The Online Rape Academy

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Right now, nearly a thousand men are meeting in a private Telegram group called Zzz, trading dosages, livestream links, and mail-order addresses for a 175-dollar sleeping liquid designed to erase their wives’ ability to resist or remember being raped. CNN’s months-long undercover investigation, published last week, proves that the ecosystem Dominique Pelicot used to recruit 72 men to rape his unconscious wife did not die when French authorities shut down the Coco website. It migrated, multiplied, and turned into a working commercial academy operating on mainstream platforms under the shield of outdated US internet law. What you are about to read names the men, the drugs, the platforms, the prosecutors, and the four main legal reforms that can still stop this.

There are nearly a thousand men in a private chat right now teaching each other how to drug and rape their wives, and get away with it.

Read that sentence again.

Not a cult from a Netflix docuseries. Not a dark web rumor. An active community on a mainstream messaging app, trading dosages, videos, livestream links, and shipping addresses for “sleeping liquid” that goes anywhere in the world for $175.

CNN’s months-long undercover investigation was brought to my attention by my wife and adult daughter (both strong women and excellent lawyers). It was published March 26, 2026, needs the attention of everyone, and you need to understand exactly what it proves before the story gets buried under the next news cycle.¹

Here is what nobody told you about the Pelicot verdict.

When Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to twenty years in Avignon in December 2024 for orchestrating the serial rape of his then-wife Gisèle over nearly a decade, the public mood treated the case as an ending. A monstrous man caught. A brave woman honored. A chapter closed.

But here’s the thing. The chapter did not close. The chapter multiplied.

The French website Pelicot used to recruit the men who raped his unconscious wife was called Coco. Its chatroom carried the name À son insu, meaning Without Her Knowledge. French authorities took Coco offline in June 2024 as part of a coordinated anti-organized-crime operation. Prosecutors say Coco was linked to more than 23,000 judicial proceedings involving more than 480 identified victims, and authorities seized over five million euros across four European countries.

In January 2025, the site’s founder Isaac Steidl was arrested in Paris and charged on eight counts, including aggravated pimping, aggravated money laundering, complicity in drug trafficking, distribution of child sexual abuse material, corruption of minors, and administering an online platform to facilitate illicit transactions by an organized gang. He denies the charges. He awaits trial on bail of 100,000 euros.

You might have thought taking down Coco was the win. It was not. The users migrated.

The new address

CNN’s As Equals team, reporters Saskya Vandoorne, Niamh Kennedy, and Kara Fox, working with colleagues across Europe and North America, spent months inside a successor ecosystem. They started on Motherless.com, a US-hosted pornographic site that carries over 20,000 videos tagged as sleep content. The categorization is precise. The tags include #passedout and #eyecheck. Eyecheck refers to clips in which a man lifts the closed eyelid of an unconscious woman to prove to viewers that she is fully sedated before the assault begins. Some of those clips have passed 50,000 individual views.

From Motherless, CNN followed a user-posted link into a private Telegram group called Zzz. Almost a thousand members. Dozens active at any hour. Reporters posed as men and were admitted. Inside, the group was running what amounts to a training academy. Members swapped specific drug names and dosages. They traded footage. They offered livestreams for approximately twenty dollars per viewer, paid in cryptocurrency, during which paying customers directed the perpetrator in real time.

One user in West Africa shared a preview clip of a woman he described as his sleeping wife to attract buyers to his next broadcast. Another user, operating out of the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on the North African coast, advertised a mail-order business selling a tasteless, odorless sleeping liquid. His price was 150 euros, about 175 dollars, shipped worldwide. “Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything,” he told prospective buyers. CNN obtained photographs of packages he had already addressed to recipients.

I want you to sit with that last detail. A man on a messaging app most of your children use, advertising an international mail-order business for a drug designed to erase his customers’ wives’ ability to resist or remember being raped. That is not a failure on the margins. That is a working commercial channel.

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Meet Piotr

Inside Zzz, CNN met a Polish man they protected under the name Piotr. He told reporters his wife had no idea what he was doing to her. Over months of messaging, he described drugging her with sleeping pills and alcohol, a combination that can be fatal. He shared what he said were nonconsensual photographs of her. Eventually, he gave the reporters his address.

CNN’s journalists traveled to Poland and confirmed he was real. They saw him at a restaurant with the woman he had described online as his wife. They did not confront him. They took their evidence to the Polish police.

On April 9, 2026, the District Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin announced an arrest. The suspect was charged under Article 197 of the Polish Criminal Code, which covers aggravated rape where the victim is vulnerable or unable to resist. He admitted the charges. He was remanded in custody for three months and faces three to twenty years if convicted. Polish media identified the man as Piotr.

One arrest. One woman warned. Hundreds more still inside that group on the day you read this.

The women you need to know about

Three survivors spoke to CNN. Their accounts are the reason this story has to travel.

Zoe Watts lived in Devon, England, and spent sixteen years married to a man who was crushing their son’s sleeping medicine into her evening tea so he could rape her while she was unconscious. They had four children. He confessed on a Sunday after church, reciting the details as if he were reading a grocery list. She kept the secret to protect the kids. After a panic attack, she told her sister, whose mother called the police. Her ex-husband is serving eleven years for rape, sexual assault by penetration, and drugging. Zoe told CNN she still cannot say the word rape out loud without flinching. People in her life framed her ordeal as less serious because it happened in her own bed instead of in an alley. Let me say this plainly as a trial lawyer. The location of the crime does not downgrade the crime. Rape is rape. Sleeping in your own bed next to the person who vowed to protect you is not a mitigating factor. It is an aggravating one.

Amanda Stanhope lives in Wigan, in northwest England. For five years she woke with bruises, in clothes she did not remember changing into, on a towel she had not placed there, with no idea why. When she asked her partner to stop after waking during an assault, he told her she was imagining things because of her medication. Her brother helped her report him. Her partner took his own life before trial. One detail in her account should stop every prosecutor in the jurisdiction cold. Police initially told her that video evidence of her partner sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious was not usable, on the theory she might have been pretending to be asleep. I have been in courtrooms for four decades. I have never heard a more indefensible evidentiary position. A video of an unconscious woman being sexually penetrated by her partner is evidence. Treating it as ambiguous is training failure and policy failure, sitting together at the same desk.

Valentina, a mother of two in northern Italy, using a pseudonym, discovered videos her husband of twenty years had filmed while he assaulted her after drugging her with alcohol and sedatives. She had no physical marks. Without the footage, she would not have believed it. Her former husband was sentenced in 2021 to eight years for multiple aggravated sexual assaults. She told CNN that a different scent in her bedroom can put her back inside the trauma.

You are reading this with your coffee or on your phone. These women were you. They had jobs and children and houses and partners who, by every outward measure, looked like safe men.

The brotherhood and the drug

Here is the part that separates this story from every other piece of internet horror you have seen.

Annabelle Montagne, the French forensic psychologist who assessed Dominique Pelicot and testified at his trial, told CNN the online ecosystem feeds something deeper than individual sexual gratification. The men bond. They validate each other. The group identity becomes the cover. Reinforcement normalizes what would otherwise repel even the participants. Montagne described the dynamic as a perverse brotherhood meeting narcissistic needs.

That is not a man with a sickness. That is a community manufacturing sickness at scale.

Sandrine Josso, a member of the French National Assembly, coined the phrase CNN used for its headline. In November 2023, Josso herself was drugged with MDMA by then-Senator Joël Guerriau at his Paris apartment. In January 2026, a Paris court convicted Guerriau and sentenced him to four years, eighteen months to serve, with a ban on holding elected office. Josso co-led a parliamentary inquiry into drug-facilitated sexual assault. She calls the Telegram groups schools of violence. Every subject needed to become a rapist, she says, is on the curriculum.

On the pharmacology side, Michel Cramer Bornemann, the Minneapolis-based sleep specialist who leads Sleep Forensic Associates, gave CNN the piece of the puzzle that prosecutors and emergency room physicians need to hear. The classic date-rape drugs Rohypnol and GHB are tightly controlled and stay detectable in urine for days. Perpetrators have pivoted to prescription sedatives, in particular zolpidem, marketed in the United States as Ambien.

It acts within minutes. It clears the body in seven to eight hours. It produces anterograde amnesia in the person it is given to. The FDA placed a black box warning on zolpidem in April 2019, its most serious level of drug warning, citing complex sleep behaviors and risk of serious injury or death. In the hands of deliberate criminal dosers, those properties are features, not bugs. By the time a woman wakes up, suspects something, and gets to a hospital, the toxicology window has already closed. The drug was chosen specifically to defeat her case.

This is what Josso meant by curriculum. The drug selection is the syllabus.

The platforms and the law

Now the part where I get to address some legal question I’m guessing you might have.

Motherless.com operates from the United States under the shield of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 largely insulates platform owners from civil liability for content users upload. That shield was written in 1996 for an internet that no longer exists. It was never intended to license a platform to host 20,000 videos of unconscious women being filmed without their knowledge or consent and to do so while collecting advertising revenue on the traffic.

Outside the United States, regulators are starting to move. The UK’s Office of Communications, Ofcom, opened an investigation on May 14, 2025 into Motherless’s parent, Luxembourg-registered Kick Online Entertainment S.A., after the company failed to respond to a statutory information request tied to its illegal content risk assessment. That investigation closed when Kick produced the paperwork.

Ofcom opened a second investigation on July 30, 2025 into whether Kick had implemented age verification under Section 12 of the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023. On February 11, 2026, Ofcom issued a Confirmation Decision and fined Kick Online Entertainment 800,000 pounds, roughly 1.1 million US dollars. Kick then installed age verification Ofcom deemed effective.

No regulator has touched the actual content. Ofcom told CNN that deciding whether a given piece of content is illegal is the platform’s job, not the regulator’s.

Let me translate that for you. The platform is asked to police itself. The platform has 20,000 reasons not to. We’re talking tens of thousands of videos tagged as sleep content that Motherless.com hosts on its site. It makes money on traffic. Traffic comes from content. The sleep category alone represents over 20,000 pieces of content drawing views, with some individual clips passing 50,000 views apiece. Every one of those videos is a revenue-generating asset. Asking the platform to decide, on its own, whether that content is illegal and should come down is asking it to voluntarily delete 20,000 revenue streams.

It isn’t going to happen.

Telegram has its own recent history. CEO Pavel Durov was charged in France in August 2024 for failing to prevent illicit activity on the platform. During CNN’s investigation, Telegram took the Zzz group down. After CNN published, Telegram issued a statement saying content encouraging sexual violence is forbidden by its terms of service and removed when discovered, and that the company uses AI-assisted moderation alongside user reports. Motherless did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Here is my legal read on the whole picture, from the trial-lawyer chair.

One. The Steidl prosecution in France is the frame the rest of the world should study. Steidl is not charged as a user of Coco. He is charged as the operator. The theory is that knowingly building and running infrastructure designed to enable felonies makes you a participant in those felonies, not a bystander to them. Aggravated pimping, criminal association, and administering an online platform to facilitate illicit transactions by an organized gang are serious charges. They treat the platform operator the way the law treats any other person who knowingly maintains a criminal enterprise. That theory travels. American prosecutors should be reading the French indictment closely.

Two. Section 230 in its current form is a national embarrassment. Reasonable people can disagree about the core protections Section 230 provides for ordinary user-generated content. No reasonable person can defend its application to a site that hosts tens of thousands of videos of nonconsensual filming of unconscious women and charges nothing to view them.

Either Congress carves out a narrow exception for platforms whose business model demonstrably depends on the commodification of image-based sexual abuse, or state attorneys general start testing creative civil theories outside Section 230’s reach. Product liability for algorithmic amplification. Public nuisance. Consumer protection. Aiding and abetting claims under state sexual assault survivor statutes. None of these are silver bullets. All of them are pressure points.

Three. The Stanhope evidentiary failure should trigger a policy review inside every force with jurisdiction over DFSA cases. Police who look at video of an unconscious woman being sexually penetrated and respond by questioning whether she was faking sleep are not making a close call. They are exhibiting a trained reflex of disbelief that needs to be retrained out of the force. Mandatory DFSA training. Mandatory medical-forensic intake protocols. Mandatory referral to specialist units. This is policy, not philosophy.

Four. Jurisdictional reach on the platform side is solvable when governments choose to solve it. The Ceuta mail-order operation that CNN documented crosses borders every time a bottle ships. That is federal territory in any country with functioning postal inspection. Cryptocurrency livestream payments are traceable when prosecutors commit resources to tracing them. The United Kingdom has moved. The European Union, through the Digital Services Act, has moved. Washington has not. Voters in American jurisdictions should demand a reason.

What the data does and does not tell you

Drug-facilitated sexual assault is notoriously hard to count. A World Health Organization spokesperson told CNN the data is limited by the nature of the crime. Victims often have partial or no memory. Hospital staff and police receive limited training on recognizing DFSA. Most European criminal justice systems do not track it as a separate category, and there is no fully comparable Europe-wide dataset.

The UK does publish something. The Office for National Statistics Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year ending March 2025 found that 43.2 percent of rape or penetration victims were assaulted by a partner or ex-partner, a marginal decrease from 45 percent five years earlier. The share of victims recorded as having been assaulted while unconscious or asleep has risen from 21 percent to 23 percent over the past decade. Conviction rates for sexual offenses across Europe and the United States remain low.

Translate the numbers into your kitchen. One in four of the rape victims in your country’s most recent data was assaulted while unconscious. The leading perpetrator category was a partner or ex-partner. The scene of the crime was a bedroom. The weapon of choice was a prescription sleep medication sold at a pharmacy most of you walked into last month.

What Gisèle Pelicot said, and what it means for you

Gisèle Pelicot waived her anonymity so the world would see her husband’s trial in full light. She said shame must change sides. She said the shame belonged to the men who did this, not to the women who survived it.

The men in the Zzz group never felt shame because the community they built told them not to. That is the part the law has to reach, and it is the part your awareness can accelerate.

If you are a parent, have the conversation with your adult children tonight about what to do if they wake up with inexplicable gaps in their memory, bruises they cannot source, or the strong sense that something is wrong. Save toxicology is a race. The sooner someone gets to a hospital with a trained DFSA intake team, the better the case.

If you are a voter, ask your congressional representative where they stand on Section 230 reform targeted at image-based sexual abuse. Ask your state attorney general what their office is doing about platform-level DFSA content originating in your state.

If you are a human being with a phone, share this piece. The Zzz group got taken down because reporters went in, stayed in, and refused to leave. The next one will get taken down because enough ordinary people made enough ordinary noise that the platforms and the regulators stopped being able to look away.

Shame changes sides the moment we stop whispering about this and start naming it out loud.

Start today.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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1. Exposing a global ‘online rape academy’ that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection (CNN report)