After the Gisèle Pélicot Trial, I Found She Was Far From Alone

This article contains references to rape and sexual assault.

When Gisèle Pélicot first chose to denounce the crimes of her ex-husband Dominique, the world was horrified. People around the world were incredulous that a man could perpetuate a campaign of drugging and raping his wife without her knowledge, and even more sickened that dozens of men joined him in his crimes.

But as Saskya Vandoorne, CNN’s Paris bureau chief, learned, he’s far from alone.

Vandoorne recently released an explosive investigative report into online “rape academies,” where men from around the world come together to plan and share footage of themselves drugging and raping their female partners. By infiltrating these groups for months, Vandoorne was able to shine a light not only on the prevalence of these types of crimes, but also on the forces in our society that allow this to continue.

Below, Vandoorne shares what inspired her to investigate these internet communities hidden in plain sight, and what every woman needs to know about this type of gender-based violence. This story has been lightly edited and condensed for readability.

It all started with the trial for gang rape of Gisèle Pélicot. I was present inside the courtroom, so the trial took on a special meaning for me. On the final day of the trial, his lawyer, Antoine Camus, began arguing that although all 51 defendants had been found guilty, the murder weapon – Coco – had not been brought to trial.

Coco was the website used by Dominic Pélicot to recruit all the men [the chatroom-style website was shut down by French authorities in June 2024 after an 18-month investigation linked it to several crimes]. Once the trial was over, I wanted to see if anything had replaced Coco. It started as a dating site and then turned into this very dark corner of the internet where a lot of nefarious activity was happening.

My colleagues Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy and I went on CNN and explained that we needed to infiltrate these spaces if we wanted men to speak openly to us, and they said yes. What was terrifying was that I knew it wasn’t going to be that difficult. Coco wasn’t on the dark web, and I imagined many of the websites that replaced it wouldn’t be either. Just do a Google search for “Coco website replacement” to reveal one that had taken its place. There were guys saying things like, “Isn’t it sad that Coco got eliminated?” Please join us here to continue the conversation. » All these guys were talking about sharing photos of their girlfriends and wives and what they wanted to do to them. The way they talked about them, objectified them, dehumanized them. On this website we learned about Motherless, the porn site we ended up going to.

We wanted to access these websites, but we knew the only way to have open conversations would be to create a fake identity, a male persona. We had to be very careful never to encourage anyone there. We were undercover, but we remained journalists in that we only asked questions. We presented ourselves as a very curious man who wanted to understand, to know what these guys were doing. So our questions always seemed very innocent. “What do you do? How do you do it? How long have you been doing it?” We were subject to very strict ethical guidelines, and images and videos are commonplace on these platforms. Many men exchange videos and photos of their wives. Of course, we could never do that. So we found that many of our conversations could only go so far; Ultimately, users didn’t trust us.