Speaker 1: It's a regular Sunday in twenty eighteen in Devon, England,
Speaker 1: and the Watts family have just returned home from church.
Speaker 1: Zoe's four children have disbursed to various corners of the house,
Speaker 1: and she's settling in for a day at home when
Speaker 1: her husband of sixteen years makes a confession. He's been
Speaker 1: crushing their son's sleeping medicine into her nightly tea and
Speaker 1: raping her once she passes out. He reels off a
Speaker 1: shopping list of abuses he has subjected her sleeping body to.
Speaker 1: Zoe is in shock, her entire life, her marriage, it
Speaker 1: all shatters in a single moment. He's been doing it
Speaker 1: for years, he says. Zoe starts to panic. The reality
Speaker 1: of what her husband, the man she has trusted, loved,
Speaker 1: parented alongside, confided in.
Speaker 2: What he is telling.
Speaker 1: Her is too painful to comprehend. I'm Jemma Bath and
Speaker 1: you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the
Speaker 1: world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who
Speaker 1: know the most about them. In twenty twenty four, the
Speaker 1: world learnt the name Gizelle Pelico. Between twenty eleven and
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, she was drugged and raped by her husband, Dominic,
Speaker 1: and fifty other men in the couple's home while she
Speaker 1: was unconscious. Seventy two year old Gizelle waived her right
Speaker 1: to anonymity in his trial, and we followed along as
Speaker 1: the proceedings detailed at least two hundred horrific rapes, all
Speaker 1: of them filmed. Dominic advertised his wife on a sex
Speaker 1: chat website, giving rapists instructions on what to where, where
Speaker 1: to park, how to abuse his wife, no condoms required,
Speaker 1: He'd tell them. These men were firefighters, truck drivers, nurses,
Speaker 1: their next door neighbor, men from in and around Jezelle's
Speaker 1: small village in France. The case shocked and horrified the world,
Speaker 1: but Jazelle's bravery in owning her story and her refusal
Speaker 1: to carry shame saw her become an international feminist icon,
Speaker 1: a symbol of survivor resistance. But this case, this abuse,
Speaker 1: it's not unique. In March twenty twenty six, CNN released
Speaker 1: a shocking investigation exposing a global rape academy. Thousands of
Speaker 1: men across the world in group chats, teaching each other
Speaker 1: and swapping tips on how to drug and rape their wives.
Speaker 1: On one website. They found more than twenty thousand videos
Speaker 1: of so called sleep content. They had hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of views. Saskia van Dorn is an award winning investigative
Speaker 1: journalist and CNN's Paris bureau chief. During this investigation, she
Speaker 1: talked to several victim survivors and infiltrated one of the
Speaker 1: group chats sharing rape sleep content. Saskia joins US now. Saskia,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining us on True Crime conversations. Firstly,
Speaker 1: you covered Giselle Pelico's case intimately in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: you went to her husband's trial. You've spoken to her since.
Speaker 1: What impact did telling that story and hearing those details
Speaker 1: in court have on you and your next steps journalistically?
Speaker 3: I think if there's one word that stays with me,
Speaker 3: it's scale, because I remember when I was sitting in
Speaker 3: the courthouse and Giselle Pattico's lawyer began describing the website
Speaker 3: that Dominic Pelico had used to recruit over seventy men
Speaker 3: to rape his wife, and he described it as the
Speaker 3: weapon of the crime. And that's how I think you
Speaker 3: can understand how we get to a scale of seventy
Speaker 3: men if it was not for this website, Coco Dominic
Speaker 3: Pelico would never have been able to find like minded men,
Speaker 3: men who shared the same fantasies that he had. And
Speaker 3: I think that that's what began, what made us want
Speaker 3: to look into these sorts of websites and of course
Speaker 3: porn sites where you are now consuming pawn on a
Speaker 3: scale that is massive. So I think those were kind
Speaker 3: of the link between these stories, which is the scale
Speaker 3: of the men and then the scale of the content
Speaker 3: that we discovered on this website that we went undercover on.
Speaker 1: How did you discover that there was more content beyond
Speaker 1: Dominique Pellico's kind of chattering website he was using. Was
Speaker 1: it hard to find these other platforms, this other website.
Speaker 2: It wasn't hard at all.
Speaker 3: There were websites that were advertising themselves as Coco's replacement.
Speaker 3: So men, you'd find men discussing this on Reddit chats,
Speaker 3: online forums where they would say, oh, Coco has been
Speaker 3: taken down, but you might want to head here, here
Speaker 3: and here to find the same kind of content, to
Speaker 3: find the same like minded people. And that's how we
Speaker 3: began going down this rabbit hole. And then Motherless, which
Speaker 3: is the website that we ended up going under cover on.
Speaker 3: We had also heard from these German journalists who had
Speaker 3: worked extensively on this site, and they had already brought
Speaker 3: to light a lot of what we will you know,
Speaker 3: talk about later on, I imagine sleep content.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me about what motherless looks like on
Speaker 1: the face? Like when you go onto this website, because
Speaker 1: it's not something on the dark Web, it's available just
Speaker 1: on a normal browser.
Speaker 3: It's readily available, it's not on the dark Web. You
Speaker 3: can access it super easily. And as soon as you
Speaker 3: are on the landing page, you're going to be faced
Speaker 3: with tons of videos showing, you know, different types of porn.
Speaker 2: So you're going to have porn.
Speaker 3: That is categorized as incest, porn that's categorized as teen
Speaker 3: and then you will have search terms for example, Z
Speaker 3: passed out, I check, And that's how we were able
Speaker 3: to then find discover all of this sleep content and
Speaker 3: what is sleep content? Those are videos where you're going
Speaker 3: to see women unconscious, women who are then going to
Speaker 3: be abused sexually. I mentioned the search term I check,
Speaker 3: what's that? Well that will you will see a man
Speaker 3: in the video lifting up the eyelids of the woman
Speaker 3: to show that she's completely sedated, that she's completely unconscious.
Speaker 3: They'll lift up her arm to show that her body's lifeless.
Speaker 2: And that's how.
Speaker 3: We were able to see these tens of thousands of
Speaker 3: videos of you know, women unconscious and and having men
Speaker 3: perform sex acts on them. Now I should add that
Speaker 3: since our investigation aired, the Motherless was taken offline for
Speaker 3: a week because their servers are in the Netherlands, and
Speaker 3: the Dutch opened an investigation into Motherless and I've been
Speaker 3: on it since and Motherless has cleaned up some of
Speaker 3: this content.
Speaker 2: They've banned some of those search terms.
Speaker 3: But if you were to search for, you know, women
Speaker 3: asleep in French or in Spanish, you're still going to
Speaker 3: come across that content.
Speaker 2: So it hasn't been taken off completely.
Speaker 1: And it sounds like these men just find new ways
Speaker 1: of kind of serving the content once they're figured out.
Speaker 3: Because that's the thing about Motherless is not only is
Speaker 3: it a website at porn site that has on average
Speaker 3: eighty million visits a month with its core audience in
Speaker 3: the US, but it also acts as a bit of
Speaker 3: a kind of social media. So you're going to have
Speaker 3: men who'll have profiles it'll show how long they've been
Speaker 3: on Motherless five years, ten years, fifteen years.
Speaker 2: You'll get awarded.
Speaker 3: Medals if you've been on there for extended periods of time.
Speaker 3: And then it will show the videos that you have
Speaker 3: listed on your profile. And of course the more views
Speaker 3: your videos have that you've uploaded, the more prestige you
Speaker 3: have on this website. So it's also a kind of brotherhood.
Speaker 3: You know, men are going to find each other there,
Speaker 3: they're going to befriend each other, befriend another user, and
Speaker 3: then what we discovered was that they would have links
Speaker 3: to Telegram groups or Telegram user names, and that's how
Speaker 3: I came across one man who said he was selling
Speaker 3: liquid sedative around the world and that for one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty dollars, he would send a bottle of liquid sedative.
Speaker 3: It would arrive the next day with detailed instructions as
Speaker 3: to how it would affect the woman that you were drugging.
Speaker 3: And then there was another user who had a link
Speaker 3: to a Telegram group where there were one thousand men
Speaker 3: in that group, and that was the one that we infiltrated.
Speaker 3: We created a mel persona and began exchanging with men
Speaker 3: in that group, and it was it was in real time,
Speaker 3: so you had men from across the world sharing tips.
Speaker 2: On how to drug and rape their partners.
Speaker 1: And I'm assuming the group you were in was one
Speaker 1: of many. You just happen to be in this one
Speaker 1: group with a thousand men, but we don't know how
Speaker 1: many more groups there are.
Speaker 3: Just to give you an example, German, the German journalists,
Speaker 3: so speaking about earlier, they infiltrated a group with seventy
Speaker 3: thousand no so you get this idea this is far
Speaker 3: more widespread, and that in fact Motherless was acting as
Speaker 3: a gateway, so men would find themselves maybe consuming at
Speaker 3: the beginning regular porn, then because of algorithms that favor
Speaker 3: extreme content, finding themselves on this dark corner of this site.
Speaker 3: Because I should mention that, yes, there are sixty to
Speaker 3: eighty million visits on this site per month, but that's
Speaker 3: not to say they're all they're looking at sleep content.
Speaker 3: A lot of these users would just be looking at porn.
Speaker 3: But you can see how some would arrive on the page.
Speaker 3: Start off by looking at regular porn, find themselves in
Speaker 3: this dark corner of the website looking at sleep pornography,
Speaker 3: and then find the link to a telegram group, and
Speaker 3: that's when they're exchanging in real time with men around
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 1: Sitting in that group, seeing these conversations. I know you
Speaker 1: kind of this was an investigation you did over several months.
Speaker 1: What was it like being immersed in their world, What
Speaker 1: were their conversations like, their mindset like? What did you
Speaker 1: learn about them?
Speaker 3: I think that it was more than just creating content.
Speaker 3: It was also about camaraderie, So this feeling that they
Speaker 3: were getting a thrill in the act itself, so by
Speaker 3: drugging and raping their partners, but also the dynamics surrounding it,
Speaker 3: So bringing the video back to this group, who would
Speaker 3: then go on to praise the acts of you know,
Speaker 3: the individual involved. And it also felt like there were
Speaker 3: there was this kind of you know, teacher student dynamic
Speaker 3: with some of the relationships. So you would there'd be
Speaker 3: a user who had been on Motherless for years and
Speaker 3: who would be boasting about drugging and raping their partner
Speaker 3: for a long time, and they would be sharing tips
Speaker 3: with the younger men who perhaps had never tried it,
Speaker 3: and they're therefore normalizing the entire.
Speaker 2: Idea of rape.
Speaker 3: And you could see that these younger guys who might
Speaker 3: never have thought about doing this, began to feel like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: these all these guys are doing it. They've been drugging
Speaker 3: and raping their partners for years and getting away with it,
Speaker 3: so maybe.
Speaker 2: It's not that bad.
Speaker 3: And you also got the sense that it was just
Speaker 3: the drugs were just a facilitator, and the ease with
Speaker 3: which they were able to do this to their wives,
Speaker 3: to their girlfriends, and also the tutorials that they were
Speaker 3: sharing with another how much does she weigh? Does she
Speaker 3: have a fast metabolism? Make sure you don't overdose? And
Speaker 3: that might be One of the most shocking things that
Speaker 3: we discovered was the way that women were treated as
Speaker 3: guinea pigs. And these are supposedly, in some cases, the
Speaker 3: mother of their children, women that they'd been with for ten, fifteen,
Speaker 3: twenty years.
Speaker 2: And so I think.
Speaker 3: What's so pernicious about this kind of content, these kinds
Speaker 3: of groups is how the men are desensitized to it.
Speaker 3: And the truth is Gemma we as the journalists who
Speaker 3: were in these groups, were desensitized to it as well.
Speaker 3: After a while, you know, or there's another video of
Speaker 3: one being raped, you just don't see it the same
Speaker 3: way because you're consuming vast amounts of this extreme content.
Speaker 1: I can see why you kind of labeled this as
Speaker 1: a rape academy, because that's it's exactly what it what
Speaker 1: it is. It's kind of men teaching men. It's a
Speaker 1: school for how to rapen drug your wives.
Speaker 3: And that term was used by a French MP who
Speaker 3: herself had been drugged by a senator, and when we
Speaker 3: came to her with her with our findings, she said, yeah,
Speaker 3: this seems like a school. This seems like an academy.
Speaker 3: And it is twenty four hours a day. It was
Speaker 3: in the morning, in the afternoon, and of course very
Speaker 3: much at night, and you.
Speaker 2: Felt that it was. You know, what we discovered was
Speaker 2: that it was across the world.
Speaker 3: There were men from France, the US, Canada, all over
Speaker 3: Europe and all ages. Some of them would talk about
Speaker 3: their professions, all different.
Speaker 2: Types of careers. It really was.
Speaker 3: There wasn't a type, which was also I think what
Speaker 3: was quite unnerving is that it could be anyone, could
Speaker 3: be any man out there. There really wasn't a profile
Speaker 3: that they were fitting well.
Speaker 1: I think that was one of the most shocking things
Speaker 1: that came out of Dominic Pelico's trial, and the fifty
Speaker 1: other men. They were firefighters, nurses, the next door neighbor,
Speaker 1: you know, a baker, like it was. You couldn't pick
Speaker 1: who it was going to be. And it was quite
Speaker 1: shocking that they were these normal kind of men. So
Speaker 1: you were finding the same thing that they were everyone.
Speaker 1: They were mailmen, they were police officers, they were all
Speaker 1: sorts of people, all sorts of people from all walks
Speaker 1: of life.
Speaker 3: Some had high power jobs, others were unemployed. And also,
Speaker 3: as I said, some of them were very experienced. Others
Speaker 3: you felt they just stumbled across these groups. And this
Speaker 3: goes to show why these unmoderated platforms can be so
Speaker 3: dangerous because you may be able to, you know, remove
Speaker 3: some of that problematic content, some of the illegal content
Speaker 3: once it's been flagged to you, but you can't control
Speaker 3: if there's a link that's living on a user's profile
Speaker 3: that everybody's then congregating on.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: It's too late that that you know, the horse has
Speaker 3: left and they're all now in another group, and you
Speaker 3: may be able to take off that user from your website,
Speaker 3: but if they know, motherless to be a space where.
Speaker 2: You can come and.
Speaker 3: Find men who feel the same way as you who
Speaker 3: are into the same kind of you know, criminal illegal content,
Speaker 3: then you are going to keep coming back to it.
Speaker 3: And we know with Motherless that several years ago, when
Speaker 3: the German journalists first did this investigation, they were made
Speaker 3: aware that there was this huge community on their site
Speaker 3: that into sleep porn. And yes they went and banned
Speaker 3: the words back then the search terms.
Speaker 2: But look where we are today.
Speaker 3: Lots, you know, lots of videos reappeared, these groups found
Speaker 3: each other again, so you know, the question needs to
Speaker 3: be asked, is enough being done to deter these men
Speaker 3: from creating these groups and from uploading this content.
Speaker 1: Up next, Saskia tells me about the dms she exchanged
Speaker 1: with one man in particular while working undercover on the site.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the chats you started having on the side,
Speaker 1: the dms from one particular man and how that kind
Speaker 1: of evolved.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the truth is because we were working under
Speaker 3: very you know, strict guidelines.
Speaker 2: We were there.
Speaker 3: Undercovera but we were there not never to encourage anybody else.
Speaker 2: We were there as observers.
Speaker 3: We remained journalists by just us questions in these groups,
Speaker 3: which meant that a lot of the conversations went cold
Speaker 3: because in these groups, pictures, videos of your wife, of
Speaker 3: your girlfriend, that's currency. And very quickly the men would
Speaker 3: grow suspicious of us because.
Speaker 2: We weren't sharing in a thing.
Speaker 3: We weren't, you know, relaying any stories when the experience
Speaker 3: that we'd had, we were just sitting there and listening.
Speaker 3: But there was one man, a Polish user, and he
Speaker 3: seemed content just to share content with me over DM
Speaker 3: of his wife, who he said he had drugged and raped.
Speaker 3: And I got the feeling with Puore that's the name
Speaker 3: we're giving him, it's not his real name, that he
Speaker 3: was just wanting to speak to someone else about what
Speaker 3: he had been doing to his wife, what he wanted
Speaker 3: to do to his wife, and didn't need anything in return.
Speaker 2: So I would, you know, just asking questions about why
Speaker 2: he was doing this.
Speaker 3: His answer was because he could, because this was something
Speaker 3: he found arousing when she was in this state that
Speaker 3: he had complete and utter control over her. And a
Speaker 3: crucial part of the investigation for US was proving that
Speaker 3: these men were real, that they weren't just user names,
Speaker 3: that they weren't just pseudonyms. And that's something we were
Speaker 3: able to do with because even though he wouldn't meet
Speaker 3: with our undercover persona, which is how we first began
Speaker 3: to try and.
Speaker 2: See him in real life.
Speaker 3: He lets slip that he was going to be at
Speaker 3: a party in Poland, and we traveled there, knew the
Speaker 3: restaurant where he was going to be with his wife,
Speaker 3: and I think that was one of the most stressful
Speaker 3: parts of the investigation because we I had many discussions
Speaker 3: before that moment with all of our editorial team to discuss,
Speaker 3: you know, do we confront plots, do we speak to
Speaker 3: his wife, because up until then we hadn't been able
Speaker 3: to confirm his identity, so we didn't know is this
Speaker 3: guy who he says he is?
Speaker 2: And when we were in the restaurant and he was
Speaker 2: just a few meters.
Speaker 3: Away, knowing what he had done to his wife, knowing
Speaker 3: that all of this was presumably true, it was really
Speaker 3: hard as a woman not to go to her and
Speaker 3: not to go to him. But we didn't know how
Speaker 3: he was going to react. We didn't know what he
Speaker 3: might do to her, and so with her safety in mind,
Speaker 3: we decided to pass our findings on to the police,
Speaker 3: to the Polish police, and they acted incredibly quickly. They
Speaker 3: arrested him, and he admitted to the charges that were
Speaker 3: brought against him, and he should be sentenced in a
Speaker 3: few months time.
Speaker 1: When you were observing him and his wife, were they
Speaker 1: normal Did they just look like a normal couple.
Speaker 3: It's hard not to project things onto them. But it
Speaker 3: felt to me that she looked incredibly vacant, that it
Speaker 3: was almost as if her body knew but her mind
Speaker 3: obviously didn't.
Speaker 2: And and there was this strange.
Speaker 3: Dynamic on the dance floor where you know, she would
Speaker 3: be dancing with friends and then he would come to
Speaker 3: her on the dance floor, she would go back to
Speaker 3: her table, and it felt like she was fleeing him.
Speaker 3: So for us, you know, in our role as observers,
Speaker 3: I felt that there was a kind of coldness between them.
Speaker 3: But it's hard to tell if that was, you know,
Speaker 3: something that was that was real. Maybe they just had
Speaker 3: an argument, who knows, But it was just for us
Speaker 3: so important to be able to show these guys are real.
Speaker 3: Here's one who we spoke to during the course of
Speaker 3: our investigation, and you know, now he's admitted to it.
Speaker 3: How many more men are there out there like him,
Speaker 3: where women are completely oblivious that they're being drugged and
Speaker 3: raped by their partners.
Speaker 1: Like you were saying before, with like the prevalence of this,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to go, Like where do you go?
Speaker 1: Is it the tech companies? Is it law enforcement? Is
Speaker 1: it moderation systems? Like how do we kind of clamp
Speaker 1: down on this if we are just seeing them kind
Speaker 1: of popping back up all the time.
Speaker 3: That's what makes it incredibly hard when it comes to
Speaker 3: tackling this problem.
Speaker 2: We were speaking about Coco earlier.
Speaker 3: It was brought down, and in the past few weeks
Speaker 3: a website that is called Coco Land has now re emerged.
Speaker 3: It has exactly the same interface that Coco had. It's
Speaker 3: advertising itself essentially as the same Coco, and Coco was
Speaker 3: cited in twenty two thousand criminal cases.
Speaker 2: There were murders that were being organized on Coco, there.
Speaker 3: Was child sex abuse imagery that was being shared there,
Speaker 3: and yet a website has now reappeared. So there is
Speaker 3: this issue of you bring one down, what is stopping
Speaker 3: creators owners from bringing another one, you know, into existence?
Speaker 3: And so clearly I think moderators and owners maybe you
Speaker 3: don't face enough scruciny or.
Speaker 2: You know, there aren't enough.
Speaker 3: Deterrence for them to create these new websites. But I
Speaker 3: also think it's worth mentioning that we're talking about a
Speaker 3: ninety billion dollar industry. That is how much, you know,
Speaker 3: the global porn industry is worth.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot at stake here. And we touched
Speaker 2: upon the algorithms earlier, but on a lot of the
Speaker 2: we mentioned Motherless, there are other websites where there it's
Speaker 2: this kind of sleep porn. We've come across it again.
Speaker 3: They're videos that will have on them, you know, raped
Speaker 3: women who are asleep. That's what they're selling. For eight euros.
Speaker 3: You can buy a bundle of that and you don't
Speaker 3: need an email address to access these these sites. You
Speaker 3: just land on them and that's what's being sold. And
Speaker 3: that's because, as you know, men are consuming this content
Speaker 3: and they get desensitized to it, they tend to then
Speaker 3: click on more and more extreme content. And that's where
Speaker 3: where there is an Experts will tell you this a
Speaker 3: failure in moderating this kind of content, because as soon
Speaker 3: as you've got the word rape there, you know the
Speaker 3: site should be geo blocked, brought down. You know, That's
Speaker 3: what a lot of the experts and ad advocates who've
Speaker 3: been trying to combat this problem, have been fighting for
Speaker 3: and they say that, you know, it's just what's happening
Speaker 3: in the online world. The policing of the online world
Speaker 3: just isn't in step with what's happening in the offline world,
Speaker 3: and that a lot of the behavior that we see
Speaker 3: on these porn sites, like, for example, strangulation.
Speaker 2: This is an example that I've brought up before.
Speaker 3: Twenty years ago, strangulation during sex was incredibly rare, it
Speaker 3: was niche. But since the porn industry has, you know,
Speaker 3: with the algorithms, pushed this of extreme content into the mainstream.
Speaker 2: There are.
Speaker 3: A third of women in the UK who will experience
Speaker 3: trigulation in their twenties. So it just goes to show
Speaker 3: how what we're seeing online then shapes what's happening to
Speaker 3: women in the bedroom. And so there's an argument there
Speaker 3: that the porn industry isn't reflecting our sexual desires but
Speaker 3: shaping them. Erotica, you know, has been around for decades.
Speaker 3: No one is suggesting when you listen to the experts,
Speaker 3: banning porn in its entirety, but it's extreme porn on
Speaker 3: this scale that is so readily available.
Speaker 2: That is harming men and women.
Speaker 1: But I would go nick one step further and say
Speaker 1: that regular pawn on these websites that are readily available,
Speaker 1: not motherless like all of the other porn sites that
Speaker 1: you can just land on, most of them are not
Speaker 1: showing loving, kind, gentle sex.
Speaker 2: They're showing quite violent or.
Speaker 1: Dominant and maybe they're the words that they start with,
Speaker 1: dominant sex or lots of like quite violent angles of
Speaker 1: women and stuff, and then it gets kind of grosser
Speaker 1: and more disturbing from there. So even the normal porn
Speaker 1: that is readily available to young boys to men, I
Speaker 1: would argue, is not nice sex.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's sexual violence towards women.
Speaker 3: And we saw this also whereas we haven't mentioned Epstein,
Speaker 3: but you know in the Epstein riles, we saw how
Speaker 3: they were grooming the girls by showing them porn. This
Speaker 3: is what you know, Jeffrey Epstein would like you to do.
Speaker 3: This is your homework for this evening. And I think
Speaker 3: that when we go back talking regulation, Yes, age verification
Speaker 3: has been introduced in some countries and that will stop
Speaker 3: six year olds perhaps coming across it once when they're
Speaker 3: on the iPad, But is it going to stop adolescence.
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of people aren't convinced that age
Speaker 3: verification is going to help solve the problem going after
Speaker 3: these sites. Also, the way that they have been built,
Speaker 3: the way that they're created, is done in a way
Speaker 3: where the risk is spread. So they've structured it deliberately
Speaker 3: to make it hard for law enforcement to go after them.
Speaker 3: Let's use the case of Motherless. You know that the
Speaker 3: servers are in the Netherlands, the parent company is going
Speaker 3: to be registered in another country. The owner, we think,
Speaker 3: is in the US, So you need to have an
Speaker 3: international corporation for any kind of case to be brought
Speaker 3: against them. And and that's why it makes it so
Speaker 3: hard for any kind of you know, charges to be
Speaker 3: brought against them in the long term. But I would
Speaker 3: also say, and Giselle Pellico is the first person to
Speaker 3: tell you this, that it's a.
Speaker 2: Question of education.
Speaker 3: That you know, boys from a young age need to
Speaker 3: be taught what consent is and need to be taught
Speaker 3: that women, you know, need to be respected and need
Speaker 3: to be listened to.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent.
Speaker 1: I was I was really shocked to hear the statistics.
Speaker 1: Getting back to the specifics of sleep rape content, you
Speaker 1: had figures in there. For the UK, nearly a quarter
Speaker 1: of all sexual assault victims are assaulted while asleep or unconscious.
Speaker 1: That's an enormous number. It makes me think, have you
Speaker 1: seen any figures. I haven't seen any figures for Australia
Speaker 1: or do we know more globally what those figures look like.
Speaker 3: I think it's a big issue in that there isn't
Speaker 3: enough data right now and anecdotally since looking into these cases,
Speaker 3: you start seeing instances of women being drugged and raped
Speaker 3: by their husbands kind of you know, all over I
Speaker 3: mean there are I'll give you the example of the UK.
Speaker 3: In the UK in September and October, you are going
Speaker 3: to have two cases where a man is accused of
Speaker 3: drugging and raping his wife and allegedly enlisting thirteen men
Speaker 3: to come and rape her in that September. In October,
Speaker 3: another case of a man who has been accused of
Speaker 3: drugging and raping his wife and inviting six men allegedly
Speaker 3: to come and rape her. So Dominic Pelico was not
Speaker 3: an outlier. He was the beginning. And I wonder is
Speaker 3: this a crime that is on the rise or is
Speaker 3: it that Gazelle Pelico coming out speaking telling other women,
Speaker 3: Shae must change sides, please speak up. Has this meant
Speaker 3: that women are now more prepared to come forward. It's
Speaker 3: really hard to tell because the data just isn't there.
Speaker 3: But anecdotally, having spoken to psychologists who have profiled a
Speaker 3: lot of the defendants in the Pelico trial, psychiatrists who
Speaker 3: have been speaking with a lot of men perpetrators of
Speaker 3: this type of crime, they have told me that they're
Speaker 3: seeing more cases.
Speaker 2: And I think that, you know, it's not a leap
Speaker 2: to make.
Speaker 3: To look at how ubiquitous this content is. And again
Speaker 3: this idea that a man will stumble across this will
Speaker 3: never have even thought of it, but because everyone else
Speaker 3: that he is suddenly in a telegram group is doing it,
Speaker 3: it just doesn't make it as scary. And you really
Speaker 3: got this sense going back to the telegram group that
Speaker 3: there wasn't any shame for them, like it wasn't something
Speaker 3: to be ashamed about. In fact, it was something to
Speaker 3: be praised. And to give you again to reflect how
Speaker 3: this group really was an upside down world, complete opposite
Speaker 3: to what we live in the reality we live in here.
Speaker 3: You know, Giselle Pellico is an icon. She's the person
Speaker 3: a lot of women look up to in these in
Speaker 3: this echosystem, in this kind of dark brotherhood, it's dominic
Speaker 3: Pellico who's the hero.
Speaker 2: She's the one to be emulated and to be copied.
Speaker 3: So it just gives you, you know, that juxtaposition and
Speaker 3: how these two worlds are vastly different and apart.
Speaker 2: And I think that you know, the men again who.
Speaker 3: Were speaking to each other in these groups, they found
Speaker 3: comfort in this and being friends. You know, They've got
Speaker 3: a sense that they felt here that they were completely
Speaker 3: uninhibited and that they could share their deepest, darkest secrets
Speaker 3: and wouldn't be vilified for it. Quite the opposite. They
Speaker 3: were one of them. And that feeling of belonging, I
Speaker 3: think is also something today that we see in Toxic
Speaker 3: Masculinity manisphere. Like all of these themes, these subjects they do,
Speaker 3: they are intertwined. And when we're discussing, you know, how
Speaker 3: do we tackle this problem, I think asking men how
Speaker 3: they can better help each other is also a big
Speaker 3: part of the problem of this issue.
Speaker 1: I think what makes me angry is I understand herd mentality.
Speaker 1: I understand being desenstheitized. I can kind of see, you know,
Speaker 1: how they would go down that route. But then I go,
Speaker 1: but women wouldn't be doing this. I haven't heard ale case.
Speaker 1: Have you? You're the person who ask have you heard
Speaker 1: of a case of a woman drugging and raping her
Speaker 1: husband and inviting women to come and do the same thing.
Speaker 2: I think it would be physically impossible.
Speaker 3: And no, and on these websites, at no point did
Speaker 3: I ever see a woman being violent towards a man.
Speaker 2: It was it was always the other way around.
Speaker 3: And I think that's again when we talk about how
Speaker 3: can men and women help each other, because I do
Speaker 3: think it's important for it to not become a them
Speaker 3: versus us, you know, situation of we're trying to come
Speaker 3: to some kind of find a solution, find a way
Speaker 3: to combat these spaces and this crime. It's also we
Speaker 3: need men who are in these who are on these sides.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure there are many who stumbled across this
Speaker 3: content and thought to themselves, this is horrific, this is terrible.
Speaker 3: You know, I want nothing to do with this. I'm
Speaker 3: leaving this platform. But did they say something, you know,
Speaker 3: did they flag it. There's a man that I'm speaking
Speaker 3: with at the moment who was addicted to Motherless between
Speaker 3: the ages of sixteen and twenty, and he really talks
Speaker 3: about the kind of descent into hell of the Motherless machine,
Speaker 3: how he first went on there just you know, consuming
Speaker 3: classic porn and then fell into this sleep community and
Speaker 3: managed to kind of extract himself from it when he
Speaker 3: realized just how bad it was, how violent it was.
Speaker 3: And he is now trying to help, in fact, law
Speaker 3: enforcement track down some of these guys. He will flag
Speaker 3: the account, he will flag the content. In some instances,
Speaker 3: he'll even try and find the woman to alert her
Speaker 3: to what's happening. And you know, it's a point we
Speaker 3: aren't touched upon. But there are also a lot of
Speaker 3: vigilantes out there now because they feel that a lot
Speaker 3: enough isn't being done by law enforcement, who are taking
Speaker 3: upon themselves to go and try and.
Speaker 2: Police these websites.
Speaker 3: And I'm absolutely not suggesting that this is something that
Speaker 3: men should be doing, but I think it also goes
Speaker 3: to show that there are men out there who may
Speaker 3: not have said something at first, but now feel compelled
Speaker 3: to do something, and that I find interesting.
Speaker 1: We've talked about kind of male violence towards women and
Speaker 1: the fact that we're not seeing it happen from women
Speaker 1: to men. But what about homosexual relationships? What about gaming?
Speaker 1: Are they kind of doing this as well?
Speaker 3: So are when you look at Motherless, it very much
Speaker 3: is centered on violence towards women. Having said that, we
Speaker 3: do know that there are men who are, of course
Speaker 3: survivors as well. There were, in fact, a few cases
Speaker 3: of male survivors who did reach out to us after
Speaker 3: it was published to say that they were in coercive relationships.
Speaker 2: And that they had, you know, been abuse sexually.
Speaker 3: But we have never come across any kind of you know,
Speaker 3: content that shows men being drugged and raped by other men.
Speaker 3: But that's not to say that you know it exists,
Speaker 3: that it doesn't exist. It just is that in our
Speaker 3: investigation we didn't come across that type of content.
Speaker 1: Well, it's comforting that there are men that are willing
Speaker 1: to kind of put their hand up and you know,
Speaker 1: this guy being a mole really and feeding back. I
Speaker 1: guess that's a good news story amongst the muck that
Speaker 1: is this story. I want to change pace a bit
Speaker 1: and tell some of the victim survivors' stories, just so
Speaker 1: that listeners can get a bit more of an idea
Speaker 1: of the real impact here on the women. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me about Zoe Watt's what happened to her? And
Speaker 1: how did you find interviewing her and telling her story?
Speaker 3: So, Zoe was married to her husband for sixteen years.
Speaker 3: They have four children together, and he was a childhood sweetheart.
Speaker 2: And one day.
Speaker 3: After church, he comes home, makes her a cup of
Speaker 3: tea and tells her that he has been drugging her
Speaker 3: with their son's sleep medication, that he's been crushing in
Speaker 3: her tea last thing at night, and he has been
Speaker 3: raping her in her seat, and he's been taking photos
Speaker 3: and videos. And Zoe's world, of course, completely collapses, and
Speaker 3: in her words, what was so hard for her at
Speaker 3: the beginning was just to be able to wrap her
Speaker 3: head around what had happened and to be able to
Speaker 3: understand and that this was abuse, because at the start,
Speaker 3: and this is what we have seen with so many
Speaker 3: of these survivors, is that the emotional context makes it
Speaker 3: so difficult for the survivor to accept that the man
Speaker 3: she loved, the man she trusted the most, the man
Speaker 3: she has built an entire family within future with, has
Speaker 3: become her aggressor. And in Zoe's case, at first she thought,
Speaker 3: I'll be able to handle this myself, will separate, but
Speaker 3: I don't want the children to lose their father. I
Speaker 3: don't want him to be locked away for a long
Speaker 3: time because the children will know what their father did
Speaker 3: and they'll have a reputation.
Speaker 2: And it's just so much.
Speaker 3: It was so much for her to take in to digest.
Speaker 3: For her, rape was the guy who rises you in
Speaker 3: a parking lot. You know, she couldn't understand that the
Speaker 3: man who she had been sleeping with would do this to.
Speaker 2: Her, and and and could she label it as rape?
Speaker 3: She has during our interview together, she really struggled to
Speaker 3: label it as rape. And so for Zoe it was
Speaker 3: a long road to justice because it was thanks to
Speaker 3: her family who encouraged her to press charges that she
Speaker 3: eventually did go to the police. He was then arrested
Speaker 3: and now he's serving a eleven year prison sentence. But
Speaker 3: it was it was really hard for her because you know,
Speaker 3: the stigma attached to this as well. When she used
Speaker 3: to go and do her shopping, the neighbors would say, well,
Speaker 3: you know, it's not that bad. I mean, he is
Speaker 3: your husband, after all. It wasn't like you were rape
Speaker 3: by a stranger. So it goes to show also the
Speaker 3: ignorance when it comes to this type of and and
Speaker 3: that's you know that Zoe's story. Amanda's story, Amanda stand
Speaker 3: her was more complex because she was under medication, she
Speaker 3: had been taking sleeping tablets, and he was raping her
Speaker 3: in her sleep. He was, you know, abusing her and
Speaker 3: when Amanda so he admitted it to Amanda, and there
Speaker 3: was a lot of coacsive control in that relationship as well.
Speaker 3: And Amanda, when she discovered all of this, goes to
Speaker 3: the police, armed with the videos and the police say, well,
Speaker 3: this isn't really evidence because you could be pretending to
Speaker 3: be to.
Speaker 2: Be asleep in the videos.
Speaker 3: And I think that is quite revealing of how police
Speaker 3: need better training when it comes to being able to
Speaker 3: recognize drug facilitated sexual assault. And for Amanda, she had
Speaker 3: text messages from him where he apologized for what he
Speaker 3: had done the night before. With that, she was able
Speaker 3: to bring charges against him. But when I met Amanda,
Speaker 3: she was still living in the home where the abuse
Speaker 3: had happened. Amanda couldn't sleep in the bed because for
Speaker 3: her it was now become the scene of the crime,
Speaker 3: and she would sleep every night on the sofa, and
Speaker 3: that also the bedroom becomes something that you know, that's
Speaker 3: where we go to rest, that's where we go to
Speaker 3: it's a restorative place, but it becomes this dark, scary,
Speaker 3: terrifying place for these survivors.
Speaker 2: And Amanda spoke to that, I thought very eloquently in
Speaker 2: the piece.
Speaker 1: I think from watching and listening to Zoe and Amanda's stories,
Speaker 1: what I took away was obviously all the emotions you've
Speaker 1: talked about, but the hurt that's involved with being abused
Speaker 1: and not knowing about it and then finding out and
Speaker 1: like the betrayal of that, Like those emotions, Like it's
Speaker 1: such a different kind of crime to be talking about,
Speaker 1: with so many more complex emotions, because it's not like
Speaker 1: someone attacked them in the street, they knew what was happening,
Speaker 1: they could kind of wrestle with them in the moment.
Speaker 1: There's so much more kind of complexity to it.
Speaker 3: And with Zoe, she talks about a disassociation and how
Speaker 3: long it took for her body to recover because in
Speaker 3: a way, the body knew but the mind didn't, and
Speaker 3: it took Zoe a long time to be able to
Speaker 3: bring those two back together. Another survivor we speak to
Speaker 3: in the piece, Valentina, not her real name. She talks
Speaker 3: about when she saw the videos, feeling like she was
Speaker 3: a protagonist in a film, that in a horror film,
Speaker 3: but because she has no recollection of it, no memory
Speaker 3: of it, it feels as if it almost didn't happen
Speaker 3: to her. So I think that's also a very difficult
Speaker 3: journey for the survivors, is to be able to reconcile
Speaker 3: the mind and the body. You know, the body keeps
Speaker 3: the score or the body knows the abuse that it's
Speaker 3: been through. But it is what makes this crime so
Speaker 3: particularly cruel is the memory loss also associated with it
Speaker 3: that you start second guessing yourself because you, in Zoe's words,
Speaker 3: you know, how could she trust a man? How could
Speaker 3: she build an entire life with a man who was
Speaker 3: able to do this to her? And I think because
Speaker 3: you then you find it hard to trust yourself because
Speaker 3: you don't remember to then be faced with the police
Speaker 3: who will maybe question what you're bringing to them, you know,
Speaker 3: retraumatizers the survivor, because they are already in a very
Speaker 3: fragile state of not being able to trust themselves because
Speaker 3: again they have no memory of the abuse.
Speaker 1: After the break we talk about why it's so difficult
Speaker 1: for these women to get a conviction. We know that
Speaker 1: trying to get a conviction in a rape case is hard,
Speaker 1: full stop. Is it even harder in these kinds of instances.
Speaker 1: I know we've talked about zoe Is she got a conviction,
Speaker 1: Giselle got a conviction. But I feel like this would
Speaker 1: be a very hard thing to prove.
Speaker 3: It is because you know, many of these drugs they
Speaker 3: leave the body within twelve hours, So first of all,
Speaker 3: you need to be able to know that you've been drugged.
Speaker 3: Go to the hospital, try and go and get a
Speaker 3: drugs test whilst you still can. And then we're talking
Speaker 3: about cases where the men filmed it, but in so
Speaker 3: many cases they don't. And Jemma, since our investigation was
Speaker 3: published aired, we have been inundated with messages from survivors
Speaker 3: too in Australia who you know, are telling us I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure this has happened, but I have no videos,
Speaker 3: no photos, I never.
Speaker 2: Took a drugs test. Were separated now.
Speaker 3: But when I look back at what happened, I remember
Speaker 3: memory loss, I remember waking up with bruises that were there,
Speaker 3: you know, that I couldn't explain. And so it's a
Speaker 3: terrible puzzle for these women who are trying to put
Speaker 3: it back together, and they'll always be this element of
Speaker 3: doubt and there's no way that they can prove it.
Speaker 3: So conviction state in incredibly hard to get and it's
Speaker 3: a long road to justice. And with all of these
Speaker 3: survivors who have been getting in touch, big majority of
Speaker 3: them have said, you know, I went to the police,
Speaker 3: but it was his word versus mine, because I just
Speaker 3: didn't have any evidence to bring forward. And and that's
Speaker 3: why it's, you know, really hard for those survivors to
Speaker 3: move on with their lives.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, as a journalist, before you started working in
Speaker 1: this kind of world, you know, pre Gizelle, did you
Speaker 1: have any idea that this this was a crime, that
Speaker 1: this was happening. Because I feel maybe I'm being naive here,
Speaker 1: but I before I heard about Jizelle's case, because I
Speaker 1: was so shocked by that, I didn't know that this
Speaker 1: was happening. And it's mind boggling to see how much
Speaker 1: it's happening. Were you aware that this was something in
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist before Gizelle.
Speaker 3: I had no idea that this was such a pervasive crime,
Speaker 3: and Gazelle Petico was it was an awakening. And the
Speaker 3: more I cover, you know, thiss these cases, the more
Speaker 3: their you know, they seem to pop up in different countries.
Speaker 3: And I think the reason also that we're not speaking
Speaker 3: about it enough is because even just you know, the
Speaker 3: term drug facilitated sexual assault, I don't know if it is.
Speaker 2: Really adequate enough to describe what's going on here.
Speaker 3: In French, they have the word sawmi so shimik chemical submission,
Speaker 3: and I think that is way more descriptive and accurate
Speaker 3: because that is what the men here are trying to do.
Speaker 3: They want the women to be completely within their control, right,
Speaker 3: they want to have control over the women. They want
Speaker 3: to be once again submitting these women to their will.
Speaker 2: And I believe that this.
Speaker 3: Kind of crime now that we're beginning to notice it,
Speaker 3: Now that we're beginning to I guess.
Speaker 2: You know, we're awake where where we're.
Speaker 3: Looking into it, we are covering it more. We're not
Speaker 3: just dismissing this as, oh, this is another case of
Speaker 3: domestic abuse, because it is domestic abuse, but it's a
Speaker 3: very specific.
Speaker 2: Type of domestic abuse.
Speaker 3: And I go back to dominate perlicosis Albeliko being the
Speaker 3: start the beginning, and I think once you kind of
Speaker 3: have your eyes open to it, you will begin noticing
Speaker 3: these cases a lot more. And we've been speaking with
Speaker 3: UK lawmakers in fact to look at laws to see,
Speaker 3: you know, and piece here are looking into are they
Speaker 3: adequate enough? Are the laws out there fit to deal
Speaker 3: with this type of emerging crime.
Speaker 2: Wasn't there a.
Speaker 1: Recent law change in the EU to kind of help
Speaker 1: put kind of like boundaries around what this was so
Speaker 1: that we could then.
Speaker 2: Lead to more convictions. Is that helping at all? Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: So that was all about you know, consent and yes
Speaker 3: means yes rather than no means no, So it really
Speaker 3: brings the consent issue first at the front of this
Speaker 3: and I think that it's a great first step. But
Speaker 3: as you and I were just saying, Gemma, you know,
Speaker 3: proving a rape case in court does remain really difficult
Speaker 3: and the overall conviction you know.
Speaker 2: Rate remains incredibly low.
Speaker 3: So this is a great first step, but I think
Speaker 3: it also goes to how do we better form the police,
Speaker 3: How do we better form to deal with these types
Speaker 3: of you know, drug facilitated assault rape, How do we
Speaker 3: better train the medical community. A lot of the survivors,
Speaker 3: they believed that there was something wrong with them, much
Speaker 3: like Dozelle Pelico. They began having serious memory loss. Zoe
Speaker 3: thought she has some kind of neurological disorder. But every
Speaker 3: time they would go and visit the doctor, they would
Speaker 3: go with their husband, with their partner, who was able
Speaker 3: to then manipulate the conversation and dismiss what the partner
Speaker 3: was saying, Oh, you've been under a lot of stress, safetly, darling,
Speaker 3: it's probably that, or you know, maybe it's the pressure
Speaker 3: that you're feeling at work. And again, like if the
Speaker 3: medical community, I think we're more aware of this type
Speaker 3: of crime that perhaps next time they would ask the
Speaker 3: husband to you know, kindly leave the room and are
Speaker 3: able to ask these women better questions to be able
Speaker 3: to ascertain whether or not they are in fact being drugged.
Speaker 3: So I think, you know, quaite first step when it
Speaker 3: comes to saying yes means yes.
Speaker 2: But more needs to be done when tackling this specific I.
Speaker 1: Think the comparison I can think of in Australia is
Speaker 1: in the last few years we got coercive control laws. Great,
Speaker 1: However it doesn't make it easier to prove coercive control
Speaker 1: once you're in the court, so it's like it looked great,
Speaker 1: but then when you're actually in the system trying to
Speaker 1: prove it with that kind of allegation, you know, there's
Speaker 1: the disconnect.
Speaker 3: And for a lot of these survivors, like Zoe, like Gazelle,
Speaker 3: once set in that courtroom and you've got lawyers that
Speaker 3: are asking you questions like, well, you are a bit
Speaker 3: of an exhibitionist, aren't you?
Speaker 2: You know, Gazelle or.
Speaker 3: Zoe will use someone who was into swinging. Your sex
Speaker 3: life is suddenly being looked into, you know, by its
Speaker 3: being brought out into the public, and you're being asked
Speaker 3: questions that again are incredibly re traumatizing. And Zoe said,
Speaker 3: you know, if she knew how hard and how difficult
Speaker 3: and the kind of question she was going to have
Speaker 3: to take during the trial, if she had known all
Speaker 3: of that, maybe she wouldn't.
Speaker 2: Have had the courage to go through with it. And again,
Speaker 2: anybody watching.
Speaker 3: The Shehazelle Pellico trial, any survivor watching that would probably
Speaker 3: leave thinking, there is no way I want to put
Speaker 3: myself through that kind of you know, scrutiny and the
Speaker 3: types of questions that she had to feeld. So you know,
Speaker 3: I would add, actually onto the better training, that maybe
Speaker 3: we need to talk more about how these cases are
Speaker 3: handled in the courtrooms.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. I think that's something I keep coming
Speaker 1: up again and again and again when I talk to
Speaker 1: victim survivors is you know, the incident is horrific, and
Speaker 1: then they go to court and they're very traumatized and
Speaker 1: it's once again horrific. So it's like, we just need
Speaker 1: to do better across the board. And that's a very
Speaker 1: sweeping statement, but it's like, no, no, no, we need to
Speaker 1: change this because how do we expect these women to
Speaker 1: walk into a courtroom and be completely torn apart by
Speaker 1: a cross examination? Like you said, like, they're not going
Speaker 1: to want to do it.
Speaker 2: They're not going to want to do it. And bringing
Speaker 2: it back to.
Speaker 3: The emotional context, the fact that a lot of these
Speaker 3: women are in relationships or married or have children, and
Speaker 3: taking the children away for example, like that is a
Speaker 3: pressure point that I think for most women would be
Speaker 3: too much to bear. And it goes again to you know,
Speaker 3: speaking about how cruel this crime can be.
Speaker 2: That is also a massive part.
Speaker 3: Of it is like how can you weaponize the children
Speaker 3: or how can you? And this is why this crime
Speaker 3: is under reported, Jemma, because you know, in some cases
Speaker 3: women will look at what life will be like without
Speaker 3: the husband and they think, well, financially, I just won't
Speaker 3: be able to bear it.
Speaker 2: I'll lose the house.
Speaker 3: How the kids, you know, survive if now the main
Speaker 3: breadwinner has gone.
Speaker 2: And again it.
Speaker 3: Just goes to show why it is so hard in
Speaker 3: some of these cases for the women to come forward
Speaker 3: and press charges because they worry about the financial aspect,
Speaker 3: they worry about keeping the children, and all of these
Speaker 3: kind of circumstances come together and make them feel like
Speaker 3: there is just no road possible and that they're just
Speaker 3: going to have to handle this by themselves.
Speaker 1: In positive news, Giselle has changed that a bit in
Speaker 1: kind of giving survivors and victims, I guess the fire
Speaker 1: and their belly to fight because they look at her
Speaker 1: and how strong she is, and she has become a
Speaker 1: bit of an icon in that kind of survivor world
Speaker 1: because of how incredible she is. I know that you
Speaker 1: spoke to her after this investigation and kind of showed
Speaker 1: her all the women.
Speaker 2: How did she react to that?
Speaker 1: Seeing all these women coming forward after she had.
Speaker 3: It was a really emotional moment for Gazelle Palico when
Speaker 3: I was able to share some of the messages that
Speaker 3: Zoe and Amanda had for her. I think Gazelle, she's
Speaker 3: such a humble person, and for her to listen to
Speaker 3: how she's affected, you know, how she's impacted these women
Speaker 3: and the courage she's given them, I think is you know,
Speaker 3: it was a really big moment for her. And I
Speaker 3: will add now you know there's Jozelle Pelico out there now,
Speaker 3: but there is also Amanda and Zoe now you know,
Speaker 3: since they have come forward, they started it's been one
Speaker 3: of the most beautiful things has come out of this
Speaker 3: investigation is they've started a campaign together again to raise
Speaker 3: awareness and to essentially have a fund now to help
Speaker 3: women who are wanting to leave their husbands who have
Speaker 3: just discovered that they've been sexually abused drugs, sexually abused
Speaker 3: by the by their partners. And you know, they have
Speaker 3: been raising awareness, they have been speaking with other survivors,
Speaker 3: giving them, you know, trying to help them navigate this
Speaker 3: very difficult time for a lot of the survivors and
Speaker 3: so you know, taking a step back and looking at
Speaker 3: what Chazelle has done in terms of freeing women, you know,
Speaker 3: empowering women to come forward is such a huge step
Speaker 3: in trying to fight this problem because the more women speak,
Speaker 3: the more women come forward, there isn't as much room for.
Speaker 2: Men to hide.
Speaker 3: And and just seeing you know, all of those messages
Speaker 3: that we've been receiving on on you know, in our social.
Speaker 2: Media or over email, women are ready.
Speaker 3: They're ready to now come together and speak up and
Speaker 3: waive their right to anonymity and make sure that if
Speaker 3: there are any other survivors out there, none of them
Speaker 3: wanted to be part of the sorority, but there is
Speaker 3: a sorority now and they're very close. Uh, you know,
Speaker 3: there's that they're working together, and it is just such
Speaker 3: a positive thing that has come from this investigation.
Speaker 2: And I would say, you know, that's one of three things.
Speaker 3: The other two is piuts are of course, you know,
Speaker 3: being arrested and admitting.
Speaker 2: To the charges.
Speaker 3: And then the third one is yes, motherless is back up.
Speaker 3: But all of those search terms you know, have been banned.
Speaker 3: A quick kind of cursory look at the website shows
Speaker 3: that some of the illegal content has been taken down.
Speaker 2: So at least they know people are watching.
Speaker 3: Now, people are are there, they're looking, and they need
Speaker 3: to do better. But there are sad other websites out there, Gemma,
Speaker 3: where you know, it's the world Wild Wist, and there's
Speaker 3: still all this content living on there and easily accessible.
Speaker 3: So it's not There's still a lot to be done
Speaker 3: on that front.
Speaker 2: And I think.
Speaker 1: It's amazing that all these women are coming forward, but
Speaker 1: I can't keep thinking. I keep thinking, but what about
Speaker 1: the men? You know, it's not all men. I'm married
Speaker 1: to a man. I know lots of good men, but
Speaker 1: it is way too many men. And what do we
Speaker 1: do with this information? As women? We know that all
Speaker 1: of these men in the world are raping their wives
Speaker 1: and drugging their wives and putting content on these websites.
Speaker 1: And it's like, how do we morally grapple with the
Speaker 1: fact that this is happening in our world and our society.
Speaker 1: How do we raise our boys to not kind.
Speaker 2: Of contribute to this.
Speaker 1: It's a really hard kind of thing to get your
Speaker 1: head around.
Speaker 3: It's so hard, and I can't help but think that
Speaker 3: the porn industry that just needs to be way more
Speaker 3: scrutiny because as you know, one lawmaker was saying the
Speaker 3: other day, you can be sure that if these websites,
Speaker 3: if these porn sites, they were tutorials about how to
Speaker 3: make a bomb or you know, how to become a terrorist,
Speaker 3: this content would be taken down in seconds.
Speaker 2: The website would be geo blocked.
Speaker 3: We need to take sexual violence towards women that seriously,
Speaker 3: because it is just this endless cycle of violence that
Speaker 3: will keep perpetuating itself. And the more this has proven,
Speaker 3: we have the statistics, this is the stuff we know.
Speaker 3: The more men are exposed to this kind of extreme
Speaker 3: content that normalizes it, that desensitizes the men, the more
Speaker 3: they are likely to act upon it. Dominic Pellico essentially
Speaker 3: used cocoa like a a newspaper in which he put
Speaker 3: an ad you know, this is what I'm doing to
Speaker 3: my wife, who would like to come and do it too.
Speaker 3: And if it wasn't for that website, there is no
Speaker 3: way he would have been able to recruit that, you know,
Speaker 3: over seventy men. So while websites argue that they are
Speaker 3: not publishers, all they're doing is hosting this content and
Speaker 3: they can't be made responsible for the you know, the
Speaker 3: illegal videos that users are uploading. It makes it hard
Speaker 3: when you are now grading your own homework, because that's
Speaker 3: what happens, for example, in the case of Motherlis is
Speaker 3: that they are responsible for taking down the content, and
Speaker 3: they are responsible for saying what's illegal and what's illegal. So,
Speaker 3: you know, how do we stop this problem? Well, I
Speaker 3: think you know, laws when it comes to moderating these sites,
Speaker 3: making sure that extreme content is just not available at
Speaker 3: all because it is unlawful. It shouldn't exist anywhere, and
Speaker 3: I think that will be a great first step in
Speaker 3: trying to you know, combat this issue.
Speaker 1: Well hopefully, Giselle, And now your investigation is kind of
Speaker 1: the wake up call that we need as a society,
Speaker 1: as a world to really start taking this more seriously.
Speaker 2: I hope so. And we're working on a second investigation
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 3: Where there are you know, ton more survivors, and we
Speaker 3: also look into how hard it is for law enforcement
Speaker 3: to try and keep track of these sides, try and
Speaker 3: keep track of what's being uploaded there and once they
Speaker 3: see maybe users sharing this kind of content, you know,
Speaker 3: they don't have endless resources to speak with men twenty
Speaker 3: four seven and try and find out where they live, who.
Speaker 2: They are it is. It is hard for law.
Speaker 3: Enforcement to keep up with these crimes. But I do
Speaker 3: hope that now men are also more aware of this,
Speaker 3: that they will reach out to one another, that they
Speaker 3: will speak to one another.
Speaker 2: If men are.
Speaker 3: Out there feeling like they you know, can't be honest
Speaker 3: with men in the real world, which is why they're
Speaker 3: being pushed, you know, to these to this kind of
Speaker 3: dark underworld. There needs to be more communication between men,
Speaker 3: and we don't want this kind of content to obviously
Speaker 3: be pushed into you know, onto the dark neck. But
Speaker 3: at the same time, because it's so readily available, that's
Speaker 3: what makes it, you know, so consumable by the masses.
Speaker 3: So I think, you know, trying to make these platforms
Speaker 3: just clearing up the content, making it harder to come
Speaker 3: across it. Having men speak to one another, having men
Speaker 3: you know, if you see something, say something, this could
Speaker 3: could help.
Speaker 2: But it's it's just it's so hard, and.
Speaker 3: There'll be people who are out there who are way
Speaker 3: more eloquent on the subject matter than us. But just
Speaker 3: from where we've been sitting, what we have uncovered, if
Speaker 3: there's one thing I've taken away from this is that
Speaker 3: this is a growing phenomenon, and it is going to
Speaker 3: get worse if we don't tackle it quickly.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Saskia for joining us on this episode today.
Speaker 1: You can find out more about Saskia's CNN investigation and
Speaker 1: her other work at the links in our show notes.
Speaker 1: If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating
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