Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

There exists online a community of websites and users who encourage, pay and teach each other in how to drug and sexually abuse women. Robert explores the case of one particular website, Coco, in France, along with in one specific offender, Dominique Pelicot.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Also, media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know, worst people in all of history, all that good stuff. And to talk about some pretty terrible people and a pretty terrible thing that happened this week with me, my good friend, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here as always.

Hey, Bridget. We're so happy to have you. Yeah. You want to tell the folks about your new audio? book. Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah. Speaking of things that might make you feel icky or uncomfortable or weird, have you two ever heard about folks who are experiencing intimate relationships with AI companions? Boy, howdy have I? Both from that movie, her and then since in the real world. Yeah. I have always been fascinated by movies like

her and Ex Machina and Blade Runner. I kind of grew up. Ex Machina is pretty fun. Exmachina is good. Although It does sort of show the dark side of like what happens if you surround yourself with sexy bots. Yeah. But yeah. So I have always been kind of fascinated by the intersection of bots and AI and the people who want to connect with them. And so I have a new audiobook out called Love at First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy. Hell yeah. That basically tries to answer the question of why are we all so fascinated with technology and people getting emotionally close to it?

And what are the risks? Like, what do we lose when tech companies like Open AI are vying to be where we go for emotional support? Yeah. Well, you know, Bridget, I suspect part of the answer, at least for a lot of the men who find themselves in love with chatbots, is that like it's a, it's like a woman, but she doesn't have any will of her own, right? Yeah. And that's really relevant to the episodes we're doing today. We're not talking about AI chatbots, but we are talking about something else that the internet and the tech world has enabled that's pretty hard. as we're all well aware over the last 20 or so years, our civilization has handed the proverbial

wheel over to a bunch of assholes who created websites right around the time you and I graduated high school, right? And of these men, Mark Zuckerberg, has probably done the most damage. But if we count PayPal as a website and it is, then Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are in the mix. And to be honest, I don't know if I think like Musk or Mark has more of an edge given the last couple of years, but they're all sort of up there. And don't forget, legal. Don't forget. Don't forget. Sure, of course. Now, wait, Spiegel? Isn't that his name?

Evan Spiegel? Who the hell is that? The Snapchat guy. Oh, I don't think about Snapchat. Does anyone? What does he do? He goes under the radar a little bit. Yeah, he's the Snapchat guy.

And when I think of him, I think of how he created all those like filters. Well, he didn't personally, but created an app with all those filters that caused so many people to have an unhealthy relationship with what their face actually looks like. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And, you know, have an, and it just caused a bunch of fraud and give people body dysmorphia. Yeah, probably was a bad idea or at least a flawed idea. And look, all this is to say, we should be asking ourselves as a society, what should we do to men who get rich off of creating websites that ruin people's lives at scale, right? How should we handle them?

That's a salient question to everybody listening with her in the ear. in the United States or Canada or India or, for example, France, which is where we're going to be talking about primarily today. This week, I'm going to tell you the story primarily of one website, although we're going to talk about a couple of different websites. And the specific site that we're going to focus on most is certainly lower on the bastard list than Facebook or Twitter or telegram in terms of like the actual aggregate amount of damage it's done. But that doesn't mean that it's minor. And in fact, the stuff that this website specifically enabled is much more horrifying than what you tend to hear of on any of these other sites because of the clientele

that it's solicited. And the website we'll be talking about this week was called Coco or cocoa. Or cocoa.fr for most of its life because it was a French website. And yeah, so far, the reason why we're talking about this is that France has recently become the only country on earth to take real steps to try and punish founders of websites and tech companies, right? for the damage that their sites have done. They've gone after the founder of Coco, this website we're going to be talking about, and they've also gone after Pavl Dorov, the founder of Telegram. Now, most Americans probably haven't heard about Coco, at least not very much about it,

but Coco was an anonymous chat site that turned into a din of bigotry violence and sex crimes. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Have we heard of stuff like this happening before? I've heard of Coco and that pattern. And I'm sure Bridget has too, because. women on the internet. It's all over. Yeah, I'm pretty sad to say. And it's one of those topics where even as people who cover and talk about dark tech and internet stuff, even for me, I'm like, ooh, this makes me feel like I want to take a shower after hearing about this.

I gave a warning to you and Sophie a couple of days before we did these episodes just because like I was like, I can't. People can't. Like, I knew you guys were aware of this story, but it just is too intense to not deliver a little bit of like a heads up. And so I'll say that the audience do. Heads up. This is a bad one, folks. It's a real bad one. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry

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We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.

I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The founder of Coco is an asshole named Isaac Stietel. He's going to be one of our bastards today, but we know very little about him.

Other than that, he was born and raised in Vacluse and the Var, which are two places in southeast France. He was probably born around 1980 or 1981, given that we know he graduated college in 2003 and was 44 in 2020. He earned a degree in computer science from a university in Toulon. I found remarkably little about the man's early life besides this, and essentially nothing direct that would lend any understanding as to his motivation. There's not like a quote from this kid being like, one day, I'm going to create a website that helps French people be horrible sex offenders. And we kind of do have that with like Mark Zuckerberg actually, right? We have like the you can be unethical and not break the law, and that's how I live my life quote. We don't get any of that from Isaac.

Don't forget the he he he. Don't forget the he he. Load bearing, he he. A load bearing he for sure. As a slight tangent, what do we think about Jeremy Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg in the new social network movie? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I'm here for it. I know it's controversial. Me too. Me too. I'm with you.

When you watch the trailer, he's doing the voice so well. I'm here for it. What do you all think? I'm into it. I'm very into it. I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion of Jeremy Strong, to be honest. Did you watch Succession? Yeah, no, Jeremy Strong, dramaturgically could play Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, I love Sophie. I don't, I look like, you know ball when it comes to Jeremy Strong. Yeah, you clearly know ball.

Yeah, I'm fascinated. I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie. All I've got to say about that is I loved, I mean, I didn't love, I loved the movie that Jesse Eisenberg came out recently with him and Kieran Culkin in Poland. Yeah, that was a great movie. What is it called? Fuck. A real pain.

A real pain. Great movie. And it caused me to re-evaluate Jesse Eisenberg because I'd hated him for years. And I realized I thought I had heard something about him being bad. And I thought that maybe I just didn't like his, I hadn't really interrogated it. I just had a negative reaction to him. And I enjoyed that movie so much that it caused me to realize, oh, no, you just did such a good job of playing Mark Zuckerberg. A man I despise.

Yeah. like I associated the two of you for years and in a completely unfair way. And now I found out he's like given a kidney to a stranger. He's apparently a nice man. I judged you poorly, Jesse. He was asked to play Zuckerberg and he refused. He was like, I don't want to keep playing this asshole. I don't want people associating me with him forever.

No, thanks. Look, Jesse, I apologize. But also, it is kind of a compliment. Like you really disappeared into that role to the extent that it gave me some problems. Anyway, back to Coco. The founder of this website, Isaac Stedle. We don't know a whole lot about him, but yeah, he goes to, he goes up in southeast France, graduates college in 2003, and earned, he's a computer science major, right? There's not a whole lot

about him beyond that. Because this is a French case, I had to rely on Yandex or Russian Google to translate several websites. So some of these quotes might sound a little odd. That's why. One article in RMC by Matthew Beliard describes Mr. Stedle as a mysterious man who started the website that would make him infamous, Coco, the same year he graduated college, 2003, with, quote, the help of his parents and 2,000 euros in capital. So that does tell you a little bit. His family's got some amount of money that they're able to throw that around. That's not a crazy amount, but it's not nothing. And his parents are supportive of what's going to turn into a website for perverts to do bad things, right? Not that being perverted is bad, but this kind of perversion is.

The website initially looked something like what the video people are going to be seeing now. There's an almost pea green background and the big center image is a coconut spilling milk onto the floor in a way I think it's suggestive of come. Maybe that's just like where my ad goes here, but they're like, I think it's a little suggestive, right? This is suggestive of semen for sure. I mean, yeah, come on. That's not really how coconut milk spills. No. It looks more viscous, yeah.

Don't like it. Don't love it. Directly above the spill is a login box where you can log in by identifying your gender, picking a pseudonym, giving an age, and entering your postal code. Coco's slogan was, this is a website for nice people. And it was a free chat site. I would describe it as initially most similar to an early and primitive version of the app, Telegram.

There are different chat rooms that are based on like the region you're in and based on like your topic of interest, like what kind of thing you want to talk about. And it's all anonymous, right? You could put your real name in, but you can put any name in, and they're not taking any, they're not verifying. Like, you don't have to do anything that would actually, like, make you directly traceable to the account that you have on this site. So it's about as anonymous as anything that's not, like, super encrypted is going to be, right?

When I say anonymous, in this instance, that's what I mean. Users can register in just a second or two, and are asked, we're asked to confirm that they were at least 18, but they can also change their displayed user age. later. I'm not sure if that was an intentional feature or just something that they didn't think about, but it certainly becomes a major selling point on the website because people are both going to spend a lot of time pretending that they're younger or older than they are. Just as kind of a spoiler for where some of these things, some things go here. In its early years, at least, it seems that Coco was one of many different regional anonymous chat platforms. There were

different websites kind of like this all over the world. There's some similarities between this, as I'll talk about, and like 4chan. It was very French, but it was not otherwise super noteworthy. Now, again, I haven't come across enough direct information about Isaac Stedle to give you his specific motivation, but it was probably some, it may have been just as simple as money. He may have just wanted to get rich, right? And he does as a result of this website. It's probably useful here for me to zoom out and give people a little context on the internet at circa 2003, in case you're too young or too old, we've been really keeping up with things back then. We were still deep in the throes of Web 1.0, and modern social media was on its way,

but embryonic. You had kind of some of the first, you know, MySpace, I think, was out by 2003, but Facebook isn't really around. Twitter certainly isn't like, the stuff that, like, is going to become known for, like, as social media is not really out yet. But there have a knee-deep in Zanga. Zanga, yeah, exactly. And there were a few online communities that had become large businesses by providing an anonymous hub for people to communicate and do business and talk about things that they were attract. Like talk about their perversions, right? You know, the something awful forums had been created by Richard Kiyanka back in 1999. And by 2003 had something like 100,000 registered members.

If I'm remembering from like the banner things back when I was visiting in 2003, each goon or member of the website paid $10 to join plus another $10 for each. time they were banned and wanted to reactivate their account. So being banned on purpose or as a bit became parts of the culture at something awful and a method of fundraising. People would get like intentionally bans, they could re-register or whatnot, like at times. It was just sort of like a thing that was a part of the culture of the website. And I'm bringing this up because Isaac is going to copy this tactic in a way that I suspect was directly pulling from something awful. Isaac was also probably familiar with 2chan and 4chan. Two Chan was the Japanese precursor to 4chan.

Forechan itself started in October 2003, the same year that Coco got started. And 4chan began after Richard Kianka forced an exodus of members of the Something Awful forums by banning hentai. A legal fire sharing prior to that was common in both communities, right? It'd common in something awful, and after this it's common in 4chan. And it's something that the owners of the websites don't profit from. directly, which is part of why Richard eventually banned it, but they profited from the sites becoming active and popular hubs of communities that are doing file sharing, right? So there's,

there's some precedent for if you start this big place where people can communicate anonymously and give them a place to discuss anything, to post anything, and to like share porn and whatnot illegally, that's a great way to get a lot of members, and then you can advertise on the site and make money, right? The reason I'm bringing this up is that I think this is probably what Isaac is looking at when he's crafting Coco. I'm sure. he's aware of these things. Craig's List does not bear a lot in common socially with these other online communities, but its creation and growing popularity by 2003 is also relevant to the story. After being founded in 1995 and as an email distribution list, Craigslist quickly expanded

beyond its initial Bay Area birthing pond by 2000. In 2003, it had opened hubs in dozens of U.S. cities, and this had caused massive, genuinely unintentional disruption to a number of industries, including newspapers by effectively killing the classified ad business. And I suspect Craigslist was probably of interest to Steele as well, because it offered a way for people to gather and do business online with the potential for quite a bit of anonymity. In fact, Craigslist scams soon became a legendary aspect of the website success. So all of this stuff is cooking in the post.com bust latter days of Web 1.0

when Isaac Steele decides to create a website of his own, right? I'm bringing this up because I think, this influences him. Coco quickly became known as a place where people could seek out dates and casual hookups as well as text-based erotic encounters. Over the years, as social media took off, Stedle rebranded Coco as the first free online chat site. That's a dubiously accurate tagline.

I think I can recall a couple free online chat sites before that, but... Definitely. Yeah, yeah. He also described it as a social network where you can reconnect with your friends, which was an odd tagline given that anonymity was a founding principle. I think he was just trying to ape off of Facebook's popularity with that tagline because there's nothing about Coco that would enable you to like reconnect with lost friends. That's not how the website was designed.

So weird. Yeah, this really does sound like he was combining a lot of things from popping off kind of early social media platforms and just sort of trying to make it his own thing. Exactly. And I, there's a, we don't know. Maybe he always intended this to be a place where people would like sell illegal porn that they would make and other horrible things. But I kind of think he was just looking to do anything that would get him a business, right?

I think that was probably his initial, you know, plan more than anything. One future user who would be convicted for crimes he committed due to his use of Coco told a court that Coco had at first seemed like a place to discuss hobbies. And he listed chess and music as specific hobbies that he was into and that he came to Coco to engage in. He told the court, as the years went by, all the predators and scammers started coming to Coco. So at least in that sort of account of things, and I wasn't on the website. I don't speak. For instance, I kind of have to go by these accounts. If that's accurate, it did start as more of a normal general community, but there was always an aspect of it that was like predatory,

that involved, like, people scamming each other, and that involved people like trying to share or make illegal pornography. And that just became more and more dominant over time. Irees.com, which documents internet culture, describes Coco as having been created for amorous encounters, and seems to suggest that the chat branding was never more than an obfuscating tactic. They note that over the years, Steele, quote, shifted the strategy by making it lack moderation in order to become more attractive to users, which apparently included criminals. And I think you could also, sorry. Oh, I have a clarifying question. It sounds like they started, from what you just read it, it sounded like they started. with some moderation and then shifted to basically have no moderation when they kind of leaned

into this sort of illegal scam vibe. That is what one source says, and I don't know if that's perfectly accurate, but I think that there was more moderation and there were more attempts to kind of clamp down on the worst aspects of the community, and they gave, he Steele, not just gave that up, but started leaning into the darkest interests of his community members, to the people who were making illegal pornography and carrying out scams and the like, right? And increasingly, people are going to be doing, like, because it becomes a hookup app pretty quickly. People use it for that. And then it also becomes a way for people to fake hookup, like to convince gay men to come out where they can beat them,

right? That's a major thing people do with cocoa.com. But it's also a major gay hookup app because there's just not a lot of options for that in France at this period of time, right? Which is what makes it a profitable place for predators, you know? Somewhere around, this starts somewhere around the 20 teens is when you first start seeing a large number of attacks on people getting traced back to Coco. I'm not saying that's where it actually, I think it probably went on earlier than that, but the stories all kind of come from around the start of the Trump era, really. These began as seemingly consensual encounters, according to an investigation in Le Parisienne by Maxime Poul. Quote, a person is tasked with luring a victim, discussing with her to gain her trust, giving her, giving her, her a meeting place to meet and then redirecting her towards several men who pass by and robbed

the victim. So that's happening too. People are just getting like beaten and robbed, but there's also a lot of like homophobic attacks, right? Because this is such a well-known hookup app for gay men. As that Le Parisian article notes, numerous traps were set by homophobic aggressors to assault rob and sometimes kill homosexual people after they had been giving a meeting place via the online chat. So that's all pretty bad. And that is again, that takes a while. The sites founded in 2003. This is all really starting to come out by like 2018-19. But there's a reason that I brought up Craigslist and online communities where file sharing was a common focus, right? And started by talking about that because Coco, more than anything, becomes an illegal clearing

house for videos and photographic content that was always sexual and, again, basically always illegal, right? And this means there was a lot of CSAM, a lot of child sexual abuse imagery being shared on there as well as being made. People would like advertise kids and advertise like filming and whatnot. But there are also a lot of videos featuring non-consensual sexual acts that involve adults, right? And not just sexual acts. People, it becomes very popular to post like pictures of women out in the world and whatnot that you snap without them realizing. So crucially, Coco is not just a place where people come to share these things. It turns into a place where people request them and even start putting together funding to produce new content. So people through

their time on Coco, they start out being like, hey, I've got this video I took or this, you know, I drugged this girl and I took a video of what I did and, you know, send me some money if you want it or whatnot. And people start like requesting new stuff. And it turns into businesses. Folks start making like actual businesses producing non-consensual pornography and the like. and use Coco as a distribution hub. It's not the only website they're doing. A lot of these people are trying to get folks to follow them in other websites, including Telegram, but this is happening by like the late 20 teens.

And it happens in a lot of ways. But one of the things that Coco becomes really known for is it's a website where you can facilitate the real world abuse of people and even get to partake in it, sometimes for money, sometimes just in order to help somebody else create pornography, right? This was organized on an ad hoc basis by individuals in different chat rooms. And because very little of what went on was documented in any way, I'll have to provide you with an example that illustrates how the whiter site functioned, and we only know of this example because it's an extremely famous court case, right?

We're going to focus a lot on this one case that's very famous because it's the only real case of abuse or of this stuff happening in Coco that we have documented to like a really significant degree. But this is a particularly exceptional case, but by no means the only one. So, starting no later than 2011, users on Coco had created a chat room named a son in Sue, which means without their knowledge. This was a place where people, mostly men, could discuss a very specific fetish, raping or otherwise sexually touching an unconscious woman, generally drugged without her knowledge. Now, a number of people who are in this broader world are into what's known as consensual,

non-consensual roleplay. There's a version of this where, like, everyone is aware of what's happening, and it's role-playing, right? These are scenes. And it's important that I emphasize that what went on in the without-the-knowledge forum was not this kind of role-playing, right? A BBC investigation by Laura Gozi described the chat room as a place where men shared photos and videos of women taken surreptitiously. Like, the whole point is that they're not consenting.

So I want to make that really clear. This has nothing to do with the other thing. Yeah. I'm so glad that you made that distinction because, you know, if anybody is even adjacent to consensual adult kink spaces, nobody takes consent more seriously than folks who are in those communities. And I hate when, I hate that it's so easy to conflate. This illegal content that is breaking the law and is horrible with what consenting adults do because kink communities where folks are consensually interested in things like consensual non-consent, they take consent very seriously. And it's just really unfair to conflate them, but also very easy to conflate them.

So I'm glad that you made that distinction. It happens all the time. This has nothing to do with that, in part because their fetish is that it is not consensual. Correct. They're not interested in, like, playing or pretending. Like, yeah. Because, like, yeah. They could.

I mean, that's the thing is, like, they could. If somebody wanted to explore this in a legal and consensual way, that avenue exists. I know a bunch of people who do, right? Same. Yeah. It's very important. That's not at all what's going on here. Now, from what I have read, I suspect that the vast majority of the conversations that went on in this chat room were not, did not involve real abuse, right?

There were sad, gross men describing their fantasy. sometimes pretending their fantasies were reality, but describing fantasies. The worst behavior most people in the chat room would have gotten up to would be taking non-consensual photos of like women at the gym or of the romantic partner sleeping, right? And that's the majority of the content. But a small number of people do things that are pushing that already very fucked up envelope way, way further, right? And often it starts with someone just wanting to post some like candid shots of like their

girlfriend or their wife asleep, right? And then it kind of escalates because people push them and are like, hey, would you do this? Could you do this? Could you do this? Why don't you try drugging her? Right? Stuff like that will occur a lot. Like many similar online ecosystems, a large number of these more casual users also subsisted

on the content generated by the boldest criminals among them. So while most members of this chat room probably aren't doing anything at all or aren't doing more than taking the occasional like picture of someone at the gym, they are consuming the content created by people who are like actively drugging and raping women, and they're encouraging those people, they're asking them to do more, and they're sometimes paying them, right? So anybody in this that's a member of this community, whether or not they're actually abusing a person directly is participating in abuse. The whole chat room, it seems like, pretty much was. Like I, again, I don't speak French and I didn't have access to it when it was up, but that is from what

I'm reading sounds like what was going on. It sounds like a real ecosystem where even If you are, you know, if... A freco system. Being there makes you a cog in this machine, essentially. Yes. And if you want to be a cog in the machine of capitalism, why not buy some of these products? Much better a machine to be a cog in than this one. Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, than this one for sure. The new Red Bull, Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers now at McDonald's, made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor. The all-new Red Bull Energizers. Now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details of McDonald's.ca. At participating Canadian restaurants excluding Quebec.

When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice. next to my ear saying shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up. Without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

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All right. So, starting in the 2010s, among the boldest members of the Without Their Knowledge chat room on Coco, was Dominique Polico. Per an article in The Mond by Lorraine de Future, Dominique, quote, filmed his daughters-in-law in the bathroom, using a telephone hidden in a toiletry bag,

then posted the images on Coco. His grandchildren talked about his insistence on playing doctor or agreeing to buy them toys, only if they were to undress. And we're going to talk a lot about Dominique today and tomorrow because he has since become the most infamous sex offender associated with Coco and arguably the most infamous sex offender in modern French history.

And while his actions do represent the most extreme minority of users on the site, I have to really emphasize that given its size, the size of the website, the length of the time that it was operating and the anonymity involved, there's no way he's the only user who committed crimes on this scale. He simply can't be. Like, I just don't believe that at all. Now, I think it might be, he might be the only one who committed crimes in the scale against like a middle class white lady. That's entirely possible. But, yeah, we'll, we'll see. So Dominique Pellico was born in 1952, according to French

newspaper Le Monde. Nowhere seems to have his exact birth date, except for the Astro-Databank, which is an astrology-based wiki that cites its source as a French lawyer named Mark Brun, who himself was citing a birth certificate. I don't know how trustworthy this is, but it's the only place I found is birth date, you know, with my casual searching. And it gives it as November 27, 1952. This isn't directly relevant, but it did provide me with an astrological chart for

this sex criminal. So here's his astrological chart. if that shows any of you guys anything. Yeah. Shout out to the astrology, girlies. I don't know what to do with that, but I found it. So you're seeing it now. I try to describe stuff to the listeners.

I don't know how to describe an astro. It looks like an astrological chart. Somebody out there is like, oh, of course, his rising is this. It makes so much sense. Oh, obviously, the green squiggly thing and the red squiggly thing both have lines in the circle thing in the middle, obviously. I don't know what any of this means. Somebody is gleaning something from this for sure.

Yeah. Somebody's learned a lot here. So Dominique was the second child of Denis and Juliet, well, Denny Pelico and Juliet Rousseau. His mother had first been married to Andre Pelico, Dennis's brother, or Denny's brother? So what happened there, right? That's kind of a weird situation. Writing for the New York Times, Catherine Porter describes what happened pretty bluntly. After his mother's first husband abandoned her and their two children, she married his brother, with whom she had two more children.

One of those was Dominique. So as that might, he went on, this is not a healthy family. This is not good place to grow up. Dominique is not going to have, like, his, the dad that, you know, he has the brother of the guy who abandoned his family, Deni, is like an abusive asshole, right? Like, he is a very aggressive man and a very cruel man. And a man who does a lot of sex crimes. The Pelico family raised their children who were simultaneously half siblings and cousins

in Central Peleco. Paris. Decades later, after Dominique was revealed as a sex criminal, he would make claims that he had been abused in his childhood. And those claims have been partly substantiated. He told his wife and several of his friends about this years before he got caught with anything. Here's how a separate article in the Monce, this one by Honoreseckel, described Dominique's claims about his childhood. A few years after Dominique Pelico's birth, his parents adopted a girl with an intellectual disability, Nicole, who became a victim of incest in her new family. And this is, it's It's really bad.

After his Denise wife dies, he basically marries Nicole. I don't know if they're legally married, but like he just takes her as his, you know, it's really bad. And Jeanette Dominic's half-sister testified that she fled the house as a teenager to escape her stepfather's sexual abuse. That article by Seckel continues. In addition to the verbal and physical violence of a father he vowed never to resemble and whose funeral he never attended, Dominique Pelico's childhood and adolescence were punctuated by several traumatic events, the veracity of which is difficult to verify. The sexual violence forced fallatio, he said he suffered at the age of nine by a nurse at a hospital, his very early confrontation with his parent's sexuality, with acts of violence and domination by his father. And it's hard to say how true this is.

He says he was basically raped by a male nurse at a hospital when he was a kid. There's no way to verify that. we can definitely verify that his mom was raped by his father because his other siblings saw this too. Dominique has a very strong memory of his dad raping and humiliating their mother. Like that is a thing that sears him as a kid. I have no reason to doubt that. He later testified, in every man there is a demon. Mine came from childhood.

And, you know, again, that's literally true, but you shouldn't take what he's saying is literally true because quite frankly, a lot of people get molested as kids. and don't commit the kind of sex crimes Dominique's going to commit. So, yeah, that's what I was thinking, you know, fuck this guy. No, every man doesn't have a demon. Like, people all, everybody's got shit to deal with. But that's different from what's going on with you, bro. When he was 14, working as an apprentice electrician on a construction site, Dominique claims he was forced to watch as several men gang raped.

It was one of the guys like the foreman's wife or something. She was drugged. And Dominique was eventually forced to participate. he says forced to participate. And he told his wife about this, again, well before he was arrested for anything. It's always worth interrogating how much we should trust these claims. Psychiatrist Laurent Léette, who consulted on Dominique's mental health for the court case that came out of all this, seems to find Dominique's version of his own childhood to be broadly credible. He noted that Pelico comes from a family with a confused history and troubled reference points, marked by certain secrets and the existence of sexual relations between adults and minors. So again, it doesn't seem like anyone really doubts he's probably exaggerating some things he also is definitely blaming his own behavior on this but i don't think there's any reason to doubt that he was abused quite a lot as a child and that i mean this is a tale as old as time with cycles of abuse so it's not really that difficult for me to imagine this yeah it's not difficult to imagine that but again

whenever he says and this is why i did it i know a lot of people i actually do know unfortunately quite a few people who were enlisted his kids you know what none of them have done is the shit we're about to talk about Dominique doing. So he's blaming that on why he is the way he is. I don't. Dominique's future wife and chief victim, Giselle, backs up the description of Deney Pelico as a monster. When Dominique was still child, his father took a job at a boarding house for disabled people.

And Giselle writes in her memoir that she suspects, quote, he must have sensed that there were vulnerable people and a domain over which he could rule. That's how she describes Dini. He soon became the warden and the, family moved into a house on the grounds. Because Dominique's older siblings left home and went to school by that point, Dominique was, Giselle claims, trapped with his parents and forced to live amid the comings and goings of physically fragile or mentally disturbed men. So he's spending a lot of time with all these very ill people in this boarding school that his father is lording tyrannically

over. He's being abused by his dad. He's watching his dad abuse his mom and he can't escape. He has to cycle long distances to his school that's very far from home and he develops a reputation as a weird kid from out of town. Giselle writes, quote, he became an outcast, ostracized for the theft of a suite that had actually been stolen by the pharmacist's son. I don't know how true that is. I could see him lying to Giselle about that, and maybe he did something significantly worse than steal a candy or someone else stole a candy.

I don't know. Whatever the truth, football became young Dominique's passion, but he was constantly forced to endure the sight of his father abusing his mother. He begged her to leave for the first. time when he was 14, but she never did. Now, in his testimony, Dominique painted a picture of a traumatized young boy who grew into a young man with dark and terrible urges. He claimed, I have something inside me that I fought for a long time and credited his wife, Giselle, for keeping him on the straight and narrow for so many years. And this is a lie, right? His initial claim is that, like,

when he first gets caught doing the crimes that were going to outline is like, oh, I've always had this demon inside me, and I fought it for decades. And, And then finally in my 60s, you know, my wife's goodness wasn't enough to, like, keep me from, from, you know, doing horrible things. That's not accurate. Very convenient narrative that also kind of puts the blame on the wife for her own abuse. Like, oh, she wasn't able to help me fight these demons any longer. He simultaneously, like, puts her up on a pedestal because he always talks about it, even when he was in court.

He talks about her like, she's, you know, an angel and can do no wrong. But also in the same way that, like, yes, she, it was her who stopped me from doing things, right? Like, it was her example that kept me on the straight and arrow, right. So he is, you're right, he is, like, putting a degree of, blame's not entirely the right word. But like, yeah, that is fucked up. The couple met in the home of Giselle's aunt, Andri, who just lost her husband. Giselle was there to visit and provide some comfort to her aunt. She's like 19.

but per her memoir, a hymn to life, quote, almost as soon as I arrived, she started telling me about a young man called Dominique. She had recently employed. Now, by this point, Dominique had become a licensed electrician, and André had hired him to help her keep her husband's business going. And she really likes this guy. Dominique is good at charming people,

which is often the case with psychopaths. They can be very glib and superficially charming. And he and Giselle hit it off immediately, right? She would describe it later as love at first sight. A month later, she attended a family camping trip with the Pelikos that sounded like a fucking nightmare. Deney was reportedly furious when the young couple laid their sleeping bags next to each other in a tent and accused them of trying to sleep together. He would later steal their family or their savings, like when they get started as a couple. He's just constantly a monster to these people as they're starting their new life together.

He probably feels his control slipping. Yeah, yeah. I think it is that kind of situation. Like he escalates his abusiveness against Dominique as Dominique starts getting out of the house, right? And Dominique does take Giselle up on the offer to flee his family and live with her in Paris. They move in together. They get married. And she describes, again, this is love at first sight.

She, after she found out, because as a spoiler, he commits horrible sex crimes against her when she's drugged to unconsciousness. And even after all that, she still says, like, yeah, I felt like it was love at first sight. And they were together for like 50 years. You know, this is a long. and seemingly for most of its length, like healthy, functional relationship. That's one of the really fucked up things about it. So initially, their primary issue as a couple

was enduring all the bullshit that Deny threw their way. Here's a representative story from Giselle's memoir. Because he was only 19, Dominique, his father still controlled his bank account. And when he got wind of our plans, he emptied it. He bought a small farm and insisted Dominique do the renovations. I still have this image in my mind of Dominique right at the bottom of the well,

as though he would never be able to climb out again and was going to let himself be buried alive by his father who was still trying to control our future. He stole from us and we said nothing. So not a great relationship with dad there. But they persevere. They power through it. For his part, Dominique says this is what drew him to Giselle.

She was the opposite of my mother who was completely rebellious, right? In court, he described Giselle as a saint whose love gave him the strength to deny the darker side of his nature, these perverted and cruel sexual urges that he had experienced since childhood, right? And we're meant to believe as a consequence of his childhood abuse. Now, again, we know this was a lie. She was, among other things, he was not keeping on the straight and arrow this entire time. We don't know how many sex crimes he committed outside of their marriage while they were married, but we know he committed some. In 1999, the couple got divorced without separating as a result of financial issues. They were eventually remarried in 2007. Giselle says

they needed to do this to avoid her salary being garnished because Dominique's debts were so bad. It's kind of sucks on so many levels. He doesn't make a lot of money. She would say, but as she said, because they're having kids too, he's an attentive father. He's an attentive husband. Like, for the most part, it was a good marriage. A little too attentive. Yeah.

And also, she doesn't like, it's not perfect. She cheats on him at one point, right? and he cheats on her at another point. There's a period of like six months where he moves out and he lives with another woman. These are very French people and her memoir is a very French memoir because she writes very bluntly about like,

well, you know, the infidelity was a problem, but once we had both done it and got through it, I think it actually improved our marriage because we were able to talk more openly about things like our second. And I was able to just say like, oh, why don't you just go and fuck someone else if you want to be in another relationship, right?

it's a very French attitude towards infidelity where they were like well we finally got the cheating out of the way everyone has to do it obviously we're French right we got it out of our system yeah we had to get it out of our system now this is all happening sometime in the early 90s during this time but Giselle says it's while they were living together in Paris Dominique is tied credibly to two sex crimes in the 1990s we don't know about any of this until later this all comes out after as a result of the bigger case against him. But he's tied definitively to a sex crime in 1999. Per Catherine Porter's New York Times article, Mr. Policoe lured a 19-year-old real estate agent into a building on the pretext that he was interested in buying it. He pinned her to the ground, bound her wrists with rope, pressed a small bag of ether to her nose, and then pulled down her pants. But the effect of the drug soon dissipated, and she managed to escape. Now, he's working as a real estate agent at the time. This doesn't come out until decades later as a result of a DNA match when Dominic gets caught committing his other

crimes. And he initially denied involvement in this, but when he was presented it with DNA evidence, he admitted to attacking this woman on impulse and fleeing once she escaped. In retrospect, Shazelle can think of thought of, because she talks about in her memoir, like, there were a couple of days where he like came home from work, like really distraught and crying. And I just assumed he'd had a bad day at work. And she kind of thinks, oh, that may have been, you know, what it was. But she doesn't really know, and she certainly didn't have a sign that he was doing shit like this. We don't know how often this happened, but once that 1999 case came out and he ultimately admitted to having attempted to rape this woman, French police who specialized in criminal

patterns found a link between this attack and a 1991 rape and murder. In this case, it was another real estate agent, Sophie Narm. This would have been, you know, during, I think around the time they were separated, but it's a little unclear to me. per Lorraine de Future's article in the Mond, they found several related factors. The victims, young women in their 20s, worked in real estate agencies.

The modus operandi is similar, with appointments made under a false name. The aggression was committed in the place visited, and there was the use of ties and a chemical product to put the victim to sleep and a bladed weapon. Now, who does that sound like? Yeah, it sounds like Dominique, right?

It sounds like his MO. He's denied committing this crime. He has been indicted for it. It seems very likely. The police, I think, lost, the DNA evidence from that case, so they can't, like, confirm this. But number one, it seems like this was not an intentional murder. She died as a result of him drugging her and being careless, I think is probably what happened here. I don't know if there's a bunch more of these rapes.

I go back and forth, because once they had his DNA, they pretty quickly found the first case and then the second one. And so I kind of think if there were a bunch of certainly murders that had the same memo, they would have come up by now, right? That said, he definitely committed other rapes, right? It couldn't have been just these two and then the stuff that he did to his wife, right? Like, there has to be things we don't know about going back.

God knows how long, maybe to his childhood. I just, it's impossible to say, right? Giselle says that she never saw this sight of her husband. Her memoir doesn't include some events that in hindsight, you could see as like evidence something was wrong. wrong. But one thing she points out is that in the entire like 50 years they were together, something like that, he only ever struck her once. And, you know, that's bad, right? But honestly, in relationships that lasted 50-something years and started in 1971, how many of them exist

were like the husband was only violent once, right? It's not, you could be like, oh, he hit her because she was trying to leave. That was a sign that he was a murder. Or you could be like, well, but that's still probably less spousal abuse than a lot of marriages in which, the husband does not commit massive sex crimes. So I don't know that we should see that as like a sign. One time is still greater than no times. Well, yeah, it's still, I'm not talking, it's not a question of it being bad or not. It's a question of like, is this a sign that he was going to do something like this. And I just don't know that I think it is, right? No. Because he, this is like not, not abnormal, unfortunately, right? And it was not she, Giselle is like, I don't, I didn't notice anything, right? Again, there were

pieces that all of her family members had little bits of it, but nothing that would have really tipped them over, right? And a lot of stuff that in hindsight seems like signs that he was this kind of guy is stuff that Giselle at the time was just like, well, he's just a man, this is what men are like, right? He was aggressive and selfish in bed. She never had an orgasm until that affair in her mid-30s. And he grew increasingly interested in like degradation and name calling during sex the longer they were together. And again, these are things that like, in retrospect we can see is relevant to his crimes, but also it's just stuff that a lot of people do, unfortunately, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Talk to your, like, the young women who have sex with men in your life, and you would be surprised to find that doing this stuff without consent or permission is not really that uncommon. So I can understand why she's thinking, this is just how men are. This is just what sex with men is like. And she's also thinking, like, on the whole, he's a very gentle.

And like, because he, it's not as bad as a lot of relationships she's aware of. All of her friends are jealous of them. Like, they have a reputation in their friends group as being like the perfect couple. That's how Giselle describes it. And I think rather than like looking through their past to be like, oh, there were signs. This man was a monster all the time. The more upsetting, but probably more accurate thing is they're like, no, they really weren't. Like, there was not a lot that people would have put together, you know?

Maybe if everyone had been talking about every weird thing they ever saw. But like most people maybe noticed one weird. moment from this guy in the decades they knew him. And that's just not enough to guess that someone's going to do stuff like what he did, right? Right. And it's really upsetting, but I think it's important to be like, yeah, some people can hide that well who are this kind of predator, right? And that's very scary. And it's easy to think that people who do monstrous things are all monsters, like very extreme people that you can pick out of a lineup very easily. But the reality is that's not the case. No. And she has a lot more story.

of him being like an attentive and loving husband than stories of like weird creepy moments obviously they stay together for like 50 years you know um once the couple retired though and moved to a house outside so they they moved to kind of like a semi rural area because they want a place with a view their finances still aren't good because of all of dominique's debts he like fails his last business is like he takes on debt and he has like his 18 year old son be like on paper the owner of the business because like his credit's too shitty and it winds he winds up he winds up needing a loan from fucking his wife. Anyway, it's bad. Like, he's bad with money, right? So the couple, they're not rich, but they're renting a house in a nice place and they're planning to spend their retirement there. She's got a decent pension. He's got a shittier one. And he's, he is really angry about that. He doesn't seem to understand why she has a better pension than his. And it's because, like, she worked more and was better at her job than how he ever was. He switched careers a bunch, you know? So once they move out of Paris and are living, in the country in this place called Mazon, Dominique starts spending more and more time on the

internet. Sophie Gilbert summarizes this kind of period of time in a review of Giselle's book for the Atlantic. He's constantly on his computer. One day his son's partner walks in on Dominique masturbating behind his desk, which Dominique seems unembarrassed about, so much so that you can't help but wonder whether he'd planned it. In fact, at some point, he set up secret cameras to film each of his two daughters-in-law in the shower. Then he posted the images online. And, you He's posting this to Coco, right? This is how it starts is he's posting. He's posting, we know he posted pictures of his daughter that he or someone else took when she was asleep.

We know that he posted pictures of his daughter's in-law in the shower from like this camera, or if not pictures, but video from these camera footage. And that's how he starts. Before he's being physically violent and drugging people, he starts by with these non-consensual photos and videos, right? So there is like an escalation period. I'd call that violence. I've been like physical. I'm not sorry, I'm not trying to minimize it.

I'm just trying to say like there's a ladder of escalation where he starts with things that do not. Listeners to understand that this guy is an absolute monster. Yeah. On so many levels. Like just that alone is very bad. It's very, very bad. And unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah.

This is how he's warming up effectively. Unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. And there are some probably the biggest. sign was that his email address is fetish 45 fetish. And his family, he's like, kids noticed that as weird.

It's like, why the fuck is this dad's email address? Like, what the hell is going on with him? And again, it's France. And a lot of the weirder, a lot of his like sexual, because he would periodically make some weird sexual comments. And it often got written off as like, well, he's a Frenchman, right? It's France. We're all French, right? Like, this is a talk of sex and talk of, like, desire and whatnot is,

more common and less sort of stigmatized, right? So it also gets kind of, even though everyone in this story is French, and they all think his email handles really weird and kind of off-putting, right? So there are little bits, but it's not enough that you would guess this guy is the kind of predator that he is. The community where Dominique spent so much of his time and the place where he uploaded secret camera footage of his daughters-in-law in the shower was again, Coco, Isaac Stedle's chat site for nice people. Dominique's lawyer would later claim that he started using Coco and

2011. I think he was using it earlier, but I don't entirely know. We know he starts drugging his wife in 2011. Now, in her book, Giselle points out that her husband was caught taking upskirt photos of women in a supermarket, not far from their apartment, quote, as early as 2010, which is the year he retired. So it's the first time that he gets caught taking upskirt photos of women out in a public place to post on Coco. Obviously, he'd been doing it for some time before. I doubt this is the first time he ever tried it. He gets, and they don't take it very seriously in 2010. She never finds out about it. He gets like a hundred-year-old fine. And very little happens at this point in time, right? Is he posting those images on Coco? I don't know if he

posted the ones he got arrested taking, but he was posting other images on Coco. Yes. Okay. From Giselle's memoir, quote, in 2010, the police clearly didn't think filming under women's skirts was terribly serious because he got away with a fine of 100 euros and I never heard a thing about it. She's written that if she had known about this at the time, my life would certainly have changed and she would have, among other things, forced her husband to see a psychologist. It also would have made her more cautious about some of the things she experienced next. So the fact that the police don't take this seriously is a part of why she suffers, right? I'm not putting all the blame on them, but the fact that this is not something the cops care about much is a real problem.

and it is why this is allowed to happen. This makes me so angry, and I need folks to understand, like, it is so common that institutions and authorities just don't give a shit about violence, particularly sexual violence against women and girls. The perpetrators are able to... Boys being boys. Yeah, it's not a big deal, whatever, whatever. Maybe she won it.

Maybe the shirt was short, whatever, whatever. They do nothing. And then that person learns, oh, I can escalate. Oh, I can do this more. And so I always, I mean, I think that she's exactly right that if the people that we think of as like the people who should do something actually gave a fuck and did something, think of all of the violence and escalation that could have been prevented. But like, I mean, I, he is responsible for his crimes for sure. But there is a network of enablers that allowed him to escalate. Yeah, it's systemic.

Yes. And it's like, it's like, it's like a locker room talk or whatever they tried to excuse Donald Trump. Trump's horrific behavior as locker room talk. That's what they're doing here. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I guess this is not harmless.

It's not harmless to take, no, candid photos or take, like, upskirts or whatever of random women in public. Like that, that's not a victimless crime, right?

Even if they don't find out about it. And like paparazzi have been doing that for decades to, to young, young celebrities. And that's disgusting. There's probably a line between that and this too. You could draw. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. You know what else is a line that we should draw? A line between now and you listening to these ads. Oh, that was so dark. Yeah, I don't know, man. I know. It's brutal. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers now at McDonald's made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor. The all-new Red Bull Energizers now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details at McDonald's.ca. At participating Canadian restaurants excluding Quebec.

When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munga shit together and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you, and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain,

as opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five-year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined.

They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive How to Live Forever on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook

on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists

for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman. Not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip this trip? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird.

Adam Scott. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never I have I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept.

You know, Danny McBride fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway to be honest with you. I was like, I was like is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context people don't get it or even know what a circle is you know what I mean like they're like oh what's a state everyone's so dumb except for you and fake right fake and

also not interested or just like oh I've got my life I don't care about your life and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us oh and by the way will feral told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode but he's just so busy listen to hollywood handbook on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, nobody contacted Giselle about her husband taking upskirt photos at the fucking grocery store. And in 2011, Dominique decided to escalate from just posting whatever candid photos and videos of random women and his female family members he could get his hands on and to do something more extreme. Now, he claims that as he grew more interested in the fetish

content on Coco, he started encountering more extreme ideas per an article in the New York Times. he learned from another user the method of drugging his wife for his own sexual pleasure so he could do things to her that she would not permit while unconscious. Over time, he offered her to other men he met online. Dominique would bait the lure by offering photos of his sleeping wife in anonymous chat rooms and when specific users expressed interest, he'd message them directly and make an offer. Come over to his home at an appointed hour where his wife would be drugged unconscious and ready for them. And, God.

What he's, first off, someone online helps him figure out, like, because he had experimented with ether, and he killed someone, probably, probably killed someone unintentionally using it. So he doesn't want to do that again. He's got a prescription for a benz-o. I think it's larazepam. And I think she had a prescription for some sleeping meds that she had been warned only to take a tiny fraction of. And he gets advice from another user who's apparently a registered nurse on Coco, who's like,

don't give her more than this. Here's the perfect dose to knock her out. And it's telling her like you want to mix it with these muscle relaxers because that way she won't clench up. And you want to, if you give her this dose of lorazepam, you know, even if she wakes up, she won't remember what's happening because she's drugged, right? Like that's how benzos can work in high enough doses. Like you go away for days at a time. I remember the first time I ever fucked around recreationally with Xanax.

And this is when I was like 17 or 18. I took like half a four bar. And I remember walking down the street and then it was 26 hours later. And I had no memory of anything that happened in the interim. But I was apparently conscious for a large chunk of it. Benzos and high doses can do that. To that nurse. Fuck you.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's look into that nurse. Let's look into that nurse. I don't know if that specific guy did get caught. But, like, there have been a number of them who were involved in the site and other similar people who had. I hope worse than that for you, man. You were a fucking piece of shit.

You were an absolute monster. Fuck you. I don't know if they found that guy because I did not find a name attached with him in any of the reporting. I'm sure they're looking for him. They found a lot of people, but some people were better at anonymity. I think you're correct there because I myself have followed this case very closely. And I do not recall a nurse being directly brought up in any of this. But fuck you, nurse, whoever you are.

a nurse who taught him like the mixtures to use. That person is so unbelievably complicit. Oh, yeah. I mean, very directly. So much for, so much for do no harm, asshole. It's not just this nurse. There's a whole chat room of people giving him advice and saying like, oh, do this and take a video of it. Do that and take a video of it.

So outside of the dozens of men who ultimately do come to their home or homes in order to rape her while she's drugged, there's God knows how many. at least dozens, maybe hundreds of other men who are commenting, who are urging it on, who are like enjoying masturbating to the content he's making, right? Like, there's a lot of complicity outside of the people who are like legally directly involved. Journalists with CNN obtained access to chat logs that Dominique painstakingly preserved while committing his crimes. Here's how they describe his MO. After initial contact was made on Coco, conversations then moved to Skype. Pelico often carried out preparatory video calls.

calls with the men during which he flipped the camera around to show them his unaware wife. He also shared intimate photos and videos of Giselle, several of which showed her being raped. In some of the messages, several men expressed their admiration for Dominique and shared the desire to do the same to their partners. Another defendant on trial wasn't accused of raping but has been convicted with drugging and raping his own wife. Now, first, there's a lot more to talk about. I want to point out because we started this talking about Isaac Stedle and the website Coco, and we're still talking. This is all happening. on Coco. There's a reason why I grounded this in the site and the founders of these sites,

because as I think I have established, Dominique was a predator well before he got access to Coco. Well before he did anything on the internet, he was a predator, right? He probably would have prayed on his family members and his wife to some extent if he had never encountered this website. Giving him this website was like giving a kid who fantasizes about a mass shooting but lives in a country with no guns. If you were to like go to a country where people can't buy guns and find a kid who's like obsessed with mass shootings and hand him an AR-15 and say, go at it, champ, that's what Isaac Steele does by making Koko. That's what this website is, right? It is a gun that is being handed out to any person like Dominique who wants to use it. And that's the moral issue here, right?

When we talk, because there's, as we talk about the court case, because Steele eventually gets charged for running this website, there's a lot of fucking, what I call, I think I like the dipshit end of like the free speech crusaders, right? Which I consider myself normally who are like, well, you know, you can't go after someone just for hosting a website where this stuff happens. And I'm fucking sorry. If I were to

buy and or own like a large venue and run like a farmer's market or something out of it, right? I own a building and I say if you pay me a hundred bucks, you can set up every Saturday, you can set up a little booth and sell your wares. And it started out as people like selling like grocery, like food they'd grown

or whatever, like little crafts. And then one day some guy comes in with a bunch of like ghost guns and like maps of a bunch of local schools. And another day a guy comes in with like a table full of like CSAM, like fucking child sex abuse images. And I keep taking their hundred dollars and knowingly let those guys sell their products out of the building I own. I would go to prison. Right?

It's not a free speech issue. You are owning and operating a place that has directly been like optimized to enable this kind of behavior and you're very well aware that that's what people are using the site for. You don't have any kind of free speech argument in my fucking mind anymore, right? That's where I land on this morally. I heart agree. You really summarize the kind of complexities of this argument well. You know, we're all sort of in the digital rights space.

And I think it's complicated because this is all, the conversations about it today are happening against the backdrop of people trying to, you know, legislate the internet, age gate the internet, all of the, that. And so the conversations are particularly- Right. And get rid of fucking encryption and shit. Yeah. Exactly. However, there's got to be standards, right? There has to be standards. Yes. Sorry. No, I just really agree. And I think there's been such a big complex argument within the digital rights and open internet movement about exactly what you just summarized. Like, where is the line? I would argue that perhaps

the line is the one that you just made, right? The line where you just made, right? The line where, where it's a legal content that is harming and abusing women and girls, perhaps that's the line. And if that's like the main use of your website is varying, allowing people to commit varying kinds of crimes against other people anonymously. If you are deliberately running a site to do that and enabling its function, like you are doing something wrong. And it's the, you know, this is not the main issue, certainly not with the series of crimes being committed against Giselle Pelico. But it is like in terms of the fucking freedom of speech thing, if you care about freedom of speech, no one is more of a threat to our ability to communicate freely on the internet, to encryption, to privacy, then people like Isaac Stedle who like force us to have to have these fucking legal debates by handing out the equivalent of a fucking gun to a kid who wants to shoot up a school, right? Like that's what he's doing here. Anyway, not the primary issue, but important to say.

So back to Giselle. Obviously, this goes on him bringing anonymous men over to rape her while she is drugged for a decade, right? At least 200 accounts of what she describes as gang rape over the years, often involving multiple people in a similar night. There are, of course, physical consequences to all of this, even though she can't remember what's happening. Very significant ones. Jiselle would wake up on many days with severe brain fog and would all. often, like, not have memories of, like, the day after, too, because that's kind of what huge doses of benzos can do, right? You know, you can lose days at a time. But she did notice

she would wake up, and there's no nice way to say this, leaking mysterious fluids, right? And I think this is a mix of things. Probably a lot of it is lubricant, but she would wake up, like, wet, and was very concerned about this. So she went to the doctor. In addition to the fact that she's got brain fog, she's losing days, she has a lot of pelvic pain, and she's waking up wet. So she goes to the doctor repeatedly. She gets MRIs and fucking cat scans and all sorts of shit. And the doctors keep telling her everything is fine. And one of the bastards here, we talked about the police and how they fucked up, the medical establishment and how it treats aging women is a side bastard here. And I'm going to quote from Giselle's autobiography.

I mean all women, to be honest. Yeah. But this is, I'm not denying that. She's talking, yeah, yeah. I'll quote it here. I spent a decade having endless medical examination. blood tests, scans, multiple courses of vaginal peceries, neurological tests, 10 years of going to see doctors who looked at me as if to say that at my age, a woman can't expect much anymore. She ought to just relax and let time continue its demolition work, never wondering what might be going on, never attempting a diagnosis. And Dominique, always there by my side, he knew. And one of the things she'll point out, like, I'm waking up wet and they'll be like,

well, this just happens to old ladies, you know? You're just losing control, you know, it's fine. Don't worry about it, right? wear a diaper. And I know this is the French medical system, but honestly, you're a fool if you think her experience would have been any better in the U.S. or the U.K., for that matter, like, really, most places I can think of. It's like medical gaslighting where essentially they're just saying, oh, she's just up,

you're just uptight, it's the problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. During one doctor's visit, when her physician made a note of the fact that she had severe bruising in her, like, pelvic area, her husband had the gall to quip, what have you been getting up to during the day. Oh my God. Dominique. Yeah. And of course we know that, you know, what Giselle was doing had nothing to do here, right, and everything to do with how Dominique spent his nights on Coco, right? That's what's actually at fault here. But she doesn't know and she's not going to for years. And we'll talk about how she learns what happens next and what happens to

Isaac Steele and the Coco and at least one other founder of a website that's enabled this horrible behavior. We'll talk about all that as well as a different website, Motherless and the Rape Academy, as CNN called it, that it spawned, in part two. I shouldn't have gotten such an upbeat part two there. Bridget, how you doing? It's pretty rough, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. I think you're covering this with a lot of, grace and nuance, which I appreciate. But this conversation fucking sucks. This guy can eat shit. It has to happen, though. He's a real asshole. We have to talk about these things.

And, you know, when we let Bridget know the topic for this week, one of the things that Bridget and I both agreed on is that the way this has been covered in the mainstream media has lacked empathy. And the way Robert wrote this script is quite the opposite. There's so much empathy in this script. And I think it's important to cover these stories, not just with the, the facts but with your feelings. And this is horrific.

I've been on bastards a few times that I don't think y'all have ever reached out to be, to give a heads up before. Heads up. Yeah. We usually don't. Because you know like with this show, genocide, murder, poisoning, rape, like, that's all child abuse. We talk about that stuff a lot because it's just, it's our milieu.

But this, this is just such another level. I mean, I was talking to my partner about it, and just one of the things she said is that, like, yeah, it's kind of just impossible to ever, like, fully trust a man. Yeah, it is. You never know. You never know. You never know. And I don't know what else to take from this story. Yeah.

I mean, I'm glad that y'all are talking about it. I also, I mean, I don't want to be too much of a downer, but I remember watching the coverage of this case in real time. And so much of the conversation was, well, they're married, can a husband really? assault a wife. I just don't think we're, yeah. There's a number of quotes like that. Yeah. And that was the one of the dominant narratives that I remember watching in real time. And I just don't think that we're having the right conversation about sexual violence. And I think that people, it might be easy to hear some of the more kind of historical bastards and be like,

this guy was a genocidal, homicidal maniac. He sucks. But then when you hear about somebody committing sexual violence to domestically to their wife. I think a lot of people are like, it's just a domestic issue. This is a marriage. It's intimate. It's their business. It doesn't have anything to do with a wider societal issue. Yeah.

And this couldn't be more obviously a wider societal issue, not just the fact that like the police and the medical establishment had little parts in this. But the fact that all of these, they know at least like 70 different men partook in these like rape things, 50 were, were convicted, but there's like 70 or so that they, they had pictures or videos or evidence of that, because Dominique's documenting all of it, all of them within 30 miles of their home. These are not men pulled from all over France. These are in some cases like guys that she saw at the grocery store and like recognized.

He would encourage people to like, he would tell some of them if they were like, wanted to, you know, show up in a couple of nights. He would tell them where she was during the day so that they could, like, could, like drive by or walk by or like go into a store she was at and like see her and like meet her surreptitiously without her knowing. And that's that's the thing is that like this was not casting a wide net across every pervert in France. This was just how many guys happened to be on this website within like a 40 minute drive of her home who are immediately willing to be like, yeah, I'll rape this lady, right? That's the systemic part of it. Right. Like you can't, if you actually

look into what happened in this story, you cannot walk away without making the conclusion that there are a shocking number of just random dudes in any given society who would, if they felt like it was safe, easily and absolutely rape an unconscious drug woman. Like if they didn't have to do the drugging themselves, like a startling number of guys were down to do that in this community in France. I don't know any reason to suspect that it would have been different if it had happened in Duluth, right? Or fucking Osaka for that.

Well, probably some cultural differences there maybe. I don't know. But it's incredibly. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have anything else to say about it today. We'll talk more in part too, I guess. I'm going to go stand outside during our break to feel the sun. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Sorry, everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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