Michael Abrahams | Exposing a ‘rape academy’

In September 2020, French police arrested a man named Dominique Pelicot for secretly taking photographs beneath women’s clothing (upskirting) in a supermarket. Unfortunately, that was just the tip of his enormous iceberg of depravity.

Investigations following his arrest led to the discovery of an archive of over 20,000 images, including videos, of his unconscious wife, Gisèle, being raped by him and other men, mostly in the couple’s home in Mazan. Investigations revealed that between 2011 and 2020, while drugged unconscious by her husband, Gisèle Pelicot was raped over 200 times by 72 men.

The story attracted international media attention in September 2024 when Gisèle waived her right to anonymity and requested an open trial, stating that “shame must change sides”. Dominique Pelicot and 50 co-defendants were found guilty of various charges, with Pelicot convicted of aggravated rape and given the maximum twenty year sentence.

Pelicot recruited his accomplices via a chatroom chillingly titled “Without Her Knowledge” that was linked to a dating website called Coco, which has since been shut down. The Pelicot case gave the world an introduction to the world of internet-enabled sexual abuse of women. There are dark and ominous crevices of the internet, technology-based ecosystems that harbour spaces where men hide behind anonymous usernames and engage others in encrypted chats where sexual violence against women is normalised, where the acts are discussed, encouraged, enabled and arranged.

Recently, a CNN investigation revealed even more about this sordid world by uncovering a virtual “rape academy”, a porn site, Motherless, that contained more than 20,000 videos of “sleep” content, which are videos shared by men who filmed themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show they are sleeping or sedated, and then raping them. The clips were categorised using descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck. The website, whose core audience is in the United States and describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever”, had approximately 62 million visits in February alone. However, the legality of some material posted there is highly questionable.

INFILTRATED

CNN journalists Saskya Vandoorne, Niamh Kennedy and Kara Fox infiltrated a private Telegram group named “Zzz” that was linked to the website and had nearly 1,000 members. Men in the group shared stories about drugging and raping their wives and partners, and shared videos of the acts. They also gave advice to other men on how to sedate their partners, including providing names of drugs, their dosages and how to procure and administer them.

In the group, the journalists met a Polish man using the pseudonym “Piotr” who boasted about drugging his wife to perform nonconsensual sex acts with her and shared images of the abuse. And they encountered others from across the globe. There was a man from West Africa who shared a clip from a previous livestream, in which a woman, whom he said was his sleeping wife, could be heard snoring as he climbed on top of her. Some men were profiting financially from the abuse. One based in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on the North African coast, claimed to be running a business selling and dispatching “sleeping liquids” to any address in the world. He said the liquid was tasteless and odourless and that “Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.” Some users advertised livestreams showing the abuse of drugged women in real time, and charged for the views, with cryptocurrency the preferred means of payment.

The journalists also spoke with survivors. One woman in Devon, England, learned that her husband of 16 years had been crushing her son’s sleeping medicine into her tea and raping her while she was passed out when he confessed to her one Sunday after they returned home from church. Another woman, from Wigan in northwest England, recalled often falling asleep without remembering how, and waking up with bruises on her body and in different clothes. After awakening up a few times to her partner violently raping her, she asked him to stop, but he gaslit her, denying that the acts took place, and telling her that she was on too much medication, was imagining things and was “mental” and “crazy”. A woman living in northern Italy discovered videos that her husband of 20 years had filmed, showing him abusing her after he had drugged her with alcohol.

Since the investigation, the “sleep” category has been removed from the website, and the “Zzz” Telegram group has disappeared. The journalists travelled to Poland, where they secretly identified Piotr at a party dancing with his wife, and reported him to the police, who reportedly arrested him and charged him with aggravated rape.

To be betrayed in this extraordinarily perverted and dehumanising way by your spouse, especially one who took a vow to be your life partner, is diabolical. This story particularly disturbs me because, as a gynaecologist, I sedate women on a regular basis for a variety of procedures. I know what it feels like to stand over someone who is in an alerted state of consciousness but is comfortable being so in your presence because they trust you not to harm them during such a vulnerable phase. To violate that trust is a heinous act that should be vociferously and unequivocally condemned, and its perpetrators harshly punished.

The Zzz chat group may no longer exist, but others are undoubtedly in operation as, apparently, raping your drugged spouse and sharing videos of the rape is a thing. Women need men as allies. It is not enough for us to refrain from participating in abuse. Silence only serves to enable such atrocities. We must call out and disassociate from the men who do abuse, and raise our boys to be respectful while setting appropriate examples for them. We owe it to the women among us.

Michael Abrahams is an obstetrician and gynaecologist, social commentator, and human-rights advocate. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and michabe_1999@hotmail.com, or follow him on X , formerly Twitter, @mikeyabrahams