14:38Robert Evans?

  He would tell them where she was during the day so that they should, could, like, drive by or walk by or, like, go into a store she was at and, like, see her and, like, meet her surreptitiously without her knowing. And that's, that's the thing, is that, like, this was not casting a wide net across every pervert in France. This was just how many guys happened to be on this website within, like, a 40-minute drive of her home, who were immediately willing to be like, yeah, I'll rape this lady. Right? That's the systemic part of it. Right? Like, you can't, if you actually look into what happened in this story, you, you cannot walk away without making the conclusion that there are a shocking number of just random dudes in any given society who would, if they felt like it was

• 1:15:20Robert Evans?

  safe, easily and absolutely drug and rape an unconscious drugged woman. Like, if they didn't have to do the drugging themselves. Like, a startling number of guys were down to do that in this community in France. And I don't know any reason to suspect that it would have been different if it had happened in Duluth, right? Or fucking Osaka for that. Well, probably, some cultural differences there, maybe. I don't know. But it's incredibly

• 1:15:46Robert Evans?

  just, yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't have anything else to say about it today. We'll talk more in part two, I guess.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go stand outside during our break to feel the sun.

• 1:15:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Sorry, everybody.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:16:36Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:16:51Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:16:57Speaker 05

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

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  I saw him violent. Backhanding him. Pow!

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

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  There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras.

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  It's real.

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  Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything.

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  It's raw.

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  And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 1:18:18Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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  or wherever you get your podcasts.

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