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

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Robert sketches out the international network of websites where sex criminals ply their trade and advertise, and concludes the story of Dominique Pelicot.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where this week we're talking about some websites that enable horrific sex crimes and the actions of Dominique Pelico, who is just a monster. You know what was in the part one of this episode, right? I probably don't need to remind you. I mean, I guess I should. But first I should introduce our guest, Bridget Todd. Bridget. Welcome back.

Also, I'm sorry. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a little bit of a rough one, but still happy to be here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is a rough one and a podcast that only does rough ones. Do you have any plugables? You want to plug up top here? I do, and I've kind of been thinking about it as we've been having this conversation. You know, I just published an audiobook with Simon & Schuster called Love It First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy, where we look at AI companions and people who use AI for things like romance, emotional support. and sex. And some of the marketing of the companies that make and market AI companions, they really lean into this very toxic attitude that women and girls should just be for the taking and that you can, in fact, use AI to create an AI companion who will do what your girlfriend slash wife won't do. And I don't know. Something about this conversation is just really

making me think about that dynamic, the dynamic that every woman and girl should just be yours for the taking that that should be the world that people live in. Well, and just the, the attitude that like women are not partners, they're like, almost like a vending machine that dispenses sex or emotional comfort, right, as opposed to like a person. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what this story is about, too, unfortunately.

There is a real direct tie between the AI girlfriend stuff that's going on and, yeah, the crimes in this, you know. And in the same way, like, obviously not every, plenty of people who are seeking AI companionship are not sex criminals. I'm the same way Dominic Pelico is. I don't mean to suggest that. But there's like, there's a line between these things, right? There's similar motivations that are pushing the people who are into this weird sleep fetish thing

where you definitely don't want these women to know that you're using them as sexual objects. There's a line between that and people like wanting to take the human out of having a human partner, I think, probably. Anyway, I would absolutely agree with you. Yeah. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of I'm just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw.

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It's the U.S. Open, which means the tennis world is about to lose its mind, and I'm here for every second of it. Join me, Renee Stubbs, on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast as I break it all down. The matches that matter, the drama that doesn't, and the stories everyone's talking about. No cliches, no sugar coding, just host analysts from someone who's actually been there. Coco looking real good. Her serve looks so much smoother than it has in the past. I was really happy to see Eager back to what she looked like a couple of years ago when she was winning dominantly.

Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Michael Imperioli. I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the. other families. It's about the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What's in the tunnels? Goldbar, Chauvinich. It could be worth half a billion. Starring Steve Sharipa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperiole. How far you're prepared to go? Depends how far you are. Listen to Underground Zero on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we left off last

episode at the start of the 20 teens when Dominique Pelico started drugging his wife and using Coco to recruit dozens of anonymous men, all of whom lived within 15 to 30 miles of their home, to sexually assault her in the dead of night. Before we get further into this story, and it's important for you to know that just as Dominique was not alone in his crimes, Coco was not the only place where men were meeting online to do this sort of thing. In fact, Dominique is a distinct outlier within the community of sleep content aficionados, both in that he commit, I should say, non-consensual sleep content aficionados,

both in that he commits actual abuse rather than fantasizing about it, and that his years of experience as a rapist and murderer meant that by the time Coco came around, he already had experience drugging women, assaulting them, and covering his tracks while committing sex crimes. Most of the guys who get interested in this stuff start at zero, and they have to find a community of like-minded abusers before they can offend.

And most don't offend directly. They offend by partaking, purchasing, you know, supporting other people, because most guys just don't have the, I don't know, guts seems like the wrong word. Most of them are not willing to cross that line, you know, which is still, they're still abusing. They're participating just as someone who shares CSAM, right, is participating in the abuse of children, even if they're not making it or directly molesting children themselves.

I'm not saying that to reduce their culpability. There was an investigation that went very viral earlier this year by CNN. In the term they used for the website they were looking into was an online rape academy. and that academy was the website motherless.com, which is, I mean, just from the name, you can tell this is a place where some upsetting stuff happens. The website domain was first registered in 2005, two years after Coco, but nothing went up there until 2008 when a guy named Joshua Lang founded that in an LLC in New York City. Motherless billed itself as a moral-free file host where anything legal is hosted forever. although their definition of legal was quite expansive

and included a lot of illegal things right legal deserves all of the quotation marks there's a shortage of quotation marks now because of how many we had to put around legal on that one yeah could not like size 78 font bold

every page on motherless dot com feature this disclaimer all content posted this site is 100% user contributed all the legal uploads will be reported if you want to blame someone for the content on this site. Blame the freaks of the world. Not us.

Feel free to join the community and upload your goodies. Don't blame us. Please upload the illegal porn that you're making. It's not all illegal. I don't even know if to say most of it is. And a lot of it is, by the way, when they're referring to illegal uploads, they're not even talking about, like, sex crimes. They're talking about, like, people who are taking porn someone else produced and

uploading it and breaking, like, copyright laws, right? Because people, and again, most of the stuff pointed here is not like a criminal content, right? But a lot of it, an increasing number of it is. And in case you're curious, here was motherless.com's logo. If you can't see it, you know, because you're not on the Netflix, it's, I mean, there's, I found a 2011 California civil suit that described the logo pretty well as, quote, a depiction of a mother holding a child's hand with a large red circle with a cross through it around it and seemingly ejaculating phallic symbol protruding from it. Like the motherless.com is sort of looks like a dick that's ejaculating because it's got this like white background behind it.

It's next to the mom with a little kid and like a circle with a cross or with a slash through it thing. The Ghostbusters thing. Yeah, like a Ghostbusters thing with like a mom and a kid. Yeah. Sedfiling also did it. The website had a separate logo on some certain pages that was just a young girl in ballerina shoes swinging from the roof in a matter I can only describe as upsetting.

Yeah, you'll see it here. It's not super great. I don't like that. Nope. Don't like that. God. So, the users on motherlist.com did indeed post, well, goodies, as the founder of the website, described it.

An investigation by Caitlin Roper on the website, Collective Shout, gives a good overview of the content offerings. We found a legal hidden camera video. Some include in images or videos of women often purported. to be perpetrators' female family members in the shower or toilet. We found hidden camera videos where women were filmed having sex, apparently unaware they were being filmed, and often overtly marketed as such. Some videos depicted women blindfolded and secretly recorded during sex with their male partner, unable to see the camera.

One particularly chilling video, Name, gets fucked on hidden camera, included the woman's full name in the title, with a photo of the woman on her wedding day, captioned 25 years later. Then follows footage of her having sex with her partner, apparently unaware she is being filmed. So, yeah, that's motherless. Now, it won't surprise you to hear that this created a river of lawsuits. The largest of these were generally DMCA violations, because, again, a huge amount of the content here is just repackaged, like, professionally made born, that someone kind of files the serial numbers off and says, oh, this is totally real. So at least there's that.

A lot of these sleep videos were, like, porn that consenting adults made where they're act. acting and people would just upload it and say it was a real video, but far too much of it was real and often really illegal. In 2012, Dutch citizen Aidan Cobon posted topless photos of Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old girl to motherless as part of a blackmail scheme. Todd had started using video chat services in 2009 to 2010, and a group of pedophiles quickly started trying to groom her. When one guy managed to convince her after like a year to take her shirt off on webcam, he screened cap the images and used those to start blackmailing her to do things and take other pictures. Things escalated over a two-year period until Todd took her own life in 2012.

In the fallout, Aden was charged with a ton of different crimes and ultimately sentenced to 13 years in prison. That's just one of these cases, right? And you see some of the stuff that we're seeing with Coco. One thing I want to emphasize here is that motherless is a place where this guy is like posting what I guess we'd call revenge porn or like blackmail content, but it's not where the relationship starts. The, like, these people, like, Todd started interacting with this person on like a video chat website. I'm not sure if it was chat roulette, but chat roulette started around this time.

Yeah. And the reason why a lot of this starts in 2009 or 10 is that that's when we first start getting a lot of anonymous video chatting clients that a lot of kids are using. And like the whole thing with chat roulette was like, our friend of the pod Cody Johnson did like a parody song called you're going to see a dick if you're on chat roulette because people would just expose themselves on it like and a lot of kids got like shit like that happened a lot on chat roulette now yeah i was on chat roulette and omagal and it really would be you would you would get matched with somebody who was already masturbating you wasn't even there wasn't even like a conversation

it was already happening and i this is also a good place to highlight the difference between a set like chat roulette and cocoa or motherless were like a lot of bad stuff happens on chat roulette and this kid does get abused. I don't know if it was chat roulette, but because they're on a video chatting site. But that wasn't the purpose of chat roulette or these other sites. They weren't built for like weird sex stuff. That was just signed of a thing that it was a side effect of an obvious side effect that they should have done more to deal with. But it wasn't the whole purpose of the site. And the site was not deliberately sort of like leaning in to providing freaks a way to masturbate in front of kids. That was not the purpose of chat roulette. And I don't really think there's much in the way of

like blame to a sign other than like we guys should have known that would have been a thing right like that that was a predictable problem but it is a different kind of thing than like with cocoa right now again motherless is not the only or primary place where abuse occurred here todd's grooming and blackmail took place in a distributed system of websites and online communities and it was she was abused by what i would describe as a community of abusers that had coalesced around the first webcam chatting sites from 2009 to 2012. And some of those people would hang out in motherless that was a major gathering space of them. But it is important you understand, as important as individual sites may be to some of these specific cases, none of these abusers are totally

reliant on any one of these sites. And one of them gets shut down. They find other places because the problem is much bigger than there being bad websites where bad men can do things, right? These communities are independent of these websites, to some extent, at least. And certainly these individual abusers are. A contemporary vice report by Patrick McGuire summarized, quote, pedophiles find young girls on webcam chat sites like blog TV, could coerce them to taking their clothes off, screenshot their images clandestinely, and share the screencaps with each other in a sick bartering system. So motherless then is not the hub of such abuse. It was instead a place to brag about it and bask in the adulation of other sex criminals. And what about the founder of this site,

Joshua Lang, right? We should probably look into him a little bit. And, Unfortunately, like Isaac Stedle, his early life, I don't know, I got nothing, right? He's basically a ghost. He's as much of a ghost as you can be while still being on the Internet. It's interesting to me how many of these guys are very concerned with their own personal privacy. Also, kind of worth pointing out. Wildly violating the privacy of others. Yeah.

Huh. Interesting. Various legal filings list him as the owner, operator, and sole employee of motherless.com. The website collective shout collected a number of these filings and point to a 2018 case Ventura Content v. Motherless, which provided this background that's basically all I know about Joshua. When Lang started motherless, he uploaded around 700,000 pictures and videos that users had uploaded to a different site to fill out his own, right? So number one, he's committing a lot of DMCA violations and stuff. This immediately, like, this is not user-created.

That was always kind of a farce. The idea that these are all created by users, that was a marketing term. That wasn't real. Joshua was started by stealing. a bunch of content from a bunch of other places. And that included a lot of illegal content, because in 2018, Joshua E. Lang of Tolano, Illinois, was convicted of CSAM-related crimes and given a 45-year sentence for having a massive amount of pictures of kids getting abused, right? We don't 100% know that this was the guy who founded motherless.com. That's still kind of a mystery. But the people at, or the author of that collective shout investigation, seems fairly convinced that this is the same Joshua, and I have to admit there are some striking

similarities between what the DOJ claims this guy did and what you would expect from someone who ran a website like motherless. Per the DOJ's indictment, quote, Lange admitted that he used the miners to engage in sexually explicit content while the miners were asleep and produced videos and photographs in his basement of such conduct. He also admitted to drugging them, so he's drugging kids and filming sexually explicit content. with him, right? We don't know that this is the guy who founded Motherless, but it seems really likely. Sounds like his M.O. for sure. Sounds like it probably was. Uh, sleep pornography exploded on

motherless during the same years that Dominique was active in Coco over in France. It started around 2010 or 11, right? There's, I don't know entirely why, but that is really when this stuff takes off to a big degree. And it seems to be consistent in a couple of different countries. I mean, one reason is that this does coincide with the popularity of video chat apps and the growing ubiquity of smartphones. To be honest, if I had to think of one reason why 2010 to 11 is why all of these like non-consensual sleep fetish porn communities get started and people start doing this stuff is because that's the first time when a lot of people had access to like smartphones that could record decent video that they just would have in their pocket all the time. And it's when there's like a lot of video chat apps that are easy to use. the internet's fast enough for that kind of stuff. So some of it's just like technically this was the first time in which a lot of this stuff was possible.

Most of the men who found themselves drawn to this kind of content had, again, less experienced drugging and assaulting women than Dominique Policoe. And so a smaller subset of more experienced users made money and clout providing these newer people with the tools of the trade. Per CNN, quote, one motherless user claimed to be running a business selling a dispatching sleeping liquids to any address in the world, The man who said he was based in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave on the North African coast, said on his telegram account that it would cost 150 euros, approximately $175, for a bottle of the liquid that he said was tasteless and odorless. Your wife won't feel a thing and won't remember anything.

So, again, we don't know if that stuff was real. We know he was mailing stuff because he, like, posted pictures of it and people seemed to buy it. There were people saying it worked. I don't think they've tracked this guy down or know exactly what that was, but he's not the only person. selling and offering advice on sleeping drugs via motherless.com. And we know the same thing is happening in Coco around the same time. It's how Dominique gets started. And it's a major thing people are doing on this site, is buying and selling the tools of

the trade of rape, right? That's a major thing in Motherless in these, like, communities. Yeah. You talking about how this is really an enterprise. It's not just, you know, it's a business. It's a business ecosystem. They're hustling. Yeah.

It's a side hustle. Oh. Men who got into this as a business would advertise their content with tags like hashtag passed out and hashtag eye check. The latter was a hallmark of all these videos. The eye check is like one of the things guys who are into this really demand in all of their videos. And it's like a moment in each of them when a cameraman will like lean in and pull up the eyelid to check the eyes of a sleeping victim to make sure they're unconscious. That's like a major hallmark of all of this content. I guess. Some I-check videos were found to have amassed over 50,000 views. So again, this is not

massive in terms of like internet content, but that's a lot of guys who are watching a drugged woman for their own sexual gratification on a single website, right? That's deeply upsetting. Prevayers tended to also sell access to live streams in which users could watch and even vote on abusing drugged women and girls in real time for the equivalent of $20,000. a person paid in cryptocurrency. Of course. There's always a crypto thread to this kind of nonsense. Always a crypto angle?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That CNN report went viral earlier this year for describing Motherless as a Rape Academy. I actually have some issues with that terminology. We'll talk about that in a little bit. The article noted that Motherless received 62 million visits in a single month, February. Now, that is a lot. I should note, obviously, there's a lot. lot of different content on this, most of which is not illegal, and a lot of which, at least,

does not inherently involve anything like violent or abusive, although it's all very unpleasant stuff, but a lot of it's just like absolute fantasy shit. This is also that number, that number 62 million visits has been misinterpreted as like, there were articles where people would be like, 62 million men attended a rape academy, or six million men also. I've seen it printed a lot as like six million men actually attended a rape academy. And again, there's not an academy. Like, I think people literally thought there was an actual, like, school where, like, classes were being sold online. That's not what's going on here.

And I don't really think Rape Academy is the right way to describe mother lists. I would describe it best as a Rape Craigslist. That's what's going on here, right? Or Facebook ads or whatever. I forget what they call it. Sorry. I remember when that happened when I think a social media user. It was just earlier this year, yeah.

Like, like, misreported the number. and I hated the conversation that resulted because the number really was inflated. If it was, it's not like, yeah. And I think that what bothered me about that conversation was that the actual numbers that CNN reported, I thought were bad enough. But then it turned into a conversation about like, oh, well, feminists are lying about this issue because the number got kind of misinterpreted and misreported on social media. So I really think I missed an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation. about sexual violence, but we whiffed it because of that misreporting. And it's really a shame. That whole conversation just really devolved in a bad way. I agree with you about it being called

a rape academy. I think they were quoting somebody who was quoted in the article, but it just gave a really inconsistent, inaccurate version of what was actually happening. And I think it did the whole conversation of disservice. Yeah, I agree. And I also think it led people to believe, that a different kind of harm was being perpetuated here. Because the problem, and I think the reason why they went with the Rape Academy framing is that it seems to tie this more into like Andrew Tate, who really does operate a rape academy or did. And so I think that's part of why they did it.

But the reason why this site was so dangerous and contributed to so many bad things is the same with Coco. It's not like an academy. It's more like a Craigslist, right? It's a place where people can buy and sell and advertise access to illegal content and tools to making illegal content and commit. sex crimes, right? That's what's happening here, and that's really bad, right? That said, it's also not unique. People do this not just on motherless and cocoa. Shit like this happens

on 4chan. You can even find pieces of this happening on places like Reddit, right? Those places, particularly Reddit, has a lot more moderation. They attempt to crack down on it, but that stuff still happens elsewhere, right? Yeah. Um, shit fucking... Rape Craigslist doesn't have the same ring to it, though. Like, yeah. And I mean, fuck, the kind of shit that gets sold on Facebook ads sometimes is pretty, sketchy as well. So, again, and part of why I think it's a mistake to do that is that, framing this website as a rape academy makes it seem unique and like a massive and critical hub in this system that is like teaching men, as opposed to like, no, it's just sort of one of the easiest places

for guys like this to gather and like shell it. And that's a problem. The site was a problem and needed to go away. but it's not like a unique load-bearing piece of sex criminal infrastructure. And that's important for people to understand if they want to actually fight this, right? There's a lot of sites that these guys were using. I mean, some of those early accounts is like the guy who was selling the sleeping potions or whatever the fuck. He's advertising on motherless, but he's actually operating his business out of Telegram,

which is a much larger and much more widely mainstream-accepted app that's run by a billionaire, right? And it seems like most of the people who ran businesses or sold content on motherless were trying to push users to their telegram channels as often as possible in some other places. The same thing's happening on Coco. A lot of people on Coco are pushing folks to their telegrams in order to actually do business. Yeah. So now we return to Coco and the story of Dominique Pelico. In 2018, Coco was involved in its first major crime of national significance. Not the first one, but the first one that, like, became reported on, right?

A 55-year-old man, Michel Solosi, agreed to meet up with a 22-year-old man on Coco. Solosi was attacked by this man and beaten to death in what a court concluded had been a homophobic attack. The murderer was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Now, at the time this happened, for a couple of years, there had been different, like, gay rights organizations in France that had been complaining about Coco and talking about it as a hub of homophobic violence. They'd been trying to warn people away from using it as a hookup app. So there were already activists who were pointing out before any of this stuff went viral, this place is really dangerous, and they were not listened to. We'll talk more about that later.

The next year, 2019, a man from Brest in northwest France was convicted of exchanging videos of children being raped over the without her knowledge chat room, the same place Dominique Palico frequented. These cases and thousands of less famous cases of harassment, revenge, c-s-sahom and homophobic beatings linked to Coco by that point, inspired the creation of a petition to ban or otherwise regulate the site. Thousands of French citizens signed. Nothing was done.

For his part, Isaac Steele, founder of the site, took no action to moderate his platform. Users were sometimes banned if their behavior elicited legal threats or serious complaints. He had moderators. People got banned. But along with banning, Isaac instituted a fee of 10 euros for users to reinstate. their band accounts. I think again, I think he stole that from something awful because it's the same basic thing, right? And when you do it that way, that's not moderation. That's fundraising.

Yeah. And incentivizing, I think. And incentivizing to an extent. Yeah. You know what I like to incentivize. Products. Yeah. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about. All in one place and it's free. I heart radio. Whatever you want to hear. Listen anytime. Anywhere.

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Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

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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. Actually, can you help me shape this?

How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this around? 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 expect. 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 down the hallway, to be honest with you. 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? They're like, oh, what's a state. Everyone's so dumb. 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 Ferrell told us personally he loves the show

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Solid question. I don't think it exists. Yeah, no, it does not exist. So we're getting up to the moment where the story of what Dominique Polico has been doing to Giselle comes out, right? That happens in 2020. One day in the early days of the pandemic, I think before the lockdown, Dominique Pelicoe went out to the grocery store and was caught for the second time we know of taking upskirt videos of unsuspecting women. A security guard not only detained him but called the police. So whatever, something about his behavior, and I think it was his nonchalance, how

unconcerned he was that he had been caught doing this, made the security to think like, I need, this needs to be escalated. This is more serious. And I need, and for her part, Giselle has given a lot of credit to the security guard. She's like talked about wanting to meet him personally to thank him. I don't know if she actually has. But he went beyond just like what he was supposed to do for his job and emphasized to the police, something is wrong with this guy. You need to look into this. This is not a, this is

whatever he's into is more than upskirts. He's doing something else, right? I think is kind of the idea that he just becomes convinced there is something more to this story than what was already bad, right? And the police, once they start talking to him, notice the same thing that like, wow, this guy is really nonchalant and chill about being arrested for a public sex crime. And that really disturbs them. And as a result, the police call in a psychologist, Dr. Layette to interview Dominique immediately after his arrest, which is unusual. I don't think that's like the norm, and it points to the fact that something about his attitude is really upset a number of people at this point. Per the BBC, Dr. Liette noted how breezily he dismissed his crime, like a

genteel grandfather caught pocketing a few cigarettes. Dr. Laiet detected the dissonance in the man's behavior and the strong implication that he was hiding something more serious. He told the police this one was worth further inspection, or closer inspection. So, at this point, couple of people, including a psychiatrist, have been like, no, there's, there's, we need to really look into this guy. Like something very, very serious and extensive is wrong with this man. He's done more than this one crime we know he committed. So they go to his home and they confiscate his hard drive, his computer, and multiple phones. Because Dominique was providing content to this large community on Coco, he had documented everything in startling detail. He had carefully archived

with both photo and video proof, not just dozens and dozens of men raping his wife at his insistence, but he had archived conversations between them. When he had like planned meetups and stuff to have them come over, Coco doesn't save that stuff, right? It's supposed to be anonymous.

He archived all of this content. And so police- Are these like trophies for him? I mean, they're also advertising. I don't think he's making money off of this, but the clout surely matters. And he also, he gets off on other men raping his wife when she's asleep, right?

That's what I'm referring to. This allows him to recruit. Yeah, he allows him to relive what he's done. I do suspect also because of how he behaves in court, I think part of this was he always knew there was a chance he would be caught and he wanted to not be the only one to go down. I do think he wanted to be able to take these other guys down with him if he got caught. Please don't mistake that for me giving him any credit. I just think that is a he didn't want to be the only guy punished for this, right?

Right. No, that was him wanting to share the blame. Right, right, right. Which does not make him a, that is not a motivation. No, in no shape or form. No, he's still scum of the earth. Yeah. In some ways, maybe even makes it worse that he clearly is thinking so like coolly and logically about all of the shit he's doing. Yeah. So he has basically handed them both the case against him and all these other men on a silver platter.

And the police start using the information he'd gathered to invest. investigate them and he'd been bringing over. Now, there's a break that, because he, he bails out or whatever, and goes home, and he, like, contacts Jezelle. And he's like, hey, I'm in trouble and, you know, I got caught. He first, he just tells her about the upscrut photos. And she's pissed. She thinks, well, the police are going to want to, because the police say they need to talk to her, but not for like a week or two, I guess as they're getting stuff in order, this is another point where they should be criticized. Because after he gets arrested and he knows he's fucked, because they have all of his hard drives, he knows he knows he's. He knows he. He knows he. he is going to go away forever. He knows this is all going to come out. He drugs and rapes her again and has someone come over to rape her again. He does that one last time. After, and again, the police, I don't think ever should have let him go home once they have this stuff. No, what the fuck?

Like, for whatever. I understand the thinking of like, we can't. Like, I get the thinking. We don't want to do this right away. But leaving this woman and her family alone with this guy, come the fuck on. Knowing that he. is the abuser. To give them a little bit of grace, I don't know how quickly they realized it was Giselle. Okay. Right. And I don't 100% know at what point, but there was definitely a gap of

several days, at least after which they knew it was her, and he was still free. And they had they had them come into the station together and they separate them immediately, right? They take him in the custody, and then they talk to Giselle, right? So, And this is just it. But to go back to your example from part one, that's like if they found out some guy was a mass shooter and sent him sent him to be to a school. Yeah. Or if they knew some guy had been committing a series of murders in the woods and they didn't know where his gun was and they just like let him go home for a couple of weeks while they get their ducks in a row. I don't know.

I don't know exactly what to compare it to. But like it's really weird that they do that. You gotta be a real dirty motherfucker to be like, I'm gonna, I want one last one before I go away. You gotta be a real sick puppy. Yeah. I mean, it just also reinforces what a monster he is. And I, again, the police, I don't think handle this well. I think there's a lot of issues with this initial part.

That's horrible. They do. They do. They are responsible for this woman getting raped. Again, it's their fault. Fuck them. Fuck all of them. Fuck the entire system.

that is unbelievably evil. Yeah, it's really bleak. And I'm guaranteeing nothing happened to those assholes who didn't do their fucking jobs. No, I mean, they get... Of course not. And in her narrative, too, they get a lot of credit because they caught him and stuff. And, yeah, I don't... Again, and I don't 100% know when they...

But there definitely was a gap at which they knew she was his primary victim and he was still free, right? So the police sit her down because they have to talk to her now. And again, she has gone to the police state. just thinking my husband got in trouble for being like a weird perverted old man and I'm and she's thinking I'm going to make him apologize to the woman and all this stuff right make him go to a psychologist and then the cops sit her down and they're like or this one police officer sits her down and she's like hey do you think you know your husband so well that he can't hide things from you and she's like yeah and she's like do you think your husband is a good man she's like yes I think he's a very good man are you and then they ask are you swingers do you guys swap partners and that's the other thing maybe they didn't fully understand And what was, although they had the chats too. So, like, again, I, the, the police ask, like, are you guys, do you guys partner swap, right? And as, as Jaze later recalled, quote, I heard myself stammering that swinging was inconceivable for me. I couldn't bear other men touching me.

I needed feelings, right? And I don't know how you'd respond to this. Maybe this is the first point they, they 100% knew. Again, I have trouble believing that. But the police officer then, I don't know what response is the right response to give, but he says to her very bluntly, I am going to show you photos and videos that are not going to please you, right? Yeah, which and then he shows her evidence of what it happened. And she is shocked, doesn't believe it at first, and then it becomes kind of impossible to deny because there's so many photos, right? but it's this I mean I can't even imagine what that that aware like accepting that is like

especially in the space of a couple of minutes at a police station realizing the foundation of this life that you've built for half a century and raised three kids with and have multiple grandkids with this person that he has been doing this to you I I can't even comprehend what that the effect that would have on you and all. the rest of the family, by the way, once they all find out, which we'll talk about later. This hits the family like a fucking bomb. It's horrifying. Yeah.

I just not to go full like fuck the police, but I remember reading about this about the police asking if they were swingers. And to your point about they would have by now had the chats that confirmed that this was not consensual, I still think there is some attitude, even from the police that we're hearing that this must somehow be consensual. There must have been something. to even though we're reading in black and white the evidence that that is clearly not the case. This clearly must be some sort of game between you two that you knew about, right? Right. Also, I'm not exactly familiar with like the French police system, but I. No, there I'm like.

But, you know, why was like a random cop the one delivering this traumatic information to her? That random cop was not properly trained. They bring in a, they bring in a psych. They do bring in a psych. But the cop is the one who says that thing to her, right? But I don't, he may have, I don't know, because there are police and stuff who have in different countries training. Like, I don't know if he was trained for these kinds. Like, I don't know.

Because that delivery is a little insane to me. I don't know. I honestly don't know what you say. I don't know how you deliver that news. But it just seemed like a little bit of like a mic drop situation, which is not very gentle in my opinion. But I don't, I not, just to say, I only have a bachelor's in psychology, so I like don't, I know how you would handle that. But like, I don't know. Also, I feel like it would have been better if the person delivering the news or was a woman.

Yeah. But I'm just doing opinions at this point. So, per an article in The Independent by Jane Dalton about this experience, the first photo showed a man raping a woman who had been laid on her side and dressed up in a suspender belt. That's you in this photo, the policeman said. He then showed her another photo, and another after that from a collection of images that Dominique Pelico had took up his wife over the years when he regularly knocked her unconscious by lacing her food and drink with drugs. Miss Pelico could not believe that the inert woman in the photos was her. I did not recognize the individuals, nor this woman. Her cheek was so flabby. Her mouth so limp. She was a rag doll.

She writes in her new book recounting her story of survival and courage. Fifty-three men had come to our house to rape me. She recalls being told by the officer. Laurent Perre. God, that's so awful. Yeah, it's just, I mean, the, and the sheer extent of the crime, the number of men who were involved to some degree, the number of men that they actually were able to, like, identify by name. That all comes out over a period of months, right, as they're realizing who each of these guys are and kind of, like, figuring them out.

It becomes this story, which becomes, in France, is known as the Mazan rape case, right? it becomes an immediate major national story as soon as this gets out into the media. And Giselle initially stays anonymous. She has a right to do that. Rape victims have the right to be anonymous in France. And so initially she's using a pseudonym but also that means that the names of the perpetrators and whatnot. The alleged perpetrators at this point are also being kept from the public, right? Like they also are obfuscated to a degree because of like she of her anonymity, right?

And that also means that the case itself is going to be anonymous. Well, because they haven't been convicted yet, I think, is kind of the idea, right? Once the public hears about this, it sparks immediate outrage, right? And, you know, that outrage spends the gamut of things, you know, the patriarchy and rape culture, but also the website Coco becomes targeted for very obvious reasons. In response to this new unwanted publicity and notoriety, Isaac Steele moved the registration of his website to the Island of Guernsey, a self-governing committee that uses the dot g-g-url. There were immediate calls to prosecute Steadle, but for the Guardian, holding Steadle accountable for the site he created

also faced another logistical hurdle. At some point, after founding the site, he moved to Bulgaria, outside the immediate reach of French authorities, and renounced his French citizenship. Even as Coco was publicly implicated in a string of violence and sexual abuse, the site remained online and with Stedle nowhere to be found. Now, as that last quote makes clear, once Coco was in the news, story after story goes viral about all of the different horrific crimes tied to the website. Now, this is also followed by the fact that more crimes keep being committed because Coco is still online. In 2022, a 23-year-old man from Marseilles barely survived being run over by three men in a car, after arriving for a hookup arranged via Coco. Per the Guardian, law enforcement officials arrested four people in the town of Saint-Poli

earlier that year after they were accused of posing his men looking for hook-ups on the site than luring victims to meet them before violently attacking and robbing them. Right. And this has been going on for years and years. The country, the national media, does not pay attention to it. And neither do the police until the story of Dominique and Giselle Pelico goes viral. Right. Like that's what makes them, you know, care about the other stuff that had been going on on Coco.

That same year as the investigation to Polico's crimes wound on and the government arrested and charged dozens of men, the investigating judge's office contacted Zincow. The company Mr. Steadle had used to register Coco in 2011 and asked for data connected to the case. Steadle or his employees never responded. The next year, Zinco shut down and he created a new company to re-registered the, re-registered the case. the website in 2024. But in 2023, France passed a new law that allows them to prosecute cases like this by looping multiple crimes enabled by a website together into one big case. You don't have to prosecute each of these as like an individual thing in order to go after the people running and administering a website like this. This law also allows prosecutors to hold administrators

liable for some activity on their site. Site founders could be found liable of being complicit if their website allowed for illicit transactions that fund criminal endeavors, which Coco definitely did. And I want to make it clear, number one, I don't speak French. I am not familiar with the specifics of this law enough to say if I think it's a good law or I endorse it or whatever. I'm trying to describe how the news sites I have read described it. I don't inherently have an issue with making it easier to go after the administrators of websites

that are doing stuff like this, as long as the things they're being liable of or are, you know, limited in a way that does not have freedom of speech concerns. And if that is an accurate description, that they're complicit if their site allows for illicit transactions funding criminal endeavors, um, Coco definitely was doing that. And Isaac Steele was for sure aware of it. It was the main reason people were like spending, like using fucking Coco was to do stuff like this, right? Um, as the investigations continued, journalists also began to look into Coco and its community. I found this segment from a CNN investigation, particularly telling. Having examined near nearly 6,000 messages sent in the course of 24 hours on 30 different chat rooms on the site,

CNN found several strikingly similar patterns between those messages, and the ones exchanged by Dominique Polico with users on Coco. Around three and four of the accounts that were active when CNN was gathering data were registered as men. A clear trend emerged of men sharing explicit photos of their wives and girlfriends on the site for the pleasure of other men. It is unclear if the photos were taken or exchanged with the women's consent. Users also frequently sought to move conversations over to private messaging platforms such as Skype or Snapchat, Snapchat, and Skype declined to comment. See, I was right with my Evan Spiegel in part one.

You really called it. You did, you did? I'd forgotten that. But yeah, that is important, and I've been trying to point out, this is as much as we're focusing on Coco and Motherless, these are spokes in like a wheel, right? They're not the wheel. Yeah. After an enormous 18-month international effort involving not just the French government but the governments of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Hungary, and Germany, to name a few,

Coco was shut down in the summer of 2024 and more than 5.6 million euros were seized from Isaac Stedle in multiple bank accounts. Steadel was questioned by French, with French prosecutors present and three of his associates were detained and questioned as well. While Coco did pop back up after it was taken down, it was quickly brought back down again. although not before more reporters were able to look into it. Per the BBC, and this is about Coco during that brief few-day period, I think, when it was up. French outlet BFM reported that its journalists were able to sign into the website in seconds without any registration or checks. Posing as a 13-year-old girl, the journalists were immediately contacted by users who persisted in sending them lewd photos and sexually explicit messages, even after they were made aware that the girl was underage.

So, charming community at Coco. Now, again, critics of the state's response have been quick to point out that Coco was not unique in anything but size and notoriety. And once it was taken down, users simply jumped to other platforms. There were plenty to choose from. Many, for example, leapt over to telegrams, then popular ZZZZ, you know, community. That's the name for their sleep, one of the sleep fetish communities on television. Like snoring, right? CNN also looked into this community.

their article quoted Annabel Montaigne, a psychologist who assessed many of the men in the Polico trial. She noted this of the broader sleep fetish community. Within these sites, there is also this notion of almost brotherhood, she said, adding that participants find themselves creating bonds that meet and inform their and reinforce their narcissistic needs. And I don't know, I'm not going to try to get too deep into the woods of, because there's also psychiatric analysis of Dominique. And I just don't, I don't find that very compelling, to be honest, that like this, that, they, there's pages of his psychiatrist being like, I think his brain, he had these little boxes that he put different aspects of his brain.

I don't care. That's not the most important thing about this to me. You're like, a creep is a creep. I don't give a fuck about his brain. A creep is a creep. The fact that there's this community that do feel bonded to each other and that are reinforcing those bonds

by committing crimes together and like sharing that. Like, that is important. That is part of what makes this so hard to take out because this is a community that is not rooted just to a website. These are men who want to and probably do have contact with each other outside of that and have bonds outside of that.

And that's the ultimate problem. The website is a tool that they're using. It's a weapon that they're using. And it's important to take that down. It's important to punish people who knowingly provide these folks with weapons. But the community, this brotherhood still exists and is still out there offending, right? This problem also exists outside of weird internet communities. One of France's leading lawmakers crusading against drug-facilitated sexual abuse is Sandrine Jossau.

She was once drugged and assaulted by a former French senator. When CNN investigated similar communities on Motherless and Telegram, woman after woman came forward with horrific stories of being drugged and raped by their partners, husbands, husbands, boyfriends, all sorts of stuff. But no one I'm aware of endured quite what Giselle Pelico did. One early article on her case in Le Monde wrote, As she awaits the trial to give her answers, she clings to her anonymity as an essential factor to rebuilding her life.

And you'll notice I'm using her real name. Which is not, that's not the name she goes by socially anymore, but it is the name she published her autobiography under. So I'm using it in this. I think that's acceptable given that she put her biography out in this. And she did that because she wants maximum visibility, right? She decided very late, right before the trial started pretty much, but she decided not to be anonymous. She chose to cast that aside so that the trial could be covered and

filmed and also so that everyone would get to see the names of the men who had raped her and see their faces while they were being tried. That was very important. And she decided that the ultimate thing, as she described in her memoir, that made her choose to not be anonymous, even though that was, that's obviously terrifying and very difficult and painful is that Her attitude is right now the problem is that women who are abused by men feel this deep sense of shame and the shame should be on the men. And if I want that change to happen, one thing I can do is be very public about the fact that this happened to me so that everyone sees who did it to me and everyone sees those men and they cannot deny it. Part of her concern was that like, well, if I'm anonymous, this will just get reported on in a couple of like news articles, but there won't be that like direct. face connection, the name connection. People won't know how normal these guys were who did this to me,

how many of them there were in my community. These were just men who lived around me. And I think it's a very heroic stance to take that she chose to put her name out there in order to not just try to try to ensure these men got as much justice as possible, but so that other rape victims wouldn't feel alone and wouldn't feel like they need to hide. She did it for other women who were being victimized and who had been victimized like her. And I think that's a really heroic thing. her saying the shame must, the shame must change hands that like, victims and survivors should not be the ones carrying the shame. We have to shift where the shame goes to the men. And I really, I can't imagine, I remember I was working on a, like, an Instagram carousel about this. And I had to

choose a picture. I thought, oh, I don't really want to use her picture as the face of this kind of this horrible crime. But then reading exactly what you just read that she intentionally wanted her image so that it wasn't just a Jane Doe or an anonymous person that it was her. And yeah, ultimately, I did use her image in my Instagram carousel about the situation. And I think people need a face and a name and a story sometimes to care about a crime and to make that crime and that systemic issue real for them in a real way. And I just, I'm so curious what the conversation around this would have been like had she not had the bravery to attach this to her name and her face and her story.

Yeah, would this have been as well known? And would more of the discourse have been like, oh, well, this is probably just some weird kink thing that she got it, right? Like how much of it would have been that? Yeah, I mean, a very heroic and, like, really difficult choice to make. She's a hero. Yeah. And her memoir is very good. Most of the men who had raped her tried to deny that they had known she was really unaware of what was happening.

They thought, oh, I thought she was into it. I thought she made a hand. gesture towards me. And like, to be honest, she may have been quote unquote conscious for some of these, but when you are that drugged out on benzos, you can be awake, you can even talk, but you're not forming memories, right? And you're not consenting because you're drugged out of your fucking mind. Also, they have been told that she will be that way before coming to the house. So shut the fuck up. Your liars, you rapists. We hate you. This is the, for his part, and I, again, I don't want this to come across positively for him, but Dominique testified repeatedly that

these men were lying. And he made it very clear like, no, I told them it was rape. I told them she didn't know. They were fully aware of what they were doing. And he made it clear. He said that he admitted to being a rapist and he was like, and so are all these other guys, right? And also a lot of the dudes who got arrested, again, 50 of them were found to have, and

Dominic also had a lot of child sexual abuse images in his possession. and so did a bunch of these guys. These were often prolific C-Sama owners and traders. To give you one representative example, I'm going to quote from an article in Le Monde by Lorraine de Foucher. Lorraine de Foucher, I don't know, not French. I tried, I got, I think I got Giselle's name right. I worked really hard on that and on a polico, but,

quote, in one of Dominique P's videos, Christian L, that's the other perpetrator, carries out the rape while wearing a uniform shirt bearing the words Vaklu firefighters. He is careful. to whisper and not to make any sudden movements. In police custody, he protested faintly, explaining that the husband had told him that his wife

agreed but that she was shy. When confronted with the exchanges on Coco and the images, he said that he was disturbed by Francois P's lack of consent. That was the pseudonym she was going by at the time, before later admitting that the fact that she was unconscious turned him on. From prison, the firefighter

insisted that his girlfriend go get his computer from the fire station. Otherwise, we'd be gone for years, according to a conversation intercepted by the prison administration. In fact, on his hard drives, the police found 728 images showing the sexual exploitation of children and a Skype negotiation with a resident in Mets to rape his sedated 15-year-old daughter.

Christian explained to his parents that he was a victim of a witch hunt, a chain of circumstances at the wrong time that had landed him in prison, but that this wasn't the case of the century. So first off, every one of these 50 dudes who all lived within 30 miles of their fucking house, nearly every one of them was a sex criminal of a fairly prolific level outside of this, right? Which shows you how fucking common that is. The fact that so many of them had child sexual abuse imagery and that like this guy is working and negotiate on Skype

to rape a child that's being drugged, which also means that like there's a lot of other guys offering up their kids, their wives, their girlfriends after drugging them in such like this is not, Dominique's not alone. He might be the most prolific but he might not be. We really have no way of knowing. I know this isn't the point of the anecdote.

Why did this dip shit wear his work uniform to do this? Great question. I don't know. I cannot answer that question for you. I certainly can. Stupid is a stupid does, Robert. Fucking idiot, yeah. But I can't walk you through his thought process if there was one.

In court, Dominique's responses to most questions were, I guess what you'd call the best case scenario for that? He admitted his own monstrous deeds to his wife. He absolved her of any blame. And in some cases, he even argued with his own defense attorney to defend his wife and repeatedly chimed in to ensure his fellow defendants were convicted. However, that is Dominique when he cannot get away, when he knows the evidence is dead to rights. One of the things that Giselle points out in her memoir is that after he was arrested, one of the first things he did was he tried to incite arguments and fighting within the family

by making them, like, distrust each other. Classic abuser. Again, he's only being honest and open in this because they've got him fucking dead to rights. And we'll talk. There's some other things. He's not open and honest about that we'll talk about. But first, here's ads. The music you love.

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Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits. change your mind or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

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And we're back. So while Dominique admitted to every crime that he was proven to have committed, he continued to deny in court that he had done anything at all to harm his children, their children, or his in-laws. Police found photos he or someone else took up his daughter, Carolyn, while asleep. Obviously, there was videos of his daughters-in-law. One of his grandsons, he raped or did something. I don't think the exact extent is known, but that some of this stuff, people realized as a result of this, oh, that time when I felt really woozy and didn't

remember something and I was with grandpa, right? We don't know how many of his family members. He physically abused in addition to like the unconsensual photos and stuff. But all of them, like his daughter, Carolyn, there's no hard evidence that he drugged or raped her. She believes that he drugged and raped her. And I can't imagine why she wouldn't, right? And I mean, one of the fucking Harley, initially there's like even, and Giselle doesn't talk about it for obvious. reasons much, but there was a point early in the case in which they kind of suspected her, right? Because you don't know. You just hear that your dad did this. You're not going to assume well, mom couldn't have known anything about it in the first days after you find this out, right?

Like, this is such a, and this, I think the family, it sounds like from Giselle's County is doing a lot better now, but for like a year, this shatters them all. How, like, her oldest kid was 50. You're a mature, middle-aged adult and you realize that, like, your entire foundation of your family life is a lie and that you're, you're, you're a young, you're dad not only may have raped and abused you, but your kids. And, like, it's, I can't even comprehend the level of fucked that that is to your head. And I think I feel like as women were often kind of told to fear strangers, people in a dark alley. And the idea that the threat is in your, yeah, the call is coming from inside the house.

Yeah, the call is coming from inside the house. The threat is your own family inside of your own home. I do think that is, I, it's just a special level of shattering. Yep. Yeah, yeah, God. Jesus. The couple's youngest son, Florian, went to a divorce that he blames on this. And I don't doubt that.

I can imagine the stress of this making it very difficult to be a good and effective partner to your spouse, right? Like, just a fucking nightmare. Their oldest son, David, has stated that his son is convinced he was abused by his grandfather. I'm going to quote again from the New York Times describing David's testimony. David Polico, a sales manager for a champagne company, said that he had shared a passion for soccer, tennis, and moviegoing with his father. He described the magical surprise birthday parties. His parents had planned for him and his siblings to the delight and envy of all their friends.

I lost and I have the feeling today all my childhood has disappeared. It was erased, he said. Now his hope is that, above all, in the future we can erase, make disappear in our heads, the man who is to the left, he said, pointing to his father in the box. And like obviously I won't even say that that's not a crime commensurate to like the sexual assaults. This destruction of your kids' understanding of their entire life, that is a horrible crime that deserves to be mentioned right up alongside the rapes.

That's an unbelievable violation to molest your grandkids and to like to just, like, I, Jesus. Like, yeah, I don't know how you deal with this like as a person. I remember reading about a similar case where a woman, her husband was drugging her, and every night before bed he would bring her this mug of tea. And when she found out what happened and was talking to the police, just this idea that like this gesture that I had interpreted as sweet that happened regularly. He made me my favorite dinner.

Exactly. Every instance of that is now something that has been totally recontextualized in your mind in the most horrific way. Yeah. as just, yeah, I, yeah, God. Dominique received the maximum sentence, 20 years in prison, which at his age, he's in the 70s, means a life sentence. He's going to die in prison. Wait, how many years did he get? 20.

That's the maximum that French law allowed, right? So he got the max sentence, and he's going to die in prison. He's fucking 70-something. The other 50 men on trial were all convicted. Most of them received six to nine-year sentences, which most reporting I've seen will note was lighter than the terms recommended by the prosecution, because the prosecution had asked for 10 to 18 years. Per the New York Times, the sentences are relatively lenient, given the gravity of the acts, which could have been classified as torture, said Lorraine Castillo, a lawyer whose practice in Paris

focuses on violence against women. The men got a huge gift by being tried in a regional criminal court, she said, adding that she believed the relatively low sentences reflected a strategic decision by the five presiding judges to avoid costly appeals that would jam up the appeals court. Six of the perpetrators were released the dave of the. of their conviction for time served. That's horrific. That's horrific.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what I'd say, the right sentences, but certainly none of them should have walked free on that day. 10 to 18 certainly sounds better. As I've noted and discussed throughout these episodes, Dominique and the men he brought into the Pelico home were not the only perpetrators. And the French government started rounding up the staff at Coco, such as it was, in

24. Two site moderators were arrested, and Paris prosecutor L'Orey Bacow has stated that since their investigation began, more than 23,000 criminal acts have been tied to Coco, 23,000 individual criminal acts, 23,000 that they know of. And considering this is an anonymous site, that's startling. Yeah. Isaac Steadle himself was arrested and charged in January of 2025 with complicity in drug trafficking, possession and distribution of CSAM, corruption of a minor through the internet and criminal conspiracy. His lawyer, Julian Zanata, denies Stedle's guilt. It is worth noting that queer advocacy organizations in France had been lobbying for Coco's closure without any sort of progress for years. The SOS Homophobia Association started demanding this after that

vehicular attack on a gay man in Marseille in like 2022. To quote again from Le Monde, at least 300 men were trapped and violently attacked between 2018 and 2022, according to our colleagues. That's a quote from SOS homophobia. Oh my God. Yeah. It is a good thing that Stiedel and his associates are being brought to justice, and it is good that Cocoa was taken down. But all this only happened because Dominique's crimes went so fucking viral, and people should not forget that. They also should not forget that the vast majority of people who partook in Coco's without her knowledge board are still out there.

years after Coco was shut down, CNN published that investigation into Motherless.com, where the same shit happens. And now that that's been taken down, because Motherless is down after that investigation, at least was last I read anything about it, people have surely migrated to new platforms, including Telegram. Now, I brought up Telegram a number of times in these episodes. Men on Cocoa and Motherless regularly tried to direct their fans and customers to private Telegram channels. The founder of Telegram is a tech CEO, named Pavel Duraugh, who I am sure we will talk about more in the future. He is 39 years old and a billionaire, and he is guilty of exactly the same kinds of crimes as Isaac Stedle. Probably quite a few more of them, to be honest.

In late August of 2024, Dureov was detained after his private jet landed in France and arrested under a warrant for, per the BBC, offenses related to the popular messaging app. The investigation is reportedly about a lack of moderation with Mr. Durov accused of failing to take steps to curb criminal uses of telegram. He's accused of failure to cooperate with law enforcement over drug trafficking, child sexual content, and fraud, right? That's what they're saying happens on telegram because it does. Durov was released. He was eventually, like the next year, he was allowed to go home to Dubai for limited visits. He's not allowed to leave for more than two weeks at a time while like his case is being processed. Of course he lives in Dubai. Telegram is now

based out of Dubai. Duraev is also wanted in Russia. He's been charged with crime there. I'm not as familiar with it because it's the Russian government. I don't actually know if they're entirely, I'm not as familiar with that. But yeah, the case against him is still ongoing. One of the difficulties is that telegram is a much larger operation than Coco. And it is not primarily used by people who were doing illegal shit, right, and doing like bad shit, even, I should say. It is primarily, like, in a lot of places, it's almost as common as WhatsApp, right? But it also is a high for white supremacist terrorism. They call terrorgram for a reason, right?

People have planned a lot of attacks and radicalized others to commit a lot of attacks via telegram. A lot of CSAM is distributed and created via telegram, a lot of sexual abuse-related content, and Durav became a billionaire profiting off of that for all of these years. The University of Toronto policy researcher John Scott Raelton described Pavel Durov's arrest by French authorities as unprecedented. This is the first time a real founder in like a major since has been arrested for like crimes committed using a large app or website, right?

Yeah. Now, there are a lot of valid civil rights and freedom of speech concerns here, mostly in the fact that the justified disgust and fear over what telegram has been used for and what Coco was used for have provided governments and state security services with an excuse to attack end-to-end encryption, which they hate for other reasons. And end-to-end encryption had nothing to do with why these crimes were able to be committed for so long. Again, he was busted for taking upscored pictures in 2010, right?

Like, the fact that this was encrypted isn't why he didn't get caught for so long. He didn't get caught for so long because no one was really looking to find guys like him doing this. Really? Because they didn't see it as that big of the thing, I really think. Yeah, it was not an encryption thing that let this all occur, right? I will always fight against any attempt by governments to criminalize the use of encrypted messaging as a whole. It is incredibly poisonous to let scum like Diroff become the face of that movement. So I simply do not defend this guy.

He was very well aware of what he was involved in. More to the point, encryption does not require people to build services that enable sexual abuse in the trading of child pornography. Criminals use signal, too, for instance, for some bad things. But in the same way that a rapist might use a smartphone to, like, document his crimes or whatever, the smartphone isn't responsible for that. It just had a camera, right? there's nothing about signal that specifically encourages or makes it easy to operate in a legal

business, whereas both Coco and Telegram choices were made not to moderate certain things. Choices are made to profit off of banning people for breaking the law in Coco's case. Choices were made to make these services better places for people to organize and plan these kind of crimes, right? And that's very different from a dumb pipe that just happens to be encrypted, right? And again, encryption is not the fucking issue here. neither is free speech. I just hate how it's so easy to conflate these things.

And as you said, like make people who are breaking the law and profiting off of horrific illegal content the face of, you know, what, like, I don't know, I just feel like in these conversations, we have kind of lost our way. And it's so easy to turn, you know, advocating for the importance of free speech into, oh, we should be protecting people who use, who are. counting on us using that banner to continue to profit from criminal behavior. Right. Number one, I don't think you really necessarily need new laws and new restrictions on the

internet to stop these people. What you do need is an understanding that they're doing it and a willingness to go after them and prosecute them and look into these. A lot of these communities are very easy to just wind up in a chat room where people are selling these rape drugs. It's not hard. Law enforcement could be going after this stuff if they really cared, right? they don't they chose not to give because it's probably more work than they want to do because they're

fucking lazy assholes but not enough of them focus on this shit like you don't need new laws you don't need anything like that what you do need is authorities to care about stopping this yep that's i guess my answer i agree that was not directed at at you bridgett sorry no i was directed like a hypothetical person arguing with me yes uh i'm i'm i agree with you again, it's an issue that like, you find, you, you find yourself on the opposite end of people, you know, it's like an issue that like, you find like strange bedfellows and you're, you know, arguing against things that you can't believe your, like, you can't believe that you have to make this argument, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. Again, my, you can't divorce your concern for freedom of speech from like the practical political realities and the practical political realities that every time people hear about. shit like this, it makes them potentially more willing to support these shitty laws. So like if, again, if you actually, if you care about freedom of speech and encryption and stuff, you shouldn't be like defending fucking Pavl Dorov or Isaac Steadle. What you should be doing is fucking getting livid at the fact that more isn't being done to stop these kind of crimes that are already illegal and that are being committed very obviously in the open in a lot of cases, right? More could be done to scare these motherfuckers. And the less like, people getting away with this

endangers all of our freedom, right? And again, I don't mean to distract from their victims by saying that, but that's my response to people who try to bring up the fucking free speech issue. It's the same thing I feel about guns, honestly, that like, well, okay, but like, if you believe firearms should be illegal, then you should be really fucking

pissed at, like, bad gun manufacturer advertisements that are, like, encouraging fucked up shit. You should be pissed at gun shops that are selling, like, illegally or that are selling like moving shit across the fucking border. Like you should be really angry at a lot of things that happen in the firearms industry that enable all of the fucking horrible violence that is part of why people want to ban guns,

right? Like if you actually care about that right, your issue should not be with defending the blank right of someone to like sell firearms to a cartel or a 15 year old. Your issue should be with the people doing that who are endangering your rights and as well as endangering other people's lives, right? Not to put the lives above the rights or anything like that. I just, I never get, I never get the argument that, like, you should focus entirely on, like, fucking defending the founder of a website that enabled a bunch of rapes because you care

about free speech. If you care about free speech, you should care about stopping those rapists. Yeah. That's where I land, I guess. I have one final thought, and it's just that, wow. is she a brave woman? Yeah. Yep.

And I'm sorry the system failed you and the amount of people that she's helped by being so courageous is. Yeah. She's an incredible person. I do. I should probably end. There is some uplifting stuff in her memoir, A Him to Life that I should note, which is that, I mean, there's some fucked up and some good stuff mostly. So she obviously was left a lot of financial issues.

She divorced her husband. Some of her in-laws, like the parents of one of the people, one of her kids married, they had like a really nice house on an island that was like a vacation getaway because they were more affluent. She was like staying there for a while. And she met a man who had just retired there. He had initially, he had bought a retirement house with his wife there. And then she contracted a horrible illness and died very suddenly right as they're about to start their retirement. And he and Giselle met and fell in love and lived together, at least the last I checked. So, I mean, that's, I guess, the good thing is that her life has gone on.

She's continued to find happiness. She even writes in the book that, like, I understand why this has led some people to just, like, hate men in general, this story. But that's not the effect it had on me. In part, she has two sons, right? Yeah. So that's, her life goes on. she's not a victim as that's not a I mean she was a victim of a crime but she is not a victim as a fundamental nature of her personality or character um she's an incredibly resilient and very brave woman who uh I hope continues to be happy afterwards a true survivor yeah yeah in the in the sexual violence community we often don't use the word victim it's survivor yeah people people go on to live full lives and you know you know, you know, their life does not end with what happened to them.

That is not the only thing that they are. It's not a measure of their entire life. It can feel that way when you're experiencing sexual violence for sure. Yeah. Certainly while you're in court. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's what I've had this week, everybody.

Okay. Bye, guys. Sorry. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Coolzone 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 with Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

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