Exposing a global ‘online rape academy’ that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection

This story is the ultimate a part of NCS’s As Equals sequence on gender inequality. For details about how the sequence was funded and extra, take a look at our FAQs.

The world was confronted by this type of internet-enabled abuse in 2024 throughout the mass rape and drugging trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 different men in southern France.   

It was on a so-called relationship web site, in a chatroom referred to as “Without Her Knowledge,” that Pelicot was in a position to join with dozens of different men to instigate the rapes of his then-wife, Gisèle. While drugged unconscious by him, she was raped over 200 instances by 70 men, not all of whom could possibly be tracked down by police. 

The Pelicot case briefly shone a highlight on this darkish nook of the web. But whereas Coco, the web site concerned, was shut down and public consideration moved elsewhere, this conduct didn’t disappear.  

A monthslong NCS As Equals investigation has uncovered a hidden, on-line world the place the commodification and amplification of sexual violence towards women is flourishing.

One porn website, Motherless.com, is dwelling to greater than 20,000 movies of so-called “sleep” content material uploaded by customers, with a whole lot of hundreds of views.  

The web site, which had round 62 million visits in February alone and whose core viewers is within the United States, describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.”  

The legality of some materials posted is in critical doubt. 

So-called “sleep” content material is categorized utilizing descriptive tags resembling #passedout and #eyecheck.

In these movies, men movie themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to present they’re sleeping or sedated, with some “eyecheck” movies surpassing 50,000 views. Inside the Motherless “sleep” group – first reported on by German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh – members commerce recommendation on how to drug their companions.  

On the “Zzz” chat group, which a Motherless person had linked to and the place we first met Piotr, they do the identical. NCS is not offering the names and doses of the particular medicines the customers stated they make use of.

One Motherless person claimed to be working a enterprise promoting and dispatching “sleeping liquids” to any handle on the planet. The man, who stated he was primarily based in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish exclave on the North African coast, stated on his Telegram account that it will value 150 euros (roughly $175) for a bottle of the liquid that he stated was tasteless and odorless. “Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything,” he stated.

While the platforms differ, inside such teams, video is king. Some customers marketed livestreams, displaying the abuse of drugged women in actual time, for $20 per viewer, with cryptocurrency the popular technique of fee.   

Another person, who stated he was primarily based in West Africa, shared a clip from a earlier livestream he stated he’d finished to entice us to his subsequent. In it, a lady – who he stated was his sleeping spouse – could possibly be heard loud night breathing as he climbs on prime of her. Then the clip ends.  

In Poland, the lady Piotr stated was his spouse additionally seems to be unaware of what is taking place to her.  

Men in these teams function shielded by the anonymity of the web. But additionally they discover a sense of group and perverse camaraderie, as they normalize abuse. For months, Piotr spoke brazenly with us and even shared what he stated was his handle.  

But when it got here to assembly face-to-face, he resisted. We needed to verify he was who he stated he was, so we travelled to his hometown in Poland.  

NCS discovered Piotr and his spouse at a native restaurant.  

Uncertain how he may react – and unwilling to put her in peril – we selected not to confront him, as a substitute reaching out to police about our findings.

Piotr is only one actor in a huge, global community – his spouse probably amongst many unaware victims.   

But some survivors know.

‘But he’s your husband’

When Zoe Watts realized that her husband of 16 years had been crushing her son’s sleeping drugs into her tea and raping her whereas she was handed out, it shattered her world.  

“We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street, or who’s even friending us on Facebook. You know, we worry about going to our car late at night in a car park, but we don’t worry about who you lie next to. I didn’t realize I had to,” Watts stated.  

Her then husband’s confession got here on an in any other case extraordinary Sunday in 2018, after the couple – who share 4 youngsters – had returned from church.  

“He reeled off a list of his wrongdoings… as if it was, you know, a shopping list,” Watts stated, talking to NCS at her home in Devon, England.    

He informed her the abuse had been happening for years.  

“He just sort of said… ‘I’ve been using our son’s sleeping medication to put in your last cup of tea at night, to tie you down, take photographs and rape you.’”  

The admission left Watts questioning all their intimate moments.  

“At the end of a very busy day… I was just grateful I had a cup of tea before I went to bed, because I was so tired and didn’t have to make it,” she stated, including: “You don’t expect anything other than innocence to come from your partner.”  

“You don’t expect anything other than innocence to come from your partner.”

Click right here for Zoe’s story

Concerned about her youngsters and nonetheless grappling with what had occurred to her, she initially stored it a secret. The inside wrestle finally took a toll on her well being.  

After a critical panic assault, Watts informed her sister. Then their mom referred to as the police. While she believes urgent costs was the best determination, on the time, it was agonizing. A four-year authorized course of noticed her youngsters grow to be targets for bullying in school, and left her social community all however destroyed.  

Watts stated one of many many tough facets of her ordeal has been confronting individuals’s assumptions about abuse inside a marriage, though she acknowledges that they’re rooted in misinformation and unconscious bias.

“I’ve had people say: ‘Yeah, but he’s your husband,’ or ‘but you weren’t awake.’ ‘So… it’s not the same as being taken down an alleyway, is it?’”  

Her ex-husband is serving an 11-year sentence for rape, sexual assault by penetration and drugging.  

Watts nonetheless struggles to use the phrase rape to describe what occurred to her. It is too painful.

“There’s a shame and a guilt that comes with it, that, ‘Oh, maybe I should have known, or I can’t believe I didn’t realize. Why didn’t I connect those dots?’ she said.

‘He was trying to change my reality’

That enduring stigma is exactly what Gisèle Pelicot has sought to challenge on the international stage, telling the world at her former husband’s trial that “shame must change sides.”  

In the city of Wigan, northwest England, Amanda Stanhope – who too, was raped by her ex-partner – stated Gisele’s power impressed her to communicate out.    

“She broke the silence and shame… if she can do it, then so can I,” Stanhope stated.   

She now posts movies on social media to unfold consciousness about one of these abuse, encouraging women to belief their instincts.  

Over a five-year interval, Stanhope stated she would usually go to sleep with out remembering how, and would get up to bruises on her physique and in numerous garments, with a towel below her, with none reminiscence as to why.   

After waking up a few instances to her accomplice violently raping her, Stanhope knew one thing was incorrect and requested him to cease. Instead, Stanhope stated, she was gaslit.   

“He would then turn on me and say, ‘well, you’re on too much medication. You must be imagining it. That didn’t happen. You’re mental. You’re crazy,’” she stated.   

“So even though I felt 100% sure that something had happened… he was trying to change my reality, (saying) that it hadn’t happened, even though the physical signs were there.”  

With the assist of her brother, Stanhope finally went to the police.  

Her former accomplice was charged with rape and sexual assault. He took his personal life earlier than the case went to court docket.  

Sharing her story is a part of Stanhope’s therapeutic course of. But the trauma has unequivocally modified her outlook.   

“I see everyone as a potential predator,” Stanhope stated, including: “It took my innocence for people away.”  

“You need to find something bigger than the pain, otherwise you drown in the pain.”

Click right here for Amanda’s story

Survivor Valentina – a mom of two who lives in northern Italy and who requested NCS not to use her actual title – stated she, too, has a exhausting time trusting anybody.  

“I can’t conceive of the fact that a woman could be treated like slaughterhouse meat. Because in the end, that’s what I was,” Valentina stated, reflecting on the horror of discovering movies that her husband of 20 years had filmed – displaying him abusing her after he had drugged her with alcohol and sedatives. 

“I used to be fortunate to discover the movies as a result of really it will have been a bit… tough to consider, as a result of I had no marks,” she added.  

Valentina doesn’t remember the abuse. But it left psychological scars. 

“No matter how much you try to brush it off, it’s always right there beside you – the experience you’ve had,” she said, adding that “it just takes a bed, a camera, a different scent” to trigger her. 

She is seeing a psychologist to help her move through the trauma. But it still feels fresh.  

“As much as I might be happy, smiling, on the outside, then I come home. I still have to deal… make friends with my nightmares, which are always just behind the door,” she said.   

In 2021, Valentina’s former husband was sentenced to eight years in prison for multiple aggravated sexual assaults.   

Years later, she is still struggling to understand his motivation.   

Like Dominique Pelicot and Piotr, Valentina said her husband was spending lots of time online, possibly seeking a self-education in rape. 

“I was branded for life with a hot iron.”

Click here for Valentina’s story

Some forms of pornography have long normalized violence against women as entertainment, with algorithms that favor extreme content further pushing exploitative material into the mainstream, experts say. 

Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Britain’s Durham University and an expert on violence against women and girls, told NCS that the growing presence of voyeuristic material on mainstream porn sites “glorifies” abusive behaviors both on and offline. It’s a problem that “many men and many people in society aren’t taking seriously enough,” she said. 

For users within the online “sleep porn” community, the thrill of the abuse is not only in the act itself but in the collective dynamic surrounding it, said Annabelle Montagne, a psychologist who assessed half of the men convicted in the Pelicot trial, including Dominique, who organized the crimes.  

“Within these sites, there is also this notion of, almost, brotherhood,” she said, adding that participants find themselves “creating bonds” that meet and reinforce their “narcissistic” needs.   

Sandrine Josso, a French lawmaker who, after being drugged by a former French senator, has campaigned to raise awareness about drug-facilitated sexual abuse (DFSA), called the groups “schools of violence.”  

“I would even call them an online rape academy, where every subject is taught. There are all the ‘subjects’ and ‘disciplines’ needed to become a good rapist or sexual predator,” she said.   

Meanwhile, the landscape of drug-facilitated assault is continuing to evolve, with perpetrators pivoting to more “available” prescription medicines that act quickly and leave little trace in the body compared to the “date rape” drugs of the past, making it harder for such cases to make their way to trial, US-based sleep specialist Michel Cramer Bornemann told NCS.

It’s difficult to know how widespread drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) is, as reliable data is limited.  

Across Europe, most criminal justice systems either lack specific monitoring systems for DFSA or do not include it as a separate category in official crime statistics, meaning there’s no fully comparable Europe‑wide dataset on such assaults.   

“This is a topic where reliable, specific data is ‘scarce by design,’” a World Health Organization spokesperson told NCS, adding that there are no accurate estimates of this type of abuse due to how underreported it is.   

“Many go unreported because victims feel embarrassment, guilt, or perceived responsibility, or because they have limited memory of the assault,” the spokesperson said.  

Low reporting is further compounded by a lack of training for both hospital staff and police in recognizing victims of DFSA, experts say.  

In England and Wales – the jurisdiction in which survivors Watts and Stanhope live – 43% of recorded sexual assaults involved a partner or ex-partner, according to March 2025 data, marking a minor decrease from 45% five years ago. The proportion of victims recorded as having been assaulted while unconscious or asleep has risen to 23% from 21% over the last decade.  

Conviction rates for sexual offenses across Europe – as in the US – remain low. 

This comes as no surprise to Stanhope. 

She says she was shocked by the initial police response to a video that showed her former partner sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious.    

“I thought, there’s the evidence. And the police said to me, ‘Well, we can’t use that, that isn’t clear evidence, because it looks like you’re pretending to be asleep.’” Survivor Amanda Stanhope

Police eventually charged Stanhope’s former partner. But her experience underscores why victims of domestic abuse often do not report these crimes.   

In the Pelicot trial, a defense used by several of Gisele’s rapists was that they believed it was a part of a consensual “intercourse sport.” 

Watts informed NCS that her former accomplice introduced a comparable clarification.  

“He said he thought I wanted me to find myself waking up with him having sex with me, like I’d asked for it,” she stated.  

McGlynn, the regulation professor, informed NCS that whereas the regulation – at the very least within the UK – is typically nicely geared up to cowl the vary of prison offenses dedicated by men who drug and rape their companions, the global on-line phenomenon persists due to a reluctance from governments to go after what she sees as the guts of the issue: the net platforms themselves.

During the course of NCS’s investigation, the “Zzz” group was taken off the messaging platform Telegram. Telegram didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.

And whereas the web site utilized by the rapists within the Pelicot case, Coco, was taken offline, different websites are arising. The Coco founder was charged with working a platform that allegedly enabled a wide selection of significant crimes, together with sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, and monetary crimes. He has denied the accusations and is awaiting trial.

Last 12 months, the UK communications service regulator Ofcom investigated Motherless.com, not for the location’s content material however for its mother or father firm, the Luxembourg-registered Kick Online Entertainment S.A., allegedly failing to full a “suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment.” The investigation was closed after the corporate offered the mandatory paperwork, the regulator stated. Ofcom opened a subsequent investigation into whether or not Kick Online Entertainment S.A. had put age checks in place to defend youngsters from pornography, and in February 2026, fined the corporate. Motherless didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.  

Ofcom informed NCS its job was “not to tell platforms which specific content to take down” and that the “responsibility is on platforms to decide whether content is illegal.”

Motherless has prevented being focused for the kind of content material posted on its website due to US protected harbor protections that largely protect platform homeowners from direct legal responsibility for his or her customers’ uploads.

This creates areas the place men like Pelicot can function behind a veil of anonymity – their abuses too usually invisible regardless of being plotted in plain sight.  

While it’s unclear what’s subsequent for Piotr, the net communities he inhabited dwell on.