Inside The Hidden Network Of Men Drugging And Raping Their Wives

In 2024, the world learned the name Gisele Pelicot. Between 2011 and 2020, she was drugged and raped in her home in France by her husband, Dominique, and dozens of other men while she was unconscious. In a landmark trial, the then-72-year-old Gisele waived her right to anonymity as evidence revealed at least 200 rapes, many of them filmed. Dominique recruited men through a sex chat website, giving detailed instructions on how to abuse his wife. But this is not an isolated case. In 2026, CNN uncovered allegations of a global network of men in group chats sharing tips on drugging and raping their wives, alongside more than 20,000 “sleep content” videos. Investigative journalist Saskya Vandoorne joins us after infiltrating these groups and speaking to survivors. LINKS Learn more about CNN's investigation here https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html. If any of the contents in this episode have caused distress, know that there is help available via Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. CREDITS Guest: Saskya Vandoorne https://edition.cnn.com/profiles/saskya-vandoorne-profile https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533976/Host: Gemma Bath https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemmabath/?originalSubdomain=au Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahli-blackman-205a891b7/?originalSubdomain=au Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy Video Editor: Julian Rosario Audio Designer: Tegan Salder Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  It's a regular Sunday in 2018 in Devon, England, and the Watts family have just returned home from church. Zoe's four children have dispersed to various corners of the house, and she's settling in for a day at home when her husband of 16 years makes a confession. He's been crushing their son's sleeping medicine into her nightly tea and raping her once she passes out. He reels off a shopping list of abuses he has subjected her sleeping body to. Zoe is in shock. Her entire life, her marriage, it all shatters in a single moment. "He's been doing it for years," he says. Zoe starts to panic.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  The reality of what her husband, the man she has trusted, loved, parented alongside, confided in, what he is telling her is too painful to comprehend.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  I'm Gemma Bath, and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. In 2024, the world learnt the name Gisele Pellico. Between 2011 and 2020, she was drugged and raped by her husband Dominic and 50 other men in the couple's home while she was unconscious. 72-year-old Gisele waived her right to anonymity in his trial, and we followed along as the proceedings detailed at least 200 horrific rapes, all of them filmed. Dominic advertised his wife on a sex chat website,

• 1:48Speaker 00

  giving rapists instructions on what to wear, where to park, how to abuse his wife. "No condoms required," he'd tell them. These men were firefighters, truck drivers, nurses, their next door neighbour. Men from in and around Giselle's small village in France. The case shocked and horrified the world. But Giselle's bravery in owning her story and her refusal to carry shame saw her become an international feminist icon, a symbol of survivor resistance. But this case, this abuse, it's not unique.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  In March 2026, CNN released a shocking investigation exposing a global rape academy. Thousands of men across the world in group chats, teaching each other and swapping tips on how to drug and rape their wives. On one website, they found more than 20,000 videos of so-called sleep content. They had hundreds of thousands of views. Saskia Van Dorn is an award-winning investigative journalist and CNN's Paris bureau chief. During this investigation, she talked to several victim survivors and infiltrated one of the group chats sharing rape sleep content. Saskia joins us now.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Saskia, thank you for joining us on True Crime Conversations. Firstly, you covered Giselle Pellicho's case intimately in 2024. You went to her husband's trial, you've spoken to her since. What impact did telling that story and hearing those details in court have on you and your next steps journalistically?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I think if there's one word that stays with me, it's scale. Because I remember when I was sitting in the courthouse and Giselle Pellicho's lawyer began describing the website that Dominique Pellicho had used to recruit over 70 men to rape his wife. And he described it as the weapon of the crime. And... That's how I think you can understand how we get to a scale of 70 men. If it was not for this website, Coco, Dominic Pellicoe would never have been able to find

• 4:24Speaker 01

  like minded men, men who shared the same fantasies that he had. And I think that that's what began, what made us want to look into these sorts of websites. And of course porn sites where you're now consuming porn on a scale that is massive. So I think those were kind of the two, the link between these, these stories, which is the scale of the men and then the scale of the content that we discovered on this website that we went undercover on.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  How did you discover that there was more content beyond Dominic Pellicoe's kind of chatroom website he was using? Was it hard to find these other platforms, this other website?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  It wasn't hard at all. There were websites that were advertising themselves as Coco's replacement. So it was so many, you'd find men discussing this on Reddit chats, online forums where they would say, oh, Coco's been taken down, but you might want to head here, here and here to find the same kind of content, to find the same like minded people. And that's how we began going down this rabbit hole. And then Motherless, which is the website that we ended up going undercover on, we had also heard from these German journalists who had worked extensively on this site. And they had already brought to light a lot of what we will, you know, talk about later

• 6:01Speaker 01

  on, I imagine, sleep content.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Can you tell me about what Motherless looks like on the face? Like when you go onto this website? Because it's not something on the dark web. It's available just on a normal browser.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  It's readily available, it's not on the dark web, you can access it super easily. And as soon as you are on the landing page, you're just going to be faced with tons of videos showing, you know, different types of porn. So you're going to have porn that is categorized as incest, porn that's categorized as teen. And then you will have search terms, for example, ZZZ, passed out, eye check. And that's how we were able to then find, discover all of this sleep content. And what is sleep content?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Those are videos where you're going to see women, unconscious women, who are then going to be abused sexually. I mentioned the search term, eye check. What's that? Well, that will, you will see a man in the video lifting up the eyelids of the woman to show that she is completely sedated, that she is completely unconscious. They'll lift up her arm to show that her body's lifeless. And that's how we were able to see these tens of thousands of videos of, you know, women unconscious and having men perform sex acts on them. Now, I should add that since our investigation aired, the motherless was taken offline for a week

• 7:41Speaker 01

  because their servers are in the Netherlands and the Dutch opened an investigation into motherless. And I've been on it since and motherless has cleaned up some of this content. They banned some of those search terms. But if you were to search for, you know, a woman asleep in French or in Spanish, you're still going to come across that content. So it hasn't been taken off completely.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  And it sounds like these men just find new ways of kind of serving the content once they're figured out.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Because that's the thing about Motherless is not only is it a website, a porn site, that has on average 80 million visits a month with its core audience in the US, but it also acts as a bit of a kind of social media. So you're going to have men who will have profiles. It'll show how long they've been on Motherless, five years, 10 years, 15 years. You'll get awarded medals if you've been on there for extended periods of time. And then it will show the videos that you have listed on your profile. And of course, the more views your videos have that you've uploaded, the more prestige you have on this website. So it's also a kind of brotherhood. You know, men are going to find each other there. They're going to befriend each other.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  You can befriend another user. And then what we discovered was that they would have links to Telegram groups or Telegram usernames. And that's how I came across one man who said he was selling liquid sedative around the world and that for $150, he would send a bottle of liquid sedative. It would arrive the next day with detailed instructions as to how it would affect the woman that you were drugging. And then there was another user who had a link to a Telegram group

• 9:42Speaker 01

  where there were 1,000 men in that group. And that was the one that we infiltrated. We created a male persona and began exchanging with men in that group. And it was, it was in real time. So you had men from across the world sharing tips on how to drug and rape their partners.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  And I'm assuming the group you were in was one of many. You just happened to be in this one group with 1,000 men, but we don't know how many more groups there are.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Just to give you an example, Gemma, the German journalists I was speaking about earlier, they infiltrated a group with 70,000 men. So you get this idea that this is far more widespread and that in fact, Motherless was acting as a gateway. So men would find themselves, maybe consuming at the beginning, regular porn, then because of algorithms that favor extreme content, finding themselves on this dark corner of this site. Because I should, you know, mention that, yes, there are sixty to eighty million visits on this site per month, but that's not to say they're all there looking at sleep content. A lot of these users would just be looking at regular

• 10:56Speaker 01

  porn. But you can see how some would arrive on the page, start off by looking at regular porn, find themselves in this dark corner of the website, looking at sleep pornography, and then find the link to a Telegram group. And that's when they're exchanging in real time with men around the world.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Sitting in that group, seeing these conversations, I know you kind of, this was an investigation you did over several months. What was it like being immersed in their world? What were their conversations like, their mindset like? What did you learn about them?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  I think that it was more than just creating content. It was also about camaraderie. So this feeling that they were getting a thrill in the act itself, so by drugging and raping their partners, but also the dynamics surrounding it. So bringing the video back to this group, who would then go on to praise the acts of, you know, the individual involved. And it also felt like there were, there was this kind of, you know, teacher-student dynamic with some of the relationships. So you would, there'd be a user who had been on Motherless for years and who would be boasting about drugging and raping their partner for a long

• 12:18Speaker 01

  time, and they would be sharing tips with the younger men who perhaps had never tried it, and therefore normalizing the entire idea of rape. And you could see that these younger guys who might never have thought about doing this began to feel like, oh, well... These, all these guys are doing it. They've been drugging and raping their partners for years and getting away with it. So maybe it's not that bad. And you also got the sense that it was just, uh, the drugs were just a facilitator, the ease with which they were able to do this to their wives, to their girlfriends, and also the tutorials that they were sharing with one another. Uh, how much does she weigh? Uh, does she have a

• 13:03Speaker 01

  fast metabolism? Make sure you don't overdose. And that might be one of the most shocking things that we discovered was the way that women were treated as guinea pigs. And these were supposedly, in some cases, the mother of their children, women that they'd been with for 10, 15, 20 years. And so I think what's so pernicious about this kind of content, these kinds of groups, is how the men are desensitized to it. And the truth is, Gemma, we, as the journalists who were in these groups, were desensitized to it as well after a while, you know? Oh, there's another video of one being raped. You just don't see it

• 13:46Speaker 01

  the same way because you're consuming vast amounts of, um, this extreme content.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  I can see why you kind of labeled this as a rape academy, because that's, it's exactly what it, what it is. It's, it's kind of men teaching men. It's a school for how to rape and drug your wives.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  And that, uh, term was, was used by a French MP who herself had been, uh, drugged by a senator. And when we came to her with her, with our findings, uh, she said, yeah, this seems like a school. This seems like an academy. And it is. Twenty four hours a day. It was in the morning, in the afternoon, and of course, very much at night. And you felt that it was, you know, what we discovered was that it was across the world. There were men from France, the US, Canada, all over Europe, and all ages. Some of them would talk about their professions, all different types of careers.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  It really was, there wasn't a type, which was also, I think, what was quite unnerving is that it could be anyone, could be any man out there. There really wasn't a profile that they were fitting.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think that was one of the most shocking things that came out of Dominic Pellicoe's trial and the fifty other men was they were firefighters, nurses, the next door neighbor, you know, a baker. Like it was, you couldn't pick who it was gonna be. And it was quite shocking that they were these normal kind of men. So you were finding the same thing, that they were everyone. They were mailmen, they were police officers, they were all sorts of people.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  All sorts of people from all walks of life. Some had high-powered jobs, others were unemployed. And also, as I said, some of them were very experienced, others you felt they just stumbled across these groups. And this goes to show why these unmoderated platforms can be so dangerous, because you may be able to, you know, remove some of that problematic content, some of the illegal content once it's been flagged to you. But you can't control, if there's a link that's living on a user's

• 16:14Speaker 01

  profile that everybody's then congregating on, that's it, it's too late, the, you know, the horse has left and they're all now in another group. And you may be able to take off that user from your website. But if they know Motherless to be a space where you can come and

• 16:33Speaker 01

  find men who feel the same way as you, who are into the same kind of, you know, Criminal illegal content, then you are going to keep coming back to it. And we know with Motherless that several years ago, when the German journalists first did this investigation, they were made aware that there was this huge community on their site that were into sleep porn. And yes, they went and banned the words back then, the search terms, but look where we are today. Lots, you know, lots of videos reappeared, these groups found each other again.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  So, you know, the question needs to be asked, is enough being done to deter these men from creating these groups and from uploading this content?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Up next, Saskia tells me about the DMs she exchanged with one man in particular while working undercover on the site.

• 17:32Speaker 02

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• 18:08Speaker 00

  Tell me about the chats you started having on the side, the DMs from one particular man and how that kind of evolved.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the truth is, because we were working under very, you know, strict guidelines, we were there undercover, but we were there never to encourage anybody else. We were there as observers. We remained journalists by just asking questions in these groups, which meant that a lot of the conversations went cold because in these groups, pictures, videos of your wife, of your girlfriend, that's currency. And very quickly, the men would grow suspicious of us because we weren't sharing anything, we weren't...

• 18:55Speaker 01

  You know, relaying any stories, any experience that we'd had, we were just sitting there and listening. Um, but there was one man, a Polish user, and he seemed content just to share content with me over DM of um his wife, who he said he had drugged and raped. And um I got the feeling with Piotr, that's the name we're giving him, it's not his real name, that he was just wanting to speak to someone else about what he had been doing to his wife, what he wanted to do to his wife, and didn't need anything in return.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  So I would, you know, just asking questions about why he was doing this. His answer was because he could, because this was something he found arousing when she was in this state, that he had complete and utter control over her. And a crucial part of the investigation for us was proving that these men were real, that they weren't just usernames, that they weren't just pseudonyms. And that's something we were able to do with Piotr, because even though he wouldn't meet with our undercover persona, which is how we first began to try and um see him in real life, he let's say that he was going to be at a party um in Poland and we travelled there,

• 20:23Speaker 01

  knew the restaurant where he was gonna be with his wife. And um I think that was one of the most stressful parts of the investigation, because we had had many discussions before that moment with um all of our editorial team to to to discuss, you know, do we confront Piotr, do we speak to his wife? Um, because up until then, we hadn't been able to confirm his identity, so we didn't know, is this guy who he says he is? And when we were in uh the restaurant and he was just a few metres away.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Knowing what he had done to his wife, knowing that all of this was presumably true, um, it was really hard as a woman not to go to her and not to go to him. But we didn't know how he was going to react. We didn't know what he might do to her. And so with her safety in mind, we decided to pass our findings on to the police, to the Polish police, and they acted incredibly quickly. They arrested him and he admitted to the charges that were brought against him, and he should be sentenced in a few months' time.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  When you were observing him and his wife, were they normal? Did they just look like a normal couple?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  It's hard not to project, um, things onto them, but it felt to me that she looked incredibly vacant, um, that it was almost as if her body knew, but her mind obviously didn't. And, and there was this strange, uh, dynamic on the dance floor where, you know, she would be dancing with friends and then he would come to her on the dance floor. She would, uh, go back to her table and it felt like she was fleeing him. So, uh, uh, for us, you know, in, in, in our role as observers, I felt that there was a kind of coldness between them. But it's hard to tell if that was, you know, something that was, that was real.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Maybe they just had an argument, who knows? Um, but it, it was just for us so important to be able to show, these guys are real, here's one who we spoke to during the course of our investigation. And, you know, now he's admitted to it. How many more men are there out there like him? Where women are completely oblivious that they're being drugged and raped by their partners?

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Like you were saying before, with like the prevalence of this, it's kind of hard to go like, where do you go? Is it the tech companies? Is it law enforcement? Is it? Moderation systems, like, how do we kind of clamp down on this if we are just seeing them kind of popping back up all the time?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  That's what makes it incredibly hard when it comes to tackling this problem. We were speaking about Coco earlier. It was brought down and in the past few weeks, a website that is called Cocoland has now reemerged. It has exactly the same interface that Coco had. It's advertising itself essentially as the same Coco. And Coco was cited in 22,000 criminal cases. There were murders that were being organised on Coco. There was child sex abuse imagery that was being shared there. And yet, a website has now reappeared. So there is this issue of you bring one down.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  What is stopping creators, owners, from bringing another one, you know, into existence? And so clearly, I think moderators and owners maybe don't face enough scrutiny or, you know, there aren't enough deterrents for them to create these new websites. But I also think it's worth mentioning that we're talking about a $90 billion industry. That is how much, you know, the global porn industry is worth. So there's a lot at stake here.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And we touched upon the algorithms earlier, but on a lot of the, we've mentioned Motherless, there are other websites where there is this kind of sleep porn. We've come across it. Again, there are videos that we'll have on them, you know. raped women who are asleep. That's what they're selling for eight euros. You can buy a bundle of that. And and you don't need an email address to access these these sites. You just land on them and that's what's being sold. And that's because um as um you know, men are consuming this content and they get desensitized to it.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  They tend to then click on more and more extreme content. And that's where there is, uh, and experts will tell you this, a failure in moderating this kind of content. Because as soon as you've got the word rape there, you know, the the the site should be geo-blocked, brought down. You know, that's what a lot of the experts are are are and ad advocates who've been trying to combat this problem have been fighting for. And they say that, you know, it just what's happening in the online world, the policing of the online world just isn't in step with what's happening in the offline world.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And uh, that a lot of the behavior that we see uh, on these uh porn sites, like for example, strangulation, this is an example that I've uh brought up before. Twenty years ago, strangulation during sex uh was incredibly rare. It was niche. But since the the porn industry uh has, you know, with the algorithms, pushed this kind of extreme content into the mainstream, there are uh a a third of women in the UK who will experience strangulation in their twenties.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  So it just goes to show how what we're seeing online then shapes uh what's happening to women in the bedroom. And so there's an argument there that the porn industry isn't reflecting our sexual desires, but shaping them. Oh. Erotica, you know, has been around for decades. No one is suggesting, when you listen to the experts, banning porn in its entirety. But it's extreme porn on this scale that is so readily available. That is harming men and women.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  But I would go one step further and say that regular porn on these websites that are readily available, not motherless like all of the other porn sites that you can just land on. Most of them are not showing loving, kind, gentle sex. They're showing quite violent or dominant, and maybe they're the words that they start with, dominant sex, or lots of like, quite violent angles of women and stuff. And then it gets kind of grosser and more disturbing from there. So even the the normal porn that is readily available to young boys, to men, I would argue is not nice sex.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yes, it's it's sexual violence towards women. And we saw this also with, we haven't mentioned Epstein, but you know, in the Epstein files, we saw how they were grooming the girls by showing them porn. This is what, you know, Jeffrey Epstein would like you to do. This is your homework for this evening. And and I think that when we go back talking about regulation, yes, age verification has been introduced in some countries. And that will stop six year olds perhaps coming across it once when they're on the iPad. But is it going to stop adolescents? You know, a lot of people aren't convinced that age verification is going to help solve

• 28:56Speaker 01

  the problem. Going after these sites also, the way that they have been built, the way that they're created, is done in a way where the the risk is spread. So they've they've structured it deliberately to make it hard for law enforcement to go after them. Let's use the the case of motherless. The the servers are

• 29:20Speaker 01

  The Netherlands, the parent company is going to be registered in another country. The owner, we think, is in the US. So you need to have an international cooperation for any kind of case to be brought against them. And and that's why it makes it so hard for any kind of, you know, charges to be brought against them in the long term. But I would also say, and Giselle Pellicoe is the first person to tell you this, that it's a question of education. That, you know, boys from a young age need to be taught what consent is

• 29:58Speaker 01

  and need to be taught that women, you know, need to be respected and need to be listened to.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. I was, I was really shocked to hear the statistics, getting back to the specifics of sleep rape content. You had figures in there for the UK, nearly a quarter of all sexual assault victims are assaulted while asleep or unconscious. That's an enormous number. It makes me think, have you seen any figures? I haven't seen any figures for Australia. Or do we know more globally what what those figures look like?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I think it's a big issue in that there isn't enough data right now. And anecdotally, since looking into these cases,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  you start seeing instances of of of women being drugged and raped by their husbands kind of, you know, all over. I mean, there are, I'll give you the example of the UK. In the UK, in September and October, you are going to have two cases where a man is accused of drugging and raping his wife and allegedly enlisting thirteen men to come and rape her. In in that September, in October, another case of a man who has been accused of drugging and raping his wife and inviting six men allegedly to come and rape her. So Dominic Pellicoe was not an outlier.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  He was the beginning. And I wonder, is this a crime that is on the rise? Or is it that Giselle Pellicoe coming out, speaking, telling other women, shame must change sides, please speak up?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Has this meant that women are now more prepared to come forward? It's really hard to tell because the data just isn't there. But anecdotally, having spoken to psychologists who have profiled a lot of the defendants in the Pellicoe trial,

• 32:01Speaker 01

  psychiatrists who have been speaking with a lot of men perpetrators of this type of crime, they have told me that they're seeing more cases. And I think that, you know, it's not a leap to make to look at how ubiquitous this content is. And again, this idea that someone, a man will stumble across this, will never have even thought of it. But because everyone else that he is suddenly in a Telegram group is doing it, it just doesn't make it as scary. And you've really got the sense, going back to the Telegram group, that there wasn't any shame for them. Like, it wasn't something to be ashamed about. In fact, it was something to be praised.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  And to give you, again, to reflect how this group really was an upside down world, a complete opposite to what we live in, the reality we live in. Here, you know, Giselle Pellicoe is an icon. She's the person a lot of women look up to. In these, in this ecosystem, in this kind of dark brotherhood, it's Dominic Pellicoe who's the hero. He's the one to be amulated and to be copied. So it just gives you, you know, that juxtaposition and how these two worlds are vastly different and apart.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, the men, again, who were speaking to each other in these groups, they found comfort in.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Uh uh uh in in in in being friends, you know, they you got a sense that they felt here that they were completely uninhibited and that they could share their deepest, darkest secrets and wouldn't be vilified for it, quite the opposite. They were one of them. And I and and that that feeling of belonging, I think, is also something today that we see in toxic masculinity, manosphere, like all of these themes, these subjects, they do, they are intertwined. And um when we're when we're discussing, you know, how do we tackle this problem, I think asking men how they can better help each other is also a big part of the problem of this issue.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  I think what makes me angry is I understand herd mentality. I understand being desensitized. I can kind of see, you know, how they would go down that route. But then I go, but women wouldn't be doing this. I haven't heard a single case, have you? You're the person to ask. Have you heard of a case of a woman drugging and raping her husband and inviting women to come and do the same thing?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  I think it would be physically impossible. Um and no. And and and on these websites, at no point did I ever see a woman being violent towards a man. Um it it was it was always the other way around. And I think that's, again, when we talk about how can men and women help each other, because I I do think it's important for it to not become a them versus us, you know, situation if we're trying to come to some kind of find a solution, find a way to to combat these spaces and this crime. It's also, we need

• 35:25Speaker 01

  men who are in these, who are on these sides. And I'm sure there are many who stumbled across this content and thought to themselves, this is horrific, this is terrible, you know, I want nothing to do with this, I'm I'm I'm leaving this this platform. But they but did they say something, you know, did they flag it?

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Um, there's a uh uh a man that I'm speaking with at the moment who was addicted to Motherless between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and he really talks about the kind of descent into hell of uh the Motherless machine, how he first went on there, um, just, you know, consuming classic porn and then fell into this um sleep community and managed to kind of extract himself from it when he realised just how bad, bad it was, how violent it was. Um, and he is now trying to help, in fact, law enforcement track down some of these guys. He will flag the account, he will flag the content.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  In some instances, he'll even try and find the woman to alert her to what's happening. And y- y- you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a point we haven't touched upon, but there are also a lot of vigilantes out there now because they feel that a lot enough um isn't being done by law enforcement, who are taking it upon themselves to go and try and police these websites. Um, and I, I, I'm absolutely not suggesting that this is something uh that men should be doing, but I think it it also goes to show that there are men out there who may not have said something at first, but now feel compelled to do something. And that I find uh interesting.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  We've talked about kind of male violence towards women and the fact that we're not seeing it happen from women to men, but what about homosexual relationships? What about gay men? Are they kind of doing this as well?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  So are, um, when you look at Motherless, it very much is centred on uh violence towards women. Having said that, we do know uh that there are uh men uh who are, of course, um survivors as well. There were in fact a few cases of male survivors who did reach out to us after uh it was published to say that they were in coercive relationships uh and that they had, you know, been abused sexually. But I, we have never come across any kind of, you know, content that shows uh men uh being drugged and raped by other men, but that's not to say that, you know, it exists, that it doesn't exist. Uh, it just is that in our investigation, we didn't come across that type of content.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Well, it's comforting that there are men that are willing to kind of put their hand up and, you know, this guy being a mole, really.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  And feeding back, I guess that's a good news story amongst the muck that is this story. I want to change pace a bit and tell some of the victim survivors' stories, just so that listeners can get a bit more of an idea of the real impact here on the women. Can you tell me about Zoe Watts? What happened to her and how did you find interviewing her and telling her story?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  So Zoe was married to her husband for 16 years. They have four children together. And he was her childhood sweetheart. And one day after church, he comes home, makes her a cup of tea and tells her that he has been drugging her with their son's sleep medication that he's been crushing in her tea last thing at night. And he has been raping her in her sleep and he's been taking photos and videos. And Zoe's world, of course, completely collapses.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And in her words, what was so hard for her at the beginning was just to be able to wrap her head around what had happened and to be able to understand that this was abuse. Because at the start, and this is what we have seen with so many of these survivors, is that the emotional context makes it so difficult for the survivor to accept that the man she loved, the man she trusted the most, the man she has built an entire family with and future with, has become her aggressor. And in Zoe's case, at first, she thought,

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I'll be able to handle this myself, we'll separate, but I don't want the children to lose their father. I don't want him to be locked away for a long time because the children will know what their father did and they'll have a reputation and.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And it's it's just so much, it was so much for her to um take in, to digest. For her, rape was the guy who um surprises you in a parking lot. You know, it it couldn't understand that the man who she had been sleeping with um would would do this to her. And and and and could she label it as rape? She has she during our interview together, she really struggled to label it as rape. And so for Zoe, it was a long road to justice because it was thanks to her family who encouraged her to uh press charges uh that she eventually did go to the police.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Uh he was then arrested and now he is serving a uh eleven year prison sentence. But it was it was really hard for her because, you know, the stigma attached to this as well. When she used to go and do her shopping, um the neighbours would say, well, you know, it's not that bad. I mean, he is your husband. After all, it wasn't like you were raped by by a stranger. So it goes to show also the ignorance um when it comes to this type of crime. And and that's, you know, that Zoe's story, Amanda's story, Amanda Stanhope, was more complex because she was under medication. She had been taking sleeping uh tablets and he was uh raping her in her sleep.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  He was, you know, uh abusing her. And when Amanda, uh so he admitted it to Amanda and it there was a lot of coercive control in that relationship uh as well. And Amanda, when she discovered all of this, goes to the police armed with the videos. And the police say, well, this isn't really evidence because you could be pretending to be to be asleep in the videos. And I think that um is quite revealing of of how police need better training when it comes to being able to recognise drug facilitated sexual assault. Um and for Amanda.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  She had text messages from him where he apologised for what he had done the night before. With that, she was able to bring charges against him. But when I met Amanda, she was still living in the home where the abuse had happened. Amanda couldn't sleep in the bed because for her it was now become the scene of the crime. And she would sleep every night on the sofa. And that also, the bedroom becomes something that, you know, that's where we go to rest. That's where we go to, it's a restorative place. But it

• 43:15Speaker 01

  becomes this dark, scary, terrifying place for these survivors. And Amanda spoke to that, I thought, very eloquently in the piece.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  I think from watching and listening to Zoe and Amanda's stories, what I took away was, obviously, all of the emotions you've talked about, but the hurt that's involved with being abused and not knowing about it, and then finding out. And like, the betrayal of that, like, those emotions, like, it's such a different kind of crime to be talking about with with so many more complex emotions. Because it's not like someone attacked them in the street, they knew what was happening, they could kind of wrestle with it in the moment. There's so much more kind of complexity to it.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  And with Zoe, she talks about a disassociation and how long it took for her body to recover. Because in a way, the body knew, but the mind didn't. And it took Zoe a long time to be able to bring those two back together. Another survivor we speak to in the piece, Valentina, not her real name, she talks about when she saw the videos.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Feeling like she was a protagonist in a film that in a horror film. But because she has no recollection of it, no memory of it, it feels as if it almost didn't happen to her. So I think that's also a very difficult journey for the survivors is to be able to reconcile the mind and the body. You know, the body keeps the score, the body knows the abuse that it's been through. But it is what makes this crime so particularly cruel is the memory loss also associated with it that you start second guessing yourself because you, in Zoe's words, you know, how could she trust a man? How could she build

• 45:15Speaker 01

  an entire life with a man who was able to do this to her? And I think because you then you find it hard to trust yourself because you don't remember. To then be faced with the police who will maybe question what you're bringing to them, you know, re-traumatizes the survivor because they are already in a very fragile state of not being able to trust themselves because again, they have no memory of the abuse.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  After the break, we talk about why it's so difficult for these women to get a conviction.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  We know that trying to get a conviction in a rape case is hard, full stop. Is it even harder in these kinds of instances? I know we've talked about Zoe, she got a conviction, Giselle got a conviction, but I feel like this would be a very hard thing to prove.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  It is because, you know, many of these drugs, they leave the body within 12 hours. So first of all, you need to be able to know that you've been drugged, go to the hospital, try and go and get a drugs test whilst you still can. And then we're talking about cases where the men filmed it, but in so many cases, they don't. And Gemma, since our investigation was published, we have been inundated with messages from survivors too in Australia, who, you know, are telling us. I'm pretty sure this happened, but I have no videos, no photos, I never took a drugs

• 47:01Speaker 01

  test, we're separated now, but when I look back at what happened, I remember memory loss, I remember waking up with bruises that were there, you know, that I couldn't explain. And, and so it's, it's, it's a terrible puzzle for these women who are trying to put it back together. And, and, and there'll always be this element of doubt, and there's no way that they can prove it. So convictions stay, you know, incredibly hard to get, and it's a long road to justice. And with all of these survivors who have been getting in touch, a big majority of them have said, you know, I went to the police, but it was

• 47:41Speaker 01

  his word versus mine, because I just didn't have any evidence to bring forward. And, and that's why it's, you know, really hard for those survivors to move on with their lives.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  I'm curious, as a journalist, before you started working in this kind of world, you know, pre Giselle, did you have any idea that this, this was a crime, that this was happening? Because I, I feel, maybe I'm being naive here, but I, before I heard about Giselle's case, because I was so shocked by that, I didn't know that this was happening. And it's mind boggling to see how much it's happening. Were you aware that this was something in the zeitgeist before Giselle?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  I had no idea that this was such a pervasive crime. And Giselle Pellicoe was, it was an awakening. And the more I cover, you know, these spaces, these cases, the more that, you know, they seem to pop up in, in different countries. And I think the reason also that we're not speaking about it enough is because Even just, you know, the term drug facilitated sexual assault. I don't know if it is really adequate enough to describe what's going on here. In French, they have the word soumission chimique, chemical submission.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And I think that is way more descriptive and accurate because that is what the men here are trying to do. They want the women to be completely within their control, right? They want to have control over the women. They want to be, once again, submitting these women to their will. And I believe that this kind of crime, now that we're beginning to notice it, now that we're beginning to, I guess, you know, be, we're awake, we're, we're, we're, we're looking into it. We, we are covering it more.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  We're not just dismissing this as, oh, this is another case of domestic abuse. Because it is domestic abuse, but it's a very specific type of domestic abuse. And I go back to Dominique Palacot, Gisele Beniko, being the start, the beginning. And I think once you kind of have your eyes open to it, you will begin noticing these cases a lot more. And we've been speaking with UK lawmakers, in fact, to look at laws, to see, you know, MPs here are looking into, are they adequate enough? Are the laws out there fit to deal with this type of emerging crime?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Wasn't there a recent law change in the EU to kind of help? Put kind of like boundaries around what this was so that we could then lead to more convictions? Is that helping at all?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So that was all about, you know, consent and yes means yes, rather than no means no. So it really brings the consent issue first at the front of this. And I think that it's a great first step. But as you and I were just saying, Gemma. You know, proving a rape case in court does remain really difficult. And the overall conviction, you know, rate remains incredibly low. So this is a great first step. But I think it also goes to how do we better form the police? How do we better form to deal with these types of, you know, drug facilitated assault rape?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  How do we better train the medical community? A lot of the survivors, they believed that there was something wrong with them, much like Gisele Pellicco. They began having serious memory loss. Zoe thought she was, had some kind of neurological disorder. But every time they would go and visit the doctor, they would go with their husband, with their partner, who was able to then manipulate the conversation and dismiss what the partner was saying. Oh, you've been under a lot of stress lately, darling, it's probably that. Or, you know, maybe it's the pressure that you're feeling at work. And again, like if the medical community, I think, were more aware of this type of crime,

• 52:10Speaker 01

  then perhaps next time they would ask the husband to, you know, kindly leave the room and are able to ask these women better questions to be able to ascertain whether or not they are in fact being drugged. So I think, you know, great first step when it comes to saying yes means yes. But more needs to be done when tackling this specific crime.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  I think the comparison I can think of in Australia is in the last few years, we got coercive control laws. Great. However, it doesn't make it easier to prove coercive control once you're in the court. So it's like, it looks great, but then when you're actually in the system, trying to prove it with that kind of allegation, you know, there's the disconnect.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  And for a lot of these survivors like Zoe, like Giselle, once they're in that courtroom and you've got lawyers that are asking you questions like, well, you are a bit of an exhibitionist, aren't you, you know, Giselle? Or Zoe, were you someone who was into swinging? Your sex life is, is, is, is, is suddenly being looked into, you know, by, it's, it's been brought out into the public. And you're being asked questions that again are incredibly re-traumatizing. And Zoe was said, you know, if she knew how hard and how difficult and the kind of questions she was going to have to take during the trial.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  If she had known all of that, maybe she wouldn't have had the courage to go through with it. And again, anybody watching the Giselle Pellicho trial, any survivor watching that would probably leave thinking there is no way I want to put myself through that kind of, you know, scrutiny and, and the types of questions that she had to field. So, um, you know, I would add actually on to the better training that maybe we need to talk more about how these cases are handled in the courtrooms.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. I think that's something I keep coming up again and again and again. When I talk to victim survivors is, you know, the incident is horrific and then they go to court and they're re-traumatized. And it's once again horrific. So it's like, we just need to do better across the board. And that's a very sweeping statement, but it's like, no, no, no, we need to change this. Because how do we expect these women to walk into a courtroom and be completely torn apart by a cross-examination? Like you said, like, they're not going to want to do it.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  They're not going to want to do it. And bringing it back to the emotional context, the fact that a lot of these women are in relationships or married or have children. And taking the children away, for example, like that is a pressure point that I think for most women would be too much to bear. And it goes again to, you know, speaking about how cruel this crime can be. That is also a massive part of it. It's like, how can you weaponize the children? Or how can you? And this is why this crime is underreported, Gemma. Because, you know, in some cases, women will look at, look at what life will be like without the husband.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And they think, well, financially, I just won't be able to, to bear it. I'll lose the house. Um, what, how will the kids, you know, survive? Um, if there's, if now the main breadwinner has gone? And again, it just goes to show why it is so hard in some of these cases for the women to come forward and press charges because they worry about the financial aspect. They worry about keeping the children. Um, and all of these kind of circumstances come together and make them feel like there is just no road possible and that they're just going to have to handle this by themselves.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  In positive news, Giselle has changed that a bit in kind of giving survivors and victims, I guess, the fire in their belly to fight because they look at her and how strong she is. And she has become a bit of an icon in that kind of survivor world because of how incredible she is. I know that you spoke to her, uh, after this investigation and kind of showed her all the women. How did she react to that, seeing all these women coming forward after she had?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  It was a really emotional moment for Giselle Palico, uh, when I was able to share some of the messages that Zoe and Amanda had for her. I think Giselle, she's such a humble person and for her to, um, listen to how she's affected, you know, how she's impacted these women and the courage she's given them. Um, I think is, you know, it was a really big moment, uh, for her. And, and, and I will add now, you know, there's Giselle Palico out there now, but there is also Amanda and, and Zoe now, you know, since they have come forward, they started, it's been one of the most beautiful things that, that's come out of this investigation.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Is they've started a campaign together again to raise awareness and to essentially have a fund now to help women who are wanting to leave their husbands who have just discovered that they are being sexually abused, drug sexually abused by their by their partners. Um, and you know, they have been raising awareness, they have been speaking with other survivors, giving them, you know, uh, trying to help them navigate this very difficult time for a lot of the survivors. And so, you know, taking a step back and looking at what Giselle has done in terms of

• 58:01Speaker 01

  um, freeing women, you know, empowering women to come forward is such a huge step in trying to fight uh this problem because the more women speak, the more women come forward, there isn't as much room for men to hide. Um, and uh, and and just seeing, you know, all of those messages that we've been receiving on on, you know, in our social media or or over email. Um, women are ready, they're ready to now come together and speak up

• 58:42Speaker 01

  and um, waive their right to anonymity and make sure that if there are any other survivors out there, none of them want to be part of this sorority, but there is a sorority now and they're very close. Uh, you know, there's that they're they're working together and it is just such a positive thing that has come from this investigation. Uh, and I would say, you know, that's one of three things. The other, the other two is Piotr, of course, you know, being arrested and admitting to the charges. And then the third one is, yes, Motherless is back up, but all of those search terms, you know, have been banned. Uh, a quick kind of cursory look at the website shows that some of the illegal content has been taken down.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  So at least they know people are watching now, people are there, they're looking and they need to do better. But there are sadly other websites out there, Gemma, where, you know, um, it's the World War West and there's still all this content living on there and easily accessible. So it's not, there's still a lot to be done on that front.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  And I think.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  It's amazing that all these women are coming forward, but I can't keep think, I keep thinking, but what about the men? You know, it's not all men. I'm married to a man. I know lots of good men, but it is way too many men. And what do we do with this information? As women, we know that all of these men in the world are raping their wives and drugging their wives and putting content on these websites. And it's like, how do we morally grapple with the fact that this is happening in our world and our society? How do we raise our boys to not kind of contribute to this? It's a really hard kind of thing to get your head around.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  It's so hard. And I can't help but think that the porn industry, there just needs to be way more scrutiny. Because as, you know, one lawmaker was saying the other day, you can be sure that if these websites, if these porn sites, they were tutorials about how to make a bomb or, you know, how to become a terrorist, this content would be taken down in seconds. The website would be geo-blocked. We'd need to take sexual violence towards women that seriously. Because it is just this endless cycle of violence that will keep perpetuating itself.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  And the more, this is proven, we have the statistics, this is the stuff we know, the more men are exposed to this kind of extreme content that normalizes it, that desensitizes the men, the more they are likely to act upon it. Dominic Pellicoe essentially used Coco like a newspaper in which he put an ad, you know, this is what I'm doing to my wife, who would like to come and do it too? And if it wasn't for that website, there is no way he would have been able to recruit that, you know, over 70 men. So while websites argue that they are not publishers,

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  all they're doing is hosting this content and they can't be made responsible for the, you know, the illegal videos that users are uploading.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  It makes it hard when you are now grading your own homework because that's what happens. For example, in the case of motherless is that they are responsible for taking down the content and they are responsible for saying what's illegal and what's illegal. So, you know, how do we stop this problem? Well, I think, you know, laws when it comes to moderating these sites, making sure that extreme content is just not available at all because it is unlawful. Um, it it shouldn't exist anywhere. And I think that will be a great first step in trying to, you know, combat this issue.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Well, hopefully, Giselle, and now your investigation is kind of the wake up call that we need as a society, as a world, to really start taking this more seriously.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  I I hope so, and we're working on a second investigation right now. Um, where there are, you know, a ton more survivors. Um, and we also look into how hard it is for law enforcement to try and keep track of these sites, try and keep track of what's being uploaded there. And once they see maybe users sharing this kind of content, you know, they don't have endless resources to speak with men twenty four seven and try and find out where they live, who they are. It it is, it is hard um for law enforcement to keep up with these crimes. But I do hope that now men are also more aware of this, that they will reach out to one another,

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  that they will speak to one another. If if men are out there feeling like they, you know, can't be honest with men in the real world, which is why they're being pushed, you know, to these uh to this kind of dark underworld. There needs to be more communication uh between men. And we don't want this kind of content to obviously be pushed in into, you know, onto the the dark net. But at the same time, because it's so readily available, that's what makes it, you know, so consumable by the masses. So I think, you know, trying to make these platforms. Just clearing up the content, making it harder to come across it.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Having men speak to one another, having men, you know, if you see something, say something. This could, could help, but it's, it's just, it's so hard. And there'll be people who are out there who are way more eloquent on the subject matter than us. But just from where we've been sitting, what we have uncovered. If there's one thing I've taken away from this is that this is a growing phenomenon. And it is going to get worse if we don't tackle it quickly.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Thank you to Saskia for joining us on this episode today. You can find out more about Saskia's CNN investigation and her other work at the links in our show notes. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It really helps others find the show. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another true crime conversation.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

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