Part One: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we
tell you everything you don't know, worst people in all
of history, all that good stuff. And to talk about
some pretty terrible people and a pretty terrible thing that
happened this week with me, my good friend, Bridget Todd. Bridget,
welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled
to be here as always.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hey, Bridget.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
We're so happy to have you.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
You want to tell the folks about your new audiobook?

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah. Speaking
of things that might make you feel icky or uncomfortable
or weird... Have you two ever heard about folks who
are experiencing intimate relationships with AI companions?

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Boy, howdy have I. Both from that movie Her and
then since in the real world.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah. I have always been fascinated by movies like Her
and Ex Machina and Blade Runner.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Ex Machina is pretty fun. Ex Machina is good.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Although it does sort of show the dark side of
what happens if you surround yourself with sexy bots. But yeah,
so I have always been kind of fascinated by the
intersection of bots and AI and the people who want
to connect with them. And so I have a new
audio book out called Love at First Prompt, AI and
the Future of Intimacy, that basically tries to answer the
question of why are we all so fascinated with technology

(01:27):
and people getting emotionally close to it? And what are
the risks? Like, what do we lose when tech companies
like OpenAI are vying to be where we go for
emotional support? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Well, you know... Bridget, I suspect part of the answer,
at least for a lot of the men who find
themselves in love with chatbots, is that like, it's like
a woman, but she doesn't have any will of her own, right?
And that's really relevant to the episodes we're doing today.
We're not talking about AI chatbots, but we are talking
about something else that the internet and the tech world

(02:00):
has enabled that's pretty horrible. As We're all well aware
over the last 20 or so years, our civilization has
handed the proverbial wheel over to a bunch of assholes
who created websites right around the time you and I
graduated high school, right? And of these men, Mark Zuckerberg
has probably done the most damage. But if we count
PayPal as a website, and it is, then Elon Musk
and Peter Thiel are in the mix. And to be honest,

(02:22):
I don't know if I think like Musk or Mark
has more of an edge given the last couple of years,
but they're all sort of up there. And don't forget Spiegel.
Don't forget Spiegel. Sure, of course. Now, wait, Spiegel?

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Isn't that his name, Evan Spiegel?

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Who the hell is that?

Speaker 3 (02:38):
The Snapchat guy.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Oh, I don't think about Snapchat.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Does anyone?

Speaker 1 (02:42):
What has he done?

Speaker 2 (02:42):
He goes under the radar a little bit.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, he's the Snapchat guy. And when I think of him,
I think of how he created all those filters. Well,
he didn't personally, but created an app with all those
filters that caused so many people to have an unhealthy
relationship with... Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, probably was a bad idea, or at least a
flawed idea. And look... All this is to say we
should be asking ourselves as a society, what should we

(03:20):
do to men who get rich off of creating websites
that ruin people's lives at scale, right? How should we
handle them? That's a salient question to everybody listening, whether
you're in the United States or Canada or India or,
for example– France, which is where we're going to be
talking about primarily today. This week, I'm going to tell

(03:41):
you the story primarily of one website, although we're going
to talk about a couple of different websites. And the
specific site that we're going to focus on most is
certainly lower on the bastard list than Facebook or Twitter
or Telegram in terms of like the actual aggregate amount
of damage it's done. But that doesn't mean that it's minor.
And in fact, the stuff that this website specifically enabled
is much more horrifying than what you tend to hear

(04:03):
of on any of these other sites, because of the
clientele that it solicited. And the website we'll be talking
about this week was called Coco or Coco.fr for most
of its life because it was a French website. And yeah,
so far, the reason why we're talking about this is
that France has recently become the only country on earth
to take real steps to try and punish founders of

(04:26):
websites and tech companies, right, for the damage that their
sites have done. They've gone after the founder of Coco,
this website we're going to be talking about. They've also
gone after Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. Now, most
Americans probably haven't heard about Coco, at least not very
much about it, but Coco was an anonymous chat site
that turned into a den of bigotry, violence, and sex crimes.

(04:47):
Does that sound familiar to anybody? Have we heard of
stuff like this happening before?

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I've heard of Coco and that pattern. And I'm sure
Bridget has too, because women on the internet.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
It's all over.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, I'm pretty sad to say. And it's one of
those topics where even as people who cover and talk
about dark tech and internet stuff, Even for me, I'm like, ooh,
this makes me feel like I want to take a
shower after hearing about this.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
I gave a warning to you and Sophie a couple
of days before we did these episodes just because, like,
I was like, I can't. People can't. Like, I knew
you guys were aware of this story, but it just
is too intense to not deliver a little bit of, like,
a heads up. And so I'll say this to the audience, too.
Heads up. This is a bad one, folks. It's a
real bad one. The founder of Coco is an asshole

(05:40):
named Isaac Steedle. He's going to be one of our
bastards today, but we know very little about him. Other
than that, he was born and raised in Vaucluse and
the Var, which are two places in Southeast France. He
was probably born around 1980 or 1981, given that we
know he graduated college in 2003 and was 44 in 2025.
He earned a degree in computer science from a university
in Toulon.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Um.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
I found remarkably little about the man's early life besides
this and essentially nothing direct that would lend any understanding
as to his motivation. There's not like a quote from
this kid being like, one day I'm going to create
a website that helps French people be horrible sex offenders.
And we kind of do have that with like Mark Zuckerberg, actually, right?
We have like the, you can be unethical and not
break the law. And that's how I live my life quote.

(06:29):
We don't get any of that from Isaac. Don't forget
the hee hee. Don't forget the hee-hee. Load-bearing hee-hee. Load-bearing
hee-hee for sure.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
As a slight tangent, what do we think about Jeremy
Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg in the new Social Network movie?

Speaker 2 (06:44):
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I'm here for it.
I know it's controversial. Me too. Me too. No, I'm
with you. When you watch the trailer, he's doing the
voice so well. I'm here for it. What do y'all think?
I'm into it.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
I'm very into it.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
I don't have a strong opinion of Jeremy Strong, to
be honest.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Did you watch Succession? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
No.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Jeremy Strong dramaturgically could play Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Oh, I love Sophie. You know Ball when it comes
to Jeremy Strong. Yeah, you clearly know Ball.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah, I'm fascinated. I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
All I've got to say about that is I loved,
I mean, I didn't love, I loved the movie that
Jesse Eisenberg came out recently with him and Kieran Culkin
in Poland.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, that was a great movie. What is it called? Fuck.
A real pain.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
A real pain. Great movie. And it caused me to
reevaluate Jesse Eisenberg because I'd hated him for years. And
I realized, I thought I had heard something about him
being bad. And I thought that maybe I just didn't
like his... I hadn't really interrogated it. I just had
a negative reaction to him. And I enjoyed that movie
so much that it caused me to realize, oh no,
you just did such a good job of playing Mark Zuckerberg,

(07:56):
a man I despise. Yeah, like I associated the two
of you for years and in a completely unfair way.
And now I found out he's like given a kidney
to a stranger. He's apparently a nice man. I judged
you poorly, Jesse. He was asked to play Zuckerberg and
he refused. He was like, I don't want to keep
playing this asshole. I don't want people associating me with
him forever.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
No, thanks.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Look, Jesse, I apologize. But also it is kind of
a compliment. Like you really disappeared into that role to
the extent that it gave me some problems. Anyway, back
to Coco. The founder of this website, Isaac Steedle, we
don't know a whole lot about him. But yeah, he
goes up in Southeast France, graduates college in 2003, and

(08:36):
he's a computer science major, right? There's not a whole
lot about him beyond that. Because this is a French case,
I had to rely on Yandex or Russian Google to
translate several websites. So some of these quotes might sound
a little odd. That's why. One article in RMC by
Mathieu Belliard describes Mr. Stiedel as a mysterious man who
started the website that would make him infamous, Coco, the

(08:58):
same year he graduated college, 2003, with, quote, the help
of his parents and 2,000 euros in capital. So that
does tell you a little bit. His family's got some
amount of money that they're able to throw that around.
That's not a crazy amount, but it's not nothing. And
his parents are... supportive of what's going to turn into
a website for perverts to do bad things, right? Not

(09:19):
that being perverted is bad, but this kind of perversion is.
The website initially looked something like what the video people
are going to be seeing now. There's an almost pea
green background and the big center image is a coconut
spilling milk onto the floor in a way I think
it's suggestive of cum. Maybe that's just like where my
ad goes here but they're like i think they're suggesting

(09:39):
it's a little suggestive right this.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Is suggestive of semen for sure i mean yeah come
on that's not really a coconut milk spills so it
looks more viscous yeah don't like it don't love it
directly above the spill is a login box where you
can log in by identifying your gender picking a pseudonym
giving an age and entering your postal code.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Coco's slogan was, this is a website for nice people.
And it was a free chat site. I would describe
it as initially most similar to an early and primitive
version of the app Telegram. There are different chat rooms
that are based on like the region you're in and
based on like your topic of interest, like what kind
of thing you want to talk about. And it's all anonymous, right?

(10:23):
You could put your real name in, but you can
put any name in and they're not taking any, they're
not verifying, like you don't have to do anything that
would actually like make you directly traceable to the account
that you have on this site. So it's about as
anonymous as anything that's not like super encrypted is going
to be, right? When I say anonymous in this instance,
that's what I mean. Um, Users can register in just

(10:44):
a second or two and we're asked to confirm that
they were at least 18, but they can also change
their displayed user age later. I'm not sure if that
was an intentional feature or just something that they didn't
think about, but it certainly becomes a major selling point
on the website because people are going to spend a

(11:05):
lot of time pretending that they're younger or older than
they are, just as kind of a spoiler for where
some things go here. In its early years, at least,
it seems that Coco was one of many different regional
anonymous chat platforms. There were different websites kind of like
this all over the world. There's some similarities between this,
as I'll talk about, and like 4chan. It was very French,

(11:26):
but it was not otherwise super noteworthy. Now, again, I
haven't come across enough direct information about Isaac Steadle to
give you his specific motivation, but it was probably some,
it may have been just as simple as money. He
may have just wanted to get rich, right? And he
does as a result of this website. It's probably useful
here for me to zoom out and give people a
little context on the internet circa 2003, in case you're

(11:48):
too young or too old to have been really keeping
up with things back then. We were still deep in
the throes of Web 1.0, and modern social media was
on its way but embryonic. You had kind of some
of the first, you know, MySpace, I think, was out
by 2003, but Facebook isn't really around. Twitter certainly isn't.
The stuff that is going to become known as social

(12:09):
media is not really out yet.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
I was knee-deep in Zanga.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
Zanga, yeah, exactly. And there were a few online communities
that had become large businesses by providing an anonymous hub
for people to communicate and do business and talk about
things that they were– like talk about their perversions, right?
The Something Awful Forums had been created by Richard Kiyonka
back in 1999 and by 2003 had something like 100,000

(12:36):
registered members if I'm remembering from like the banner things
back when I was visiting in 2003. Yep. Each goon
or member of the website paid $ 10 to join, plus
another $ 10 for each time they were banned and wanted
to reactivate their account. So being banned on purpose or
as a bit became parts of the culture at Something
Awful and a method of fundraising. People would get like

(12:57):
intentionally banned so they could re-register or whatnot like at times.
It was just sort of like a thing that was
a part of the culture of the website. And I'm
bringing this up because Isaac is going to copy this
tactic in a way that I suspect was directly pulling
from Something Awful. Isaac was also probably familiar with 2chan
and 4chan. 2chan was the Japanese precursor to 4chan. 4chan

(13:18):
itself started in October 2003, the same year that Coco
got started. And 4chan began after Richard Kiyonka forced an
exodus of members of the Something Awful forums by banning hentai.
Illegal file sharing prior to that was common in both communities, right?
It's common in Something Awful, and after this, it's common
in 4chan. And it's something that the owners of the

(13:39):
websites don't profit from directly, which is part of why
Richard eventually banned it. But they profited from the sites
becoming active and popular hubs of communities that are doing
file sharing, right? So there's some precedent for if you
start this big place where people can communicate anonymously and
give them a place to discuss anything, to post anything,
and to share porn and whatnot illegally— that's a great

(14:01):
way to get a lot of members and then you
can advertise on the site and make money, right? The
reason I'm bringing this up is that I think this
is probably what Isaac is looking at when he's crafting Coco.
I'm sure he's aware of these things. Craigslist does not
bear a lot in common socially with these other online communities,
but its creation and growing popularity by 2003 is also
relevant to the story. After being founded in 1995 and

(14:24):
as an email distribution list, Craigslist quickly expanded beyond its
initial Bay Area birthing pond by 2000. In 2003, it
had opened hubs in dozens of U.S. cities, and this
had caused massive, genuinely unintentional disruption to a number of industries,
including newspapers, by effectively killing the classified ad business. And
I suspect Craigslist was probably of interest to Steedle as well,

(14:45):
because it offered a way for people to gather and
do business online with the potential for quite a bit
of anonymity. In fact, Craigslist scams soon became a legendary
aspect of the website's success. So all of this stuff
is cooking in the post dot com bust latter days
of Web 1.0 when Isaac Steele decides to create a

(15:05):
Web site of his own.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
I'm bringing this up because I think this influences him.
Coco quickly became known as a place where people could
seek out dates and casual hookups, as well as text
based erotic encounters over the years as social media took off.
Steedle rebranded Coco as the first free online chat site.
That's a dubiously accurate tagline. I think I can recall

(15:27):
a couple free online chat sites before that, but- Definitely.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Yeah. He also described it as a social network where
you can reconnect with your friends, which was an odd
tagline given that anonymity was a founding principle. I think
he was just trying to ape off of Facebook's popularity
with that tagline because there's nothing about Coco that would
enable you to like reconnect with lost friends. That's not
how the website was designed.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
So weird.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yeah, this really does sound like he was combining a
lot of things from popping off kind of early social
media platforms and just sort of trying to make it
his own thing.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Exactly. Exactly. And I there's a we don't know. Maybe
he always intended this to be a place where people
would like sell illegal pornography that they would make and
other horrible things. But I kind of think he was
just looking to do anything that would get him a business. Right.
I think that was probably his initial plan more than anything.
One future user who would be convicted for crimes he

(16:22):
committed due to his use of Coco told a court
that Coco had at first seemed like a place to
discuss hobbies. and he listed chess and music as specific
hobbies that he was into and that he came to
Coco to engage in. He told the court, as the
years went by, all the predators and scammers started coming
to Coco. So at least in that sort of account
of things, and I wasn't on the website, I don't

(16:43):
speak French, so I kind of have to go by
these accounts. If that's accurate, it did start as more
of a normal general community, but there was always an
aspect of it that was like, predatory, that involved people
scamming each other, and that involved people trying to share
or make illegal pornography, and that just became more and
more dominant over time. Irees.com, which documents internet culture, describes

(17:07):
Coco as having been created for amorous encounters and seems
to suggest that the chat branding was never more than
an obfuscating tactic. They note that over the years, Steedle, quote,
shifted the strategy by making it lack moderation in order
to become more attractive to users, which apparently included criminals.
And I think you could also, sorry.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Oh, I just, I have a clarifying question. It sounds
like they started, from what you just read, it sounded
like they started with some moderation and then shifted to
basically have no moderation when they kind of leaned into
this sort of illegal scam vibe.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
That is what one source says. And I don't know
if that's perfectly accurate, but I think that there was
more moderation and there were more attempts to kind of
clamp down on the worst aspects of the community. And
they gave, Steele not just gave that up, but started
leaning into the darkest interests of his community members, to
the people who were making illegal pornography and carrying out

(18:04):
scams and the like, right? And increasingly- people are going
to be doing like because it becomes a hookup app
pretty quickly people use it for that and then it
also becomes a way for people to fake hookup like
to convince gay men to come out where they can
beat them right that's a major thing people do with
coco.com but it's also a major gay hookup app because

(18:25):
there's just not a lot of options for that in
france at this period of time right which is what
makes it a profitable place for predators you know um
Somewhere around– this starts somewhere around the 20-teens is when
you first start seeing a large number of attacks on
people getting traced back to Coco. I'm not saying that's
where it actually– I think it probably went on earlier
than that, but the stories all kind of come from

(18:47):
around the start of the Trump era really. These began
as seemingly consensual encounters according to an investigation in Le
Parisien by Maxime Poole. Quote, a person is tasked with
luring a victim, discussing with her to gain her trust,
giving her a meeting place to meet, and then redirecting
her towards several men who pass by and rob the victim.
So that's happening too. People are just getting like beaten

(19:09):
and robbed, but there's also a lot of like homophobic attacks, right?
Because this is such a well-known hookup app for gay men.
As that Le Parisien article notes, numerous traps were set
by homophobic aggressors to assault, rob, and sometimes kill homosexual
people after they had been given a meeting place via
the online chat. So that's all pretty bad. And that is, again,

(19:31):
that takes a while. The site's founded in 2003. This
is all really starting to come out by like 2018, 19.
But there's a reason that I brought up Craigslist and
online communities where file sharing was a common focus, right?
And started by talking about that because Coco, more than anything,
becomes an illegal clearinghouse. for videos and photographic content that

(19:52):
was always sexual and again, basically always illegal, right? And
this means there was a lot of CSAM, a lot
of child sexual abuse imagery being shared on there as
well as being made. People would like advertise kids and
advertise like filming and whatnot. but there are also a
lot of videos featuring non-consensual sexual acts that involve adults, right?

(20:17):
And not just sexual acts. It becomes very popular to
post pictures of women out in the world and whatnot
that you snap without them realizing. So crucially, Cocoa is
not just a place where people come to share these things.
It turns into a place where people request them and
even start putting together funding to produce new content. So people,
through their time on Cocoa, they start out being like, hey,

(20:39):
I've got this video I took of this– I drugged
this girl and I took a video of what I
did and send me some money if you want it
or whatnot. And people start like requesting new stuff. And
it turns into businesses. Folks start making like actual businesses
producing nonconsensual pornography and the like. and use Coco as

(20:59):
a distribution hub. It's not the only website they're doing.
A lot of these people are, you know, trying to
get folks to follow them in other websites, including Telegram.
But this is happening by like the late 20-teens. And
it happens in a lot of ways. But one of
the things that Coco becomes really known for is it's
a website where you can facilitate the real world abuse

(21:22):
of people and even get to partake in it. sometimes
for money, sometimes just in order to help somebody else
create pornography, right? This was organized on an ad hoc
basis by individuals in different chat rooms. And because very
little of what went on was documented in any way,
I'll have to provide you with an example that illustrates
how the Whiter site functioned. And we only know of

(21:44):
this example because it's an extremely famous court case, right?
We're going to focus a lot on this one case
that's very famous because It's the only real case of
abuse or of this stuff happening in Coco that we
have documented to like a really significant degree. But this
is a particularly exceptional case, but by no means the

(22:05):
only one. So starting no later than 2011, users on
Coco had created a chat room named Ason Insu, which
means without their knowledge. This was a place where people,
mostly men, could discuss a very specific fetish. raping or
otherwise sexually touching an unconscious woman generally drugged without her knowledge. Now,

(22:26):
a number of people who are in this broader world
are into what's known as consensual, non-consensual role play. There's
a version of this where like everyone is aware of
what's happening and it's role playing, right? These are scenes.
And it's important that I emphasize that what went on
in the without their knowledge forum was not this kind
of role playing, right? A BBC investigation by Laura Gozzi

(22:48):
described the chat room as a place where men shared
photos and videos of women taken surreptitiously. Like, the whole
point is that they're not consenting. So I want to
make that really clear. This has nothing to do with
the other thing.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
I'm so glad that you made that distinction because, you know,
if anybody is even adjacent to consensual adult kink spaces,
nobody takes consent more seriously than folks who are in
those communities. And I hate when... I hate that it's
so easy to conflate this illegal content that is breaking

(23:23):
the law and is horrible with what consenting adults do
because King communities where folks are consensually interested in things
like consensual non-consent, they take consent very seriously. And it's
just really unfair to conflate them, but also very easy
to conflate them.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
So I'm glad that you made that distinction. It happens
all the time. This has nothing to do with that,
in part because their fetish is that it is not consensual.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
They're not interested in, like, playing or pretending. Like, they— Because— Yeah,
they could.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
I mean, that's the thing is like they could if
somebody wanted to explore this in a legal and consensual way,
that avenue exists.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
I know a bunch of people who do. Right. And
it's yeah, it's it's it's very important. That's not at
all what's going on here. Now, from what I have read,
I suspect that the vast majority of the conversations that
went on in this chat room did not involve real abuse, right?
They were sad, gross men describing their fantasies, sometimes pretending
their fantasies were reality, but describing fantasies. The worst behavior

(24:23):
most people in the chat room would have gotten up
to would be taking nonconsensual photos of, like, women at
the gym or of the romantic partner sleeping, right? And
that's the majority of the content. But a small number
of people do things that are pushing that already very
fucked up envelope way, way, way further, right? And often
it starts with someone just wanting to post some like

(24:44):
candid shots of like their girlfriend or their wife asleep, right?
And then it kind of escalates because people push them
and are like, hey, would you do this? Could you
do this? Could you do this? Why don't you try
drugging her, right? Stuff like that will occur a lot.
Like many similar online ecosystems, a large number of these
more casual users also subsisted on the content generated by
the boldest criminals among them. So while most members of

(25:06):
this chat room probably aren't doing anything at all or
aren't doing more than taking the occasional picture of someone
at the gym, they are consuming the content created by
people who are actively drugging and raping women, and they're
encouraging those people, they're asking them to do more, and
they're sometimes paying them, right? So anybody in this that's

(25:26):
a member of this community, whether or not they're actually
abusing a person directly is participating in abuse. The whole
chat room, it seems like, pretty much was. Again, I
don't speak French, and I didn't have access to it
when it was up, but that is, from what I'm reading,
sounds like what was going on.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
It sounds like a real ecosystem where even if you are...
A freak-o system. Being there makes you a cog in
this machine, essentially.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yes. And if you want to be a cog and...
the machine of capitalism, why not buy some of these products?

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Much better machine to be a cog in than this one. Yeah,
I guess.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, than this one for sure. We're back. All right.
So starting in the 2010s, among the boldest members of
the without their knowledge chat room on Coco was Dominique Polico.

(26:22):
per an article in Le Monde by Lorraine de Futcher, Dominique, quote,
filmed his daughters-in-law in the bathroom using a telephone hidden
in a toiletry bag, then posted the images on Coco.
His grandchildren talked about his insistence on playing doctor or
agreeing to buy them toys only if they were to undress.
And we're going to talk a lot about Dominique today
and tomorrow because he has since become the most infamous

(26:44):
sex offender associated with Coco and arguably the most infamous
sex offender in modern French history.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Um, And while his actions do represent the most extreme
minority of users on the site, I have to really
emphasize that given its size, the size of the website,
the length of the time that it was operating and
the anonymity involved, there's no way he's the only user
who committed crimes on this scale. He simply can't be
like this. I just don't believe that at all. Now,
I think it might be he might be the only

(27:12):
one who committed crimes in the scale against like a
middle class white lady. That's entirely possible. But yeah, we'll
we'll we'll see. So Dominique Polico was born in 1952,
according to French newspaper Le Monde. nowhere seems to have
his exact birth date, except for the Astro Databank, which
is an astrology-based wiki that cites its source as a

(27:34):
French lawyer named Marc Brun, who himself was citing a
birth certificate. I don't know how trustworthy this is, but
it's the only place I found his birth date, you know,
with my casual searching. And it gives it as November 27th, 1952.
This isn't directly relevant, but it did provide me with
an astrological chart for this sex criminal. So here's his
astrological chart, if that shows any of you guys anything. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Shout out to the astrology girlies.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
I don't know what to do with that, but I
found it. So you're seeing it now. I try to
describe stuff to the listeners. I don't know how to
describe an astro. It looks like an astrological chart.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Somebody out there is like, oh, of course his, his
rising is this. It makes so much sense.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Oh, obviously the green squiggly thing and the red squiggly
thing both have lines in the circle thing in the middle. Obviously.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Somebody is gleaning something from this for sure.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Somebody's learned a lot here. Um, So Dominique was the
second child of Denis and Juliet, well, Denis Pellico and
Juliet Rousseau. His mother had first been married to André Pellico,
Denis's brother or Denis's brother. So what happened there, right?
That's kind of a weird situation. Writing for the New
York Times, Catherine Porter describes what happened pretty bluntly. After

(28:45):
his mother's first husband abandoned her and their two children,
she married his brother with whom she had two more children.
One of those was Dominique. So is that my key
went on? This is not a healthy family. This is
not not good place to grow up. Dominique is not
going to have like his the dad that, you know,
he has the brother of the guy who abandoned his family.

(29:07):
Denis is like an abusive asshole, right? Like he is
a very aggressive man and a very cruel man and
a man who does a lot of sex crimes. The
Pelico family raised their children who were simultaneously half siblings
and cousins in central Paris. Decades later, after Dominique was
revealed as a sex criminal, he would make claims that
he had been abused in his childhood. And those claims

(29:29):
have been partly substantiated. He told his wife and several
of his friends about this years before he got caught
with anything. Here's how a separate article in Le Monde,
this one by Henri Seckl, described Dominique's claims. about his childhood.
A few years after Dominique Pellico's birth, his parents adopted
a girl with an intellectual disability, Nicole, who became a
victim of incest in her new family. And... That's horrific.

(29:51):
This is... It's really bad. After his... Denis' wife dies,
he basically marries Nicole. I don't know if they're, like,
legally married, but, like, he... He just takes her as his,
you know, it's really bad. And Jeanette, Dominique's half-sister, testified
that she fled the house as a teenager to escape

(30:12):
her stepfather's sexual abuse. That article by Seckle continues, in
addition to the verbal and physical violence of a father
he vowed never to resemble and whose funeral he never attended,
Dominique Pellico's childhood and adolescence were punctuated by several traumatic events,
the veracity of which is difficult to verify. The sexual
violence forced fellatio, he said he suffered at the age
of nine by a nurse at a hospital. His very

(30:33):
early confrontation with his parents' sexuality, with acts of violence
and domination by his father. And it's hard to say
how true this is. He says he was basically raped
by a male nurse at a hospital when he was
a kid. There's no way to verify that. We can
definitely verify that his mom was raped by his father
because his other siblings saw this too. Dominique has a

(30:56):
very strong memory of of his dad raping and humiliating
their mother. Like that is a thing that sears him
as a kid. I have no reason to doubt that
he later testified in every man, there is a demon
mine came from childhood. And, you know, again, That's literally true,
but you shouldn't take what he's saying as literally true because,
quite frankly, a lot of people get molested as kids

(31:18):
and don't commit the kind of sex crimes Dominique's going
to commit. So keep that in mind, too. Yeah, that's
what I was thinking. You know, fuck this guy. No,
every man doesn't have a demon. Everybody's got shit to
deal with, but that's different from what's going on with you, bro.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
When he was 14, working as an apprentice electrician on
a construction site, Dominique claims he was forced to watch
as several men gang raped. It was one of the guys,
like the foreman's wife or something. She was drugged. And
Dominique was eventually forced to participate. He says forced to participate.
And he told his wife about this, again, well before
he was arrested for anything. It's always worth interrogating how

(31:56):
much we should trust these claims. Psychiatrist Laurent Layette, who
consulted on Dominique's mental health for the court case that
came out of all this, seems to find Dominique's version
of his own childhood to be broadly credible. He noted
that Pellico comes from a family with a confused history
and troubled reference points marked by certain secrets and the
existence of sexual relations between adults and minors. So again,

(32:18):
it doesn't seem like anyone really doubts. He's probably exaggerating
some things. He also is definitely blaming his own behavior
on this. But I don't think there's any reason to
doubt that he was abused quite a lot as a child.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
And that, I mean, this is a tale as old
as time with cycles of abuse. So it's not really
that difficult for me to imagine this.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
It's not difficult to imagine that. But again, whenever he says,
and this is why I did it, I know a
lot of people. I actually do know, unfortunately, quite a
few people who were molested as kids. You know, none
of them have done is the shit we're about to
talk about Dominique doing. So he's blaming that on why
he is the way he is. I don't. Dominique's future
wife and chief victim, Giselle, backs up the description of

(32:58):
Denis Pellico as a monster. When Dominique was still a child,
his father took a job at a boarding house for
disabled people. And Giselle writes in her memoir that she suspects, quote,
he must have sensed that there were vulnerable people and
a domain over which he could rule. That's how she
describes Denis. He soon became the warden and the family
moved into a house on the grounds. Because Dominique's older

(33:21):
siblings left home and went to school by that point,
Dominique was, Giselle claims, trapped with his parents and forced
to live amid the comings and goings of physically fragile
or mentally disturbed men. So he's spending a lot of
time with all these very ill people in this boarding
school that his father is lording tyrannically over. He's being
abused by his dad. He's watching his dad abuse his mom,
and he can't escape. He has to cycle long distances

(33:43):
to a school that's very far from home, and he
develops a reputation as a weird kid from out of town.
Giselle writes, quote, he became an outcast, ostracized for the
theft of a sweet that had actually been stolen by
the pharmacist's son. I don't know how true that is.
I could see him lying to Giselle about that, and
maybe he did something significantly worse than steal a candy

(34:05):
or someone else stole a candy. I don't know. Whatever
the truth, football became young Dominique's passion, but he was
constantly forced to endure the sight of his father abusing
his mother. He begged her to leave for the first
time when he was 14, but she never did. Now,
in his testimony, Dominique painted a picture of a traumatized
young boy who grew into a young man with dark

(34:26):
and terrible urges. He claimed, I have something inside me
that I fought for a long time and credited his wife, Giselle,
for keeping him on the straight and narrow for so
many years. And this is a lie, right? His initial
claim is that like when he first gets caught doing
the crimes that we're going to outline is like, oh,
I've always had this demon inside me, and I fought
it for decades, and then finally in my 60s, you know,

(34:49):
my wife's goodness wasn't enough to, like, keep me from,
you know, doing horrible things. That's not accurate.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Very convenient narrative that also kind of puts the blame
on the wife for her own abuse. Like, oh... She
wasn't able to help me fight these demons any longer.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
He simultaneously like puts her up on a pedestal because
he always talks about it. Even when he was in court,
he talks about her like she's, you know, an angel
and can do no wrong. But also in the same
way that like, yes, she it was her who stopped
me from doing things right. Like it was it was
her example that kept me on the straight and narrow.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
So he is.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
You're right.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
He is like. putting a degree of, blame's not entirely
the right word, but like, yeah, that is fucked up.
The couple met in the home of Giselle's aunt, Andrie,
who just lost her husband. Giselle was there to visit
and provide some comfort to her aunt. She's like 19.
But per her memoir, A Hymn to Life, quote, almost

(35:48):
as soon as I arrived, she started telling me about
a young man called Dominique she had recently employed. Now,
by this point, Dominique had become a licensed electrician and
Andrie had hired him to help her keep her husband's
business going. And she really likes this guy. Dominique is
good at charming people, which is often the case with psychopaths.
They can be very glib and like superficially charming. And

(36:09):
he and Giselle hit it off immediately, right? She would
describe it later as love at first sight. A month later,
she attended a family camping trip with the Pelicos that
sounded like a fucking nightmare. Denis was reportedly furious when
the young couple laid their sleeping bags next to each
other in a tent and accused them of trying to
sleep together. He would later steal their family or their

(36:31):
savings like when they get started as a couple. He's
just constantly a monster to these people as they're starting
their new life together.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
He probably feels his control slipping.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yeah, yeah. I think it is that kind of situation.
Like he escalates his abusiveness against Dominique as Dominique starts
getting out of the house, right? And Dominique does take
Giselle up on the offer to flee his family and
live with her in Paris, right? They move in together.
They get married. And she describes, again, this is love
at first sight. She, after she found out, because as

(37:01):
a spoiler, he commits horrible sex crimes against her when
she's drugged to unconsciousness. And even after all that, she
still says like, yeah, I felt like it was love
at first sight. And they were together for like 50 years.
You know, this is a long and seemingly for most
of its length, like healthy, functional relationship. That's one of
the really fucked up things about it. Um, So initially,

(37:22):
their primary issue as a couple was enduring all the
bullshit that Denis threw their way. Here's a representative story
from Giselle's memoir. Because he was only 19, Dominique, his
father still controlled his bank account, and when he got
wind of our plans, he emptied it. He bought a
small farm and insisted Dominique do the renovations. I still
have this image in my mind of Dominique right at
the bottom of the well, as though he would never
be able to climb out again and was going to

(37:43):
let himself be buried alive by his father, who was
still trying to control our future. He stole from us,
and we said nothing. So not a great relationship with
dad there. But they persevere. They power through it. For
his part, Dominique says this is what drew him to Giselle.
She was the opposite of my mother, who was completely rebellious, right?

(38:04):
In court, he described Giselle as a saint whose love
gave him the strength to deny the darker side of
his nature, these perverted and cruel sexual urges that he
had experienced since childhood, right? And we're meant to believe
as a consequence of his childhood abuse. Now, again, we
know this was a lie. She was, among other things,
he was not keeping on the straight and narrow this
entire time. We don't know how many sex crimes he

(38:26):
committed outside of their marriage while they were married, but
we know he committed some. In 1999, the couple got
divorced without separating as a result of financial issues. They
were eventually remarried in 2007. Giselle says they needed to
do this to avoid her salary being garnished because Dominique's
debts were so bad. This guy sucks on so many levels.

(38:48):
He doesn't make a lot of money. But as she said,
because they're having kids, too, he's an attentive father. He's
an attentive husband. Like, for the most part, it was
a good marriage.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
A little too attentive.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah. And also, she doesn't, like, it's not perfect. She
cheats on him at one point.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Right.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
And he cheats on her at another point. There's a
period of like six months where he moves out and
he lives with another woman. These are very French people
and her memoir is a very French memoir because she
writes very bluntly about like, well, you know, the infidelity
was a problem. But once we had both done it
and got through it, I think it actually improved our
marriage because we were able to talk more openly. about

(39:30):
things like our second and i was able to just
say like oh why don't you just go and fuck
someone else if you want to be in another relationship
right um it's a very french attitude towards infidelity where
they were like well we finally got the cheating out
of the way everyone has to do it obviously we're
french right we got it out of our system yeah
we had to get it out of our system um Now,

(39:50):
this is all happening sometime in the early 90s. During
this time, but Giselle says it's while they were living
together in Paris, Dominique is tied credibly to two sex
crimes in the 1990s. We don't know about any of
this until later. This all comes out after 2020 as
a result of the bigger case against him. But he's

(40:11):
tied definitively to a sex crime in 1999. Per Catherine
Porter's New York Times article, Mr. Polico lured a 19-year-old
real estate agent into a building on the pretext that
he was interested in buying it. He pinned her to
the ground, bound her wrists with rope, pressed a small
bag of ether to her nose, and then pulled down
her pants. But the effect of the drug soon dissipated,
and she managed to escape. Now, he's working as a

(40:33):
real estate agent at the time. This doesn't come out
until decades later as a result of a DNA match
when Dominic gets caught committing his other crimes. And he
initially denied involvement in this. But when he was presented
with DNA evidence, he admitted to attacking this woman on
impulse and fleeing once she escaped. In retrospect, Giselle can
think of thought of because she talks about in her memoir,

(40:53):
like there were a couple of days where he like
came home from work, like really distraught and crying. And
I just assumed he'd had a bad day at work.
And she kind of thinks, oh, that may have been,
you know, what it was. But she doesn't really know.
And she certainly didn't have a sign that he was
doing shit like this. We don't know how often this happened,
but once that 1999 case came out and he ultimately

(41:16):
admitted to having attempted to rape this woman, French police
who specialized in criminal patterns found a link between this
attack and a 1991 rape and murder. In this case,
it was another real estate agent, Sophie Narm. This would
have been during, I think, around the time they were separated,
but it's a little unclear to me. Per Lorraine de
Futcher's article in Le Monde, they found several related factors.

(41:38):
The victims, young women in their 20s, worked in real
estate agencies. The modus operandi is similar, with appointments made
under a false name. The aggression was committed in the
place visited, and there was the use of ties and
a chemical product to put the victim to sleep and
a bladed weapon.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
Who does that sound like?

Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, it sounds like Dominique, right? It sounds like his M.O.
He's denied committing this crime. He has been indicted for it.
It seems very likely the police, I think, lost the
DNA evidence from that case. So they can't like confirm this.
But number one, it seems like this was not an
intentional murder. She died as a result of him drugging
her and being careless, I think, is probably what happened here.

(42:18):
I don't know if there's a bunch more of these rapes.
I go back and forth because Once they had his DNA,
they pretty quickly found the first case and then this
second one. And so I kind of think if there
were a bunch of certainly murders that had the same MO,
they would have come up by now.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
That said, he definitely committed other rapes.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
It couldn't have been just these two and then the
stuff that he did to his wife.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
Like there has to be things we don't know about
going back. God knows how long, maybe to his childhood.
I just it's impossible to say.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Right.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Giselle says that she never saw this side of her husband.
Her memoir does include some events that in hindsight you
could see as like evidence something was wrong. But one
thing she points out is that in the entire like
50 years they were together, something like that, he only
ever struck her once. And, you know, that's bad, right?
But honestly, in relationships that went lasted 50 something years

(43:13):
and started in 1971 alone. How many of them exist
where like the husband was only violent once, right? It's not,
you could be like, oh, he hit her because she
was trying to leave. That was a sign that he
was a murderer. Or you could be like, well, but
that's still probably less spousal abuse than a lot of
marriages in which the husband does not commit massive sex crimes.
So I don't know that we should see that as

(43:34):
like a sign.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
To be fair. One time is still greater than no times.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Well, yeah, it's still it's I'm not talking it's not
a question of it being bad or not. It's a
question of like, is this a sign that he was
going to do something like this? And I just don't
know that I think it is right now because he
this is like not not not abnormal, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Right.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
And it was not she Giselle is like, I don't
I didn't notice anything.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Right.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Again, there were pieces that all of her family members
had little bits of it, but nothing that would have
really tipped them over.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
And a lot of stuff that in hindsight seems like
signs that he was this kind of guy is stuff
that Giselle at the time was just like, well, he's
just a man. This is what men are like, right?
He was aggressive and selfish in bed. She never had
an orgasm until that affair in her mid thirties. And
he grew increasingly interested in like degradation and name calling
during sex, the longer they were together. And again, these
are things that like in retrospect, we can see is

(44:29):
relevant to his crimes, but also it's just stuff that
a lot of people do unfortunately right like it's yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
Talk to your like the young women who have sex
with men in your life and you would be surprised
to find that doing this stuff without consent or permission
is not really that uncommon so i can understand why
she's thinking this is just how men are this is
just what this is just.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
How men are like and and she's she's also thinking
like on the whole he's a very gentle and like
because he he it's not as bad as a lot
of relationships she's aware of. All of her friends are
jealous of them. Like they have a reputation in their
friendship group as being like the perfect couple. That's how
Giselle describes it. And I think rather than like looking
through their past to be like, Oh, there were signs.

(45:13):
This man was a monster all the time. The more upsetting,
but probably more accurate thing is that like, no, there
really weren't like, there was not a lot that people
would have put together. You know, maybe if everyone had
been talking about every weird thing they ever saw, But
like most people maybe noticed one weird moment from this
guy in the decades they knew him. And that's just
not enough to guess that someone's going to do stuff
like what he did.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Right.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
And it's really upsetting. But I think it's important to
be like, yes, some people can hide that well who
are this kind of predator. Right. And that's very scary.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
And it's easy to think that people who do monstrous
things are all monsters, like very extreme people that you
can pick out of a lineup very easily. But the
reality is that's not the case.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
No, and she has a lot more stories of him
being like an attentive and loving husband than stories of
like weird, creepy moments. Obviously, they stayed together for like
50 years, you know? Once the couple retired, though, and
moved to a house outside, so they moved to kind
of like a semi-rural area because they want a place
with a view. Their finances still aren't good because of
all of Dominique's debts. He like fails. His last business

(46:18):
is like he takes on debt and he has like
his 18-year-old son be like on paper the owner of
the business. because his credit's too shitty, and he winds
up needing a loan from fucking his wife. Anyway, it's bad.
He's bad with money, right? So the couple, they're not rich,
but they're renting a house in a nice place, and
they're planning to spend their retirement there. She's got a

(46:39):
decent pension. He's got a shittier one. And he is
really angry about that. He doesn't seem to understand why
she has a better pension than his, and it's because
she worked more and was better at her job than
he ever was. He switched careers a bunch, you know? Um...
So once they move out of Paris and are living
in the country in this place called Mazon, Dominique starts

(47:01):
spending more and more time on the Internet. Sophie Gilbert
summarizes this kind of period of time in a review
of Giselle's book for The Atlantic. He's constantly on his computer.
One day, his son's partner walks in on Dominique masturbating
behind his desk, which Dominique seems unembarrassed about, so much
so that you can't help but wonder whether he'd planned it.
In fact, at some point, he set up secret cameras

(47:21):
to film each of his two daughters-in-law in the shower.
Then he posted the images online. And he's posting this
to Coco, right? This is how it starts, is he's posting,
he's posting. We know he posted pictures of his daughter
that he or someone else took when she was asleep.
We know that he posted pictures of his daughters-in-law in

(47:41):
the shower from like this camera, or not pictures, but
video from this camera footage. And that's how he starts.
Before he's... being physically violent and drugging people, he starts
by with these non-consensual photos and videos, right? So there
is like an escalation period.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
I'd call that violence.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
I meant like physical. I'm not, sorry, I'm not trying
to minimize it. I'm just trying to say like, there's
a ladder of escalation where he starts with things that
do not.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
I just want listeners to understand that this guy is
an absolute monster on so many levels, like just that alone.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
Is very bad.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Is very, very bad.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
And unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah, this is how he's warming up effectively. Unfortunately, yeah. Yeah.
And there are some, probably the biggest sign was that
his email address is fetish45, like fetish. And his family
is like, kids notice that as weird. It's like, why
the fuck is this dad's email address? Like, what the

(48:39):
hell is going on with him? And again- It's France.
And a lot of the weirder, a lot of his
like sexual, because he would periodically make some weird sexual comments.
And it often got written off as like, well, he's
a Frenchman, right? It's France. We're all French, right? Like
this is a talk of sex and talk of like
desire and whatnot is more common and less sort of stigmatized, right?

(49:00):
So it also gets kind of, even though everyone in
this story is French and they all think his email
handles really weird and kind of off-putting, right? So there
are little bits of, But it's not enough that you
would guess this guy is the kind of predator that
he is. The community where Dominique spent so much of
his time and the place where he uploaded secret camera
footage of his daughters-in-law in the shower was, again, Coco,

(49:21):
Isaac Steadle's chat site for nice people. Dominique's lawyer would
later claim that he started using Coco in 2011. I
think he was using it earlier, but I don't entirely know.
We know he starts drugging his wife in 2011. Now,
in her book, Giselle points out that her husband was
caught taking upskirt photos of women in a supermarket not

(49:41):
far from their apartment, quote, as early as 2010, which
is the year he retired. So it's the first time
that he gets caught taking upskirt photos of women out
in a public place to post on Coco. Obviously, he'd
been doing it for some time before. I doubt this
is the first time he ever tried it.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
He gets.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
And they don't take it very seriously in 2010. She
never finds out about it. He gets like a hundred
euro fine. And very little happens at this point in time, right?

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Is he posting those images on Coco?

Speaker 1 (50:12):
I don't know if he posted the ones he got
arrested taking, but he was posting other images on Coco. Yes. Okay.
From Giselle's memoir, quote, in 2010, the police clearly didn't
think filming under women's skirts was terribly serious because he
got away with a fine of a hundred euros and
I never heard a thing about it. She's written that
if she had known about this at the time, my
life would certainly have changed. And she would have, among

(50:33):
other things, forced her husband to see a psychologist. It
also would have made her more cautious about some of
the things she experienced next. So the fact that the
police don't take this seriously is a part of why
she suffers, right? I'm not putting all the blame on them,
but the fact that this is not something the cops
care about much is a real problem. And it is
why this is allowed to happen.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
This makes me so angry, and I need folks to understand, like,
it is so common that institutions and authorities just don't
give a shit about violence, particularly sexual violence against women
and girls. The perpetrators are able.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
To— Boys being boys. Guys being guys.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
It's not a big deal, whatever, whatever. Maybe she won
on it. Maybe the skirt was short, whatever, whatever. They
do nothing, and then that person learns, oh— I can escalate. Oh,
I can do this more. And so I always... I mean,
I think that she's exactly right that if the people
that we think of as, like, the people who should
do something actually gave a fuck and did something, think

(51:30):
of all of the violence and escalation that could have
been prevented. But, like, I mean, I... He is responsible
for his crimes, for sure. But there is a network
of enablers that allowed him to escalate. Yeah, it's systemic.
It really is.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
Yes, there's a systemic aspect of this.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
It's the locker room talk, or whatever they tried to
excuse Donald Trump's horrific behavior as. Locker room talk. That's
what they're doing here.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Yeah, and this is not harmless. It's not harmless to
take fucking candid photos or take... upskirts or whatever of
random women in public like that that's not a victimless
crime right even if they don't find out about it.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
And like paparazzi have been doing that for decades to
to young young celebrities and that's disgusting.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
There's probably a line between that and this too you
could draw um yep yeah you know what else is
a line that we should draw a line between now
and you listening to these.

Speaker 3 (52:28):
Ads oh that was so dark yeah i don't know
man I know it's brutal.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
We're back. So, uh, nobody contacted Giselle about her husband
taking up skirt photos at the fucking grocery store. And
in 2011, Dominique decided to escalate from just posting whatever
candid photos and videos of random women, his female family members,
he could get his hands on, um, And to do
something more extreme. Now, he claims that as he grew

(53:01):
more interested in the fetish content on Coco, he started
encountering more extreme ideas. Per an article in the New
York Times, he learned from another user the method of
drugging his wife for his own sexual pleasure so he
could do things to her that she would not permit
while unconscious. Over time, he offered her to other men
he met online. Dominique would bait the lure by offering
photos of his sleeping wife in anonymous chat rooms, and

(53:23):
when specific users expressed interest, he'd message them directly and
make an offer. come over to his home at an
appointed hour where his wife would be drugged unconscious and
ready for them. And what he's, first off, someone online
helps him figure out, like, because he had experimented with
ether and he killed someone, probably, probably killed someone unintentionally

(53:44):
using it. So he doesn't want to do that again.
He's got a prescription for a benzo. I think it's lorazepam.
And I think she had a prescription for some sleeping
meds that she had been warned only to take a
tiny fraction of. And he gets advice from another user
who's apparently a registered nurse on cocoa. Who's like, don't

(54:05):
give her more than this. Here's the perfect dose to
knock her out. You're going to, and it's telling her like,
you want to mix it with these muscle relaxers because
that way she won't clench up. And, and you want to,
if you give her this dose of lorazepam, you know,
even if she wakes up, she won't remember what's happening
because she's drugged, right? Like that's how benzos can work
in high enough doses. Like you go away for days
at a time. I remember the first time I ever

(54:26):
fucked around recreationally with Xanax. And this is when I
was like 17 or 18. I took like half a
four bar and I remember walking down the street and
then it was 26 hours later and I had no
memory of anything that happened in the interim. But I
was apparently conscious for a large chunk. Benzos and high
doses can do.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
That to that nurse.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Fuck you.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Let's look into that nurse.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Let's look into that nurse.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
I don't know if that specific guy did get caught,
but like there have been a number of them who
were involved in the site.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
I hope you feel shame till your last breath.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
I hope worse than that for you, man.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
You are a fucking piece of shit.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
You are an absolute monster.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Fuck you.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
I don't. I don't know if they found that guy
because I did not find a name attached with him
in any of the reporting. I'm sure they're looking for him.
They found a lot of people, but some people were
better on anonymity than others.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
I think you're correct there because I myself have followed
this case very closely, and I do not recall a
nurse being directly brought up in any of this.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
But fuck you, nurse, whoever you are.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
But it was apparently a nurse who taught him the
mixtures to use.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
That person is so unbelievably complicit.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, very directly.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
So much for do no harm, asshole.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
It's not just this nurse. There's a whole chat room
of people giving him advice and saying like, oh, do
this and take a video of it. Do that and
take a video of it. So outside of the dozens
of men who ultimately do come to their home or
homes in order to rape her while she's drugged, there's
God knows how many, at least dozens, maybe hundreds of
other men who are commenting, who are urging it on,

(56:04):
who are like enjoying masturbating to the content he's making, right?
Like there's a lot of complicity outside of the people
who are like legally directly involved. Journalists with CNN obtained
access to chat logs that Dominique painstakingly preserved while committing
his crimes. Here's how they describe his MO. After initial

(56:24):
contact was made on Coco, conversations then moved to Skype.
Pelico often carried out preparatory video calls with the men
during which he flipped the camera around to show them
his unaware wife. He also shared intimate photos and videos
of Giselle, several of which showed her being raped. In
some of the messages, several men expressed their admiration for
Dominique and shared the desire to do the same to
their partners. Another defendant on trial wasn't accused of raping Giselle,

(56:46):
but has been convicted with drugging and raping his own wife. Now, first,
there's a lot more to talk about. I want to
point out, because we started this talking about Isaac Steadle
and the website Coco, and we're still talking, this is
all happening on Coco. There's a reason why I grounded
this in the site and the founders of these sites,
because as I think I have established, Dominique was a

(57:08):
predator well before he got access to Coco, well before
he did anything on the internet. He was a predator, right?
He probably would have preyed on his family members and
his wife to some extent if he had never encountered
this website. Giving him this website was like giving a
kid who fantasizes about a mass shooting but lives in
a country with no guns. If you were to like

(57:30):
go to a country where people can't buy guns and
find a kid who's like obsessed with mass shootings and
hand him an AR-15 and say, go at it, champ.
That's what Isaac Steadle does by making Coco. That's what
this website is, right? It is a gun that is
being handed out to any person like Dominique who wants
to use it. And that's the moral issue here, right?

(57:51):
When we talk, because there's, as we talk about the
court case, because Steele eventually gets charged for running this website,
there's a lot of fucking, what I call, I think
like the dipshit end of like the free speech crusaders, right?
Which I consider myself normally, who are like, well, you know,
you can't go after someone just for hosting a website
where this stuff happens. And like, I'm fucking sorry. If
I were to buy and or own like a large

(58:13):
venue and, and, and run like a farmer's market or
something out of it.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Right.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
I own a building and I say, if you pay
me a hundred bucks, you can set up every Saturday,
you can set up a little booth and sell your wares.
And it started out as people like selling like grocery,
like food they'd grown or whatever, like little crafts. And
then one day, some guy comes in with a bunch
of like ghost guns and like maps of a bunch
of local schools. And another guy, a guy comes in
with like a table full of like CSAM, like fucking

(58:39):
child sex abuse images. and I keep taking their $ 100
and knowingly let those guys sell their products out of
the building I own, I would go to prison, right?
It's not a free speech issue. You are owning and
operating a place that has directly been optimized to enable
this kind of behavior, and you're very well aware that
that's what people are using the site for. You don't

(59:00):
have any kind of free speech argument in my fucking
mind anymore, right? That's where I land on this morally.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
I heart agree.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
You really summarized the kind of complexities of this argument well.
You know, we're all sort of in the digital rights space.
And I think it's complicated because this is all, the
conversations about it today are happening against the backdrop of
people trying to, you know, legislate the internet, age gate
the internet, all of that. And so the conversations.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
Are particularly- Encryption and shit, yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
Exactly. However, there's got to be standards, right?

Speaker 1 (59:35):
There has to be standards. Yes. Sorry.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
No, I just really agree. And I think there's been
such a big... complex argument within the digital rights and
open internet movement about exactly what you just summarized. Like,
where is the line? I would argue that perhaps the
line is the one that you just made, right? The
line where it's illegal content that is harming and abusing

(59:59):
women and girls. Perhaps that's the line.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
And if that's like the main use of your website
is varying, allowing people to commit varying kinds of crimes
against other people. anonymously. If you are deliberately running a
site to do that and enabling its function, like you
are doing something wrong. And it's the, you know, this
is not the main issue, certainly not with the series
of crimes being committed against Gisele Pelico. But it is like,

(01:00:25):
in terms of the fucking freedom of speech thing, if
you care about freedom of speech, no one is more
of a threat to our ability to communicate freely on
the internet, to encryption, to privacy, than people like Isaac Steadle,
who like force us to have to have these fucking
legal debates by handing out the equivalent of a fucking
gun to a kid who wants to shoot up a school, right?

(01:00:45):
Like that's what he's doing here. Anyway, not the primary issue,
but important to say. So back to Giselle. Obviously, this
goes on, him bringing anonymous men over to rape her
while she is drugged for a decade.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
At least 200 accounts of what she describes as gang
rape over the years, often involving multiple people in a
similar night. There are, of course, physical consequences to all
of this, even though she can't remember what's happening. Very
significant ones. Giselle would wake up on many days with
severe brain fog and would often like not have memories

(01:01:21):
of like the day after, too, because that's kind of
what huge doses of benzos can do. Right. you know,
you can lose days at a time. But she did
notice she would wake up, and there's no nice way
to say this, leaking mysterious fluids, right? I think this
is a mix of things. Probably a lot of it
is lubricant. But she would wake up like wet and
was very concerned about this. So she went to the doctor.
In addition to the fact that she's got brain fog,

(01:01:43):
she's losing days, she has a lot of pelvic pain,
and she's waking up wet. So she goes to the
doctor repeatedly. She gets MRIs and fucking CAT scans and
all sorts of shit. And the doctors keep telling her
everything is fine. And one of the bastards here, we
talked about the police and how they fucked up. The
medical establishment and how it treats aging women is a
side bastard here. And I'm going to quote from Giselle's autobiography.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
I mean, all women, to be honest.

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
Yeah, but this is I'm not denying that. She's talking. Yeah, yeah.
I'll quote it here. I spent a decade having endless
medical examinations, blood tests, scans, multiple courses of vaginal pessaries.
neurological tests, 10 years of going to see doctors who
looked at me as if to say that at my age,
a woman can't expect much anymore. She ought to just
relax and let time continue its demolition work. Never wondering

(01:02:31):
what might be going on, never attempting a diagnosis. And
Dominique always there by my side, he knew. And one
of the things she'll, she'll point out, like I'm waking
up wet and they'll be like, well, this just happens
to old ladies. You know, you're just losing control. You know,
it's fine. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Wear a diaper. Um, And I know this is the
French medical system, but honestly, you're a fool if you
think her experience would have been any better in the
US or the UK for that matter. Like really, most
places I can think of.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
It's like medical gaslighting where essentially they're just saying, oh,
you're just uptight is the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. During one doctor's visit, when her
physician made a note of the fact that she had
severe bruising in her pelvic area, her husband had the
gall to quip, what have you been getting up to
during the day?

Speaker 3 (01:03:15):
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Dominique. Yeah. And of course, we know that, you know,
what Giselle was doing had nothing to do here.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
And everything to do with how Dominique spent his nights
on Coco.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
That's what's actually at fault here. But she doesn't know
and she's not going to for years. And we'll talk
about how she learns what happens next and what happens
to Isaac Steele and Coco and at least one other
founder of a Web site that's enabled this horrible behavior.
We'll talk about all that, as well as a different website, Motherless,
and the Rape Academy, as CNN called it, that it spawned,

(01:03:52):
in part two! I shouldn't have gotten such an upbeat
part two there. Bridget, how you doing?

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
It's pretty rough, you know. I think you're covering this
with a lot of grace and nuance, which I appreciate, but...
This conversation fucking sucks. This guy can eat shit. It
has to happen, though.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
He's a real asshole.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
We have to talk about these things. And, you know,
when we let Bridget know the topic for this week,
one of the things that Bridget and I both agreed
on is that the way this has been covered in
the mainstream media has lacked empathy. And the way Robert
wrote this script is quite the opposite. There's so much
empathy in this script. And I think it's important to
cover these stories, not just with the facts, but with

(01:04:39):
your feelings.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
And this is horrific.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
I've been on Bastards a few times, and I don't
think y'all have ever reached out to give a heads
up before.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Heads up.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
We usually don't. Because you know, like, with this show, genocide...
murder poisoning rape like that's all child abuse we talk
about that stuff a lot because it's just it's our
milieu but this this is just such another level i
mean i was talking to my partner about it and
just one of the things she said is that like

(01:05:13):
yeah it's kind of just impossible to ever like fully
trust a man yeah like you never know you never
know you never know uh And I don't know what
else to take from this story.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that y'all are talking about it.
I also, I mean, I don't want to be too
much of a downer, but I remember watching the coverage
of this case in real time. And so much of
the conversation was, well, they're married. Can a husband really
assault a wife? I just don't think we're, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
There's a number of quotes like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
And that was one of the dominant narratives that I
remember watching in real time. And I just don't think
that we're having the right conversation about sexual violence. And
I think that people, it might be easy to hear
some of the more kind of historical bastards and be like,
this guy was a genocidal, homicidal maniac. He sucks. But

(01:06:06):
then when you hear about somebody committing sexual violence domestically
to their wife, I think a lot of people are like,
it's just a domestic issue. This is a marriage. It's intimate.
It's their business. It doesn't have anything to do with
a wider societal issue.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
And this couldn't be more obviously a wider societal issue.
Not just the fact that the police and the medical
establishment had little parts in this, but the fact that
all of these, they, they, they know at least like
70 different men partook in these like rape things. I
50 were, were convicted, but there's like 70 or so

(01:06:42):
that they, they had pictures or videos or evidence of that.
Cause Dominique's documenting all of it. Um, all of them
within 30 miles of their home. These are not men
pulled from all over France. These are in some cases
like guys that she saw at the grocery store. And
like recognized he would encourage people to like he would
tell some of them if they were like wanted to,
you know, show up in a couple of nights. He

(01:07:04):
would tell them where she was during the day so
that they could like drive by or walk by or
like go into a store she was at and like
see her and like meet her surreptitiously without her knowing.
And that's the thing is that like, this was not
casting a wide net across every pervert in France. This
was just how many guys happened to be on this
website within like a 40 minute drive of her home

(01:07:26):
who were immediately willing to be like, yeah, I'll rape
this lady, right? That's the systemic part of it, right?
Like you can't, if you actually look into what happened
in this story, you cannot walk away without making the
conclusion that there are a shocking number of just random
dudes who in any given society who would, if they

(01:07:46):
felt like it was safe, easily and absolutely rape an
unconscious drugged woman. Like if they didn't have to do
the drugging themselves. Like a startling number of guys were
down to do that in this community in France. I
don't know any reason to suspect that it would have
been different if it had happened in Duluth, right? Or
fucking Osaka for that. Well, probably some cultural differences there maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
But it's incredibly... Yeah, I don't know. I don't have
anything else to say about it today. We'll talk more
in part two, I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
I'm going to go stand outside during our break to
feel the sun.

Speaker 1 (01:08:22):
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
Sorry, everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool
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(01:08:44):
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