Part Two: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

Robert sketches out the international network of websites where sex criminals ply their trade and advertise, and concludes the story of Dominique Pelicot.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome back to behind the bastards a podcast where this
week we're talking about some websites that enable horrific sex
crimes and uh the actions of dominique pelico who is
just a just a monster um you you know what
was in the part one of this episode right i
don't probably don't need to remind you i i I mean,

(00:27):
I guess I should, but first I should introduce our guest,
Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome back. Also, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a little bit
of a rough one, but still happy to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a rough one in a
podcast that only does rough ones. Do you have any
pluggables you want to plug up top here?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
I do, and I've kind of been thinking about it
as we've been having this conversation. I just published an
audio book with Simon & Schuster called Love it, first prompt,
AI and the Future of Intimacy, where we look at
AI companions and people who use AI for things like romance, emotional.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
Support, and sex.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
And some of the marketing of the companies that make
and market AI companions, they really lean into this very
toxic attitude that women and girls should just be for
the taking. And that you can, in fact, use AI
to create an AI companion who will do what your
girlfriend slash wife won't do.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
And.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I don't know, something about this conversation is just really
making me think about that dynamic, the dynamic that every
woman and girl should just be yours for the taking,
that that should be the world that people live in.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Well, and just the attitude that women are not partners.
They're almost like a vending machine that dispenses sex or
emotional comfort, right? As opposed to a person. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah. I mean, that's what this story is about too, unfortunately.
There is a real direct tie between the AI girlfriend
stuff that's going on and, yeah, the crimes in this.
And in the same way, like obviously not every– plenty
of people who are seeking AI companionship are not sex

(02:12):
criminals in the same way Dominique Pellico is. I don't
mean to suggest that. But there's like– There's a line
between these things, right? There's similar motivations that are pushing
the people who are into this weird sleep fetish thing
where you definitely don't want these women to know that
you're using them as sexual objects. There's a line between

(02:32):
that and people wanting to take the human out of
having a human partner, I think, probably. Anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
I would absolutely agree with you.

Speaker 4 (02:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
So we left off last episode at the start of
the 20-teens when Dominique Pellicot started drugging his wife and
using Coco to recruit dozens of anonymous men, all of
whom lived within 15 to 30 miles of their home,
to sexually assault her in the dead of night. Before
we get further into this story, it's important for you
to know that just as Dominique was not alone in
his crimes, Coco was not the only place where men

(03:11):
were meeting online to do this sort of thing. In fact,
Dominique is a distinct outlier within the community of sleep
content aficionados, both in that he commits, I should say,
non-consensual sleep content aficionados, both in that he commits actual
abuse rather than fantasizing about it, and that his years
of experience as a rapist and murderer meant that by
the time Coco came around, he already had experience drugging women,

(03:34):
assaulting them, and covering his tracks while committing sex crimes.
Most of the guys who get interested in this stuff
start at zero, and they have to find a community
of like-minded abusers before they can offend. And most don't
offend directly. They offend by partaking, purchasing, supporting other people.
Because most guys just don't have the– I don't know.
Gut seems like the wrong word. Most of them are

(03:55):
not willing to cross that line, which is still– they're
still abusing. They're participating just as someone who shares CSAM
is participating in the abuse of children. even if they're
not making it or directly molesting children themselves. I'm not
saying that to reduce their culpability. There was an investigation
that went very viral earlier this year by CNN. And
the term they used for the website they were looking

(04:18):
into was an online rape academy. And that academy was
the website motherless.com, which is, I mean, just from the name,
you can tell this is a place where some upsetting
stuff happens. The website domain was first registered in 2005,
two years after Coco, but nothing went up there until
2008 when a guy named Joshua Lang founded that and

(04:40):
an LLC in New York City. Motherless billed itself as
a moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever,
although their definition of legal is. was quite expansive and
included a lot of illegal things, right? Legal deserves all
of the quotation marks. There's a shortage of quotation marks
now because of how many we had to put around legal. Yeah,

(05:03):
could not, like size 78 font, bold. Every page on
motherless.com featured this disclaimer. All content posted to this site
is 100% user contributed. All illegal uploads will be reported.
If you want to blame someone for the content on
this site, Blame the freaks of the world, not us.
Feel free to join the community and upload your goodies.

(05:23):
Don't blame us. Please upload the illegal porn that you're making.
It's not all illegal. I don't even know if to
say most of it is. And a lot of it is,
by the way, when they're referring to illegal uploads, they're
not even talking about like sex crimes. They're talking about
like people who are taking porn someone else produced and
uploading it and breaking like copyright laws, right? Because people–

(05:44):
and again, most of the stuff pointed here is not
like criminal content, right? But a lot of it, an
increasing number of it is. And in case you're curious,
here was Motherless.com's logo. If you can't see it because
you're not on the Netflix, it's– I mean there's– I
found a 2011 California civil suit that described the logo

(06:04):
pretty well as, quote, a depiction of a mother holding
a child's hand with a large red circle on with
a cross through it around it and seemingly ejaculating phallic
symbol protruding from it. Like the motherless.com is sort of
looks like a dick that's ejaculating because it's got this
like white background behind it. It's next to the mom
with a little kid and like a circle with a

(06:26):
cross or with a slash through it thing.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
A Ghostbusters thing.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, like a Ghostbusters thing with like a mom and
a kid.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Said filing also noted that the website had a separate
logo on certain pages that was just a young girl
in ballerina shoes swinging from the roof in a manner
I can only describe as upsetting. Yeah, you'll see it here.
It's not super great. I'm not happy about this. I
don't like that. Nope. Don't like that.

Speaker 5 (06:53):
God.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
So the users on motherless.com did indeed post, well, goodies,
as the founder of the website described it. An investigation
by Caitlin Roper on the website Collective Shout gives a
good overview of the content offerings. We found illegal hidden
camera videos. Some included images or videos of women often
purported to be perpetrators' female family members in the shower

(07:16):
or toilet. We found hidden camera videos where women were
filmed having sex, apparently unaware they were being filmed, and
often overtly marketed as such. Some videos depicted women blindfolded
and secretly recorded during sex with their male partner, unable
to see the camera. One particularly chilling video, Name Gets
Fucked on Hidden Camera, included the woman's full name in
the title, with a photo of the woman on her

(07:38):
wedding day, captioned 25 years later, then follows footage of
her having sex with her partner, apparently unaware she is
being filmed. So, yeah, that's motherless. Now, it won't surprise
you to hear that this created a river of lawsuits.
The largest of these were generally DMCA violations, because again,

(08:00):
A huge amount of the content here is just repackaged,
like professionally made porn that someone kind of files the
serial numbers off and says, oh, this is totally real.
So at least there's that. A lot of these sleep
videos were like porn that consenting adults made where they're
acting and people would just upload it and say it
was a real video. But far too much of it
was real and often really illegal content. In 2012, Dutch

(08:23):
citizen Aiden Coban posted topless photos of Amanda Todd, a
15-year-old girl, to Motherless as part of a blackmail scheme.
Todd had started using video chat services in 2009 to 2010,
and a group of pedophiles quickly started trying to groom her.
When one guy managed to convince her after like a
year to take her shirt off on webcam, he screen-capped

(08:44):
the images and used those to start blackmailing her to
do things and take other pictures. Things escalated over a
two-year period until Todd took her own life in 2012.
In the fallout, Aiden was charged with a ton of
different crimes and ultimately sentenced to 13 years in prison.
That's just one of these cases, right? And you see

(09:05):
some of the stuff that we're seeing with Coco. One
thing I want to emphasize here is that Motherless is
a place where this guy is like posting what I
guess we'd call revenge porn or like blackmail content online.
But it's not where the relationship starts. These people, like
Todd started interacting with this person on like a video
chat website. I'm not sure if it was Chatroulette, but

(09:26):
Chatroulette started around this time. And the reason why a
lot of this starts in 2009 or 10 is that
that's when we first start getting a lot of anonymous
video chatting clients that a lot of kids are using.
And like the whole thing with Chatroulette was like, our
friend of the pod, Cody Johnson, did like a parody
song called You're Gonna See a Dick If You're on Chatroulette.
Because people would just expose themselves on it. Like, and

(09:48):
a lot of kids got like shit like that happened
a lot on chat roulette. Now.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
I was on chat roulette and Omegle and it really
would be, you, you would, you would get matched with
somebody who was already masturbating. He wasn't even, there wasn't
even like a conversation. It was already happening.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
And I, this is also a good place to highlight
the difference between a site like chat roulette and Coco
or motherless. We're like a lot of bad stuff happens
on chat roulette. And this, this kid does get abused.
I don't know if it was chat roulette, but because
they're on a video chatting site, But that wasn't the
purpose of Chatroulette or these other sites. They weren't built
for like weird sex stuff. That was just kind of
a thing that it was a side effect of an
obvious side effect that they should have done more to

(10:26):
deal with. But it wasn't the whole purpose of the site.
And the site was not deliberately sort of like leaning
in to providing freaks a way to masturbate in front
of kids. That was not the purpose of Chatroulette. And
I don't really think there's much in the way of
like blame to a site other than like, well, you
guys should have known that would have been a thing, right?

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Like that was a predictable problem.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah. But it is a different kind of thing than
like with Coco, right? Now, again, Motherless is not the
only or primary place where abuse occurred here. Todd's grooming
and blackmail took place in a distributed system of websites
and online communities. And it was she was abused by
what I would describe as a community of abusers that
had coalesced around the first webcam chatting sites from 2009

(11:07):
to 2012. And some of those people would hang out
in Motherless. That was a major gathering space of them.
But it is important you understand. As important as individual
sites may be to some of these specific cases, none
of these abusers are totally reliant on any one of
these sites. And when one of them gets shut down,
they find other places, because the problem is much bigger
than there being bad websites where bad men can do things, right?

(11:31):
These communities are independent of these websites, to some extent
at least, and certainly these individual abusers are. A contemporary
vice report by Patrick McGuire summarized, quote, Pedophiles find young
girls on webcam chat sites like BlogTV, coerce them into
taking their clothes off, screenshot their images clandestinely, and share
the screencaps with each other in a sick bartering system.

(11:53):
So motherless, then, is not the hub of such abuse.
It was instead a place to brag about it and
bask in the adulation of other sex criminals. And what
about the founder of this site, Joshua Lang, right? We
should probably look into him a little bit. And unfortunately,
like Isaac Steadle, his early life, I don't know. I
got nothing.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
He's basically a ghost. He's as much of a ghost
as you can be while still being on the Internet.
It's interesting to me how many of these guys are
very concerned with their own personal privacy. Also kind of
worth pointing out.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
Wildly violating the privacy of others.

Speaker 5 (12:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Interesting. Various legal filings list him as the owner, operator
and sole employee of Motherless.com. The website Collective Shout collected
a number of these filings and point to a 2018 case,
Ventura Content v. Motherless, which provided this background that's basically
all I know about Joshua. When Lang started Motherless, he
uploaded around 700,000 pictures and videos that users had uploaded

(12:48):
to a different site to fill out his own, right?
Number one, he's committing a lot of DMCA violations and stuff.
This immediately, like, this is not user-created. That was always
kind of a farce, the idea that these are all
created by users. That was a marketing term. That wasn't real.
Joshua started by stealing a bunch of content from a
bunch of other places, and that included a lot of

(13:10):
illegal content, because in 2018, Joshua E. Lang of Tolano, Illinois,
was convicted of CSAM-related crimes and given a 45-year sentence
for having a massive amount of pictures of kids getting abused, right?
We don't 100% know that this was the guy who
founded motherless.com. That's still kind of a mystery. But the

(13:31):
people at or the author of that collective shout investigation
seems fairly convinced that this is the same Joshua. And
I have to admit, there are some striking similarities between
what the DOJ claims this guy did and what you
would expect from someone who ran a website like motherless.
Per the DOJ's indictment, quote, Lange admitted that he used

(13:53):
the minors to engage in sexually explicit content while the
minors were asleep and produced videos and photographs in his
basement of such conduct. He also admitted to drugging them.
So he's drugging kids and filming sexually explicit content with them, right?
We don't know that this is the guy who founded Motherless,
but it seems really likely.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
Sounds like his MO for sure.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Sounds like it probably was, uh, Sleep pornography exploded on
Motherless during the same years that Dominique was active in
Coco over in France. It started around 2010 or 11, right?
I don't know entirely why, but that is really when
this stuff takes off to a big degree, and it
seems to be consistent in a couple of different countries.

(14:33):
I mean, one reason is that this does coincide with
the popularity of video chat apps and the growing ubiquity
of smartphones. To be honest, if I had to think
of one reason why 2010 to 11 is why all
of these, like, non-consensual sleep fetish porn– communities get started
and people start doing this stuff is because that's the
first time when a lot of people had access to
like smartphones that could record decent video that they just

(14:56):
would have in their pocket all the time and it's
when there's like a lot of video chat apps that
are easy to use the internet's fast enough for that
kind of stuff so some of it's just like technically
this was the first time in which a lot of
this stuff was possible most of the men who found
themselves drawn to this kind of content had again less
experience drugging and assaulting women than Dominique Policoe And so
a smaller subset of more experienced users made money and

(15:20):
clout providing these newer people with the tools of the trade.
Per CNN, quote, one motherless user claimed to be running
a business selling and dispatching sleeping liquids to any address
in the world. The man, who said he was based
in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave on the North African coast,
said on his Telegram account that it would cost 150 euros,
approximately $ 175, for a bottle of the liquid that he

(15:41):
said was tasteless and odorless. Your wife won't feel a
thing and won't remember anything. So again, we don't know
if that stuff was real. We know he was mailing
stuff because he posted pictures of it and people seemed
to buy it. There were people saying it worked. I
don't think they've tracked this guy down or know exactly
what that was. But he's not the only person selling

(16:02):
and offering advice on sleeping drugs via motherless.com. And we
know the same thing is happening in Coco around the
same time. It's how Dominique gets started. And it's a
major thing people are doing on this site is buying
and selling the tools of the trade of rape, right?
That's a major thing in motherless in these communities. And
it goes back to.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
You talking about how this is really an enterprise. It's
not just, you know, it's a business. It's a business ecosystem.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
They're hustling. Yeah, it's a side hustle. Men who got
into this as a business would advertise their content with
tags like hashtag passed out and hashtag I check. The
latter was a hallmark of all these videos. The eye
check is like one of the things guys who are
into this really demand in all of their videos. And

(16:49):
it's like a moment in each of them when a
cameraman will like lean in and pull up the eyelid
to check the eyes of a sleeping victim to make
sure they're unconscious. That's like a major hallmark of all
of this content, I guess. Some eye check videos were
found to have amassed over 50,000 views. So again, this
is not massive in terms of like internet content, but

(17:11):
that's a lot of guys who are watching a drugged
woman for their own sexual gratification on a single website, right?
That's deeply upsetting. Purveyors tended to also sell access to
live streams in which users could watch and even vote
on abusing drugged women and girls in real time for
the equivalent of $ 20 a person paid in cryptocurrency, of course.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
There's always a crypto thread to this kind of nonsense.

Speaker 5 (17:37):
Always.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
Always a crypto angle. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That CNN report
went viral earlier this year for describing Motherless as a
rape academy. I actually have some issues with that terminology.
We'll talk about that in a little bit. The article
noted that Motherless received 62 million visits in a single month, February. Now,
that is a lot. I should note, obviously, there's a

(18:00):
lot of different content on this, most of which is
not illegal and a lot of which at least does
not inherently involve anything like violent or abusive, although it's
all very unpleasant stuff. But a lot of it's just
like absolute fantasy shit. This is also that that number,
62 million visits, has been misinterpreted as like there were

(18:21):
articles where people would be like 62 million men attended
a rape cademy. academy or six million men also i've
seen it printed a lot as like six million men
actually attended a rape academy and again there's not an
academy like i think people literally thought there was an
actual like school where like classes were being sold online
that's not what's going on here and i don't really
think rape academy is the right way to describe motherless

(18:43):
i would describe it best as a rape craigslist that's
what's going on here right or facebook ads or whatever.
I forget what they call it.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
Sorry.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
I remember when that happened, when I think a social
media user.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
It was just earlier this year. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
Like, like misreported the number.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
And I hated the conversation that resulted because the.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
Number really was inflated. If it was, it's not like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
And I think that what bothered me about that conversation
was that the actual numbers that CNN reported, I thought
were bad enough. But then it turned into a conversation
about like, oh, well, feminists are lying about this issue
because the number got kind of misinterpreted and misreported on
social media. So I really think we missed an opportunity

(19:28):
to have a meaningful conversation about sexual violence, but we
whiffed it because of that misreporting. And it's really a shame.
That whole conversation just really.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
Devolved in a bad way.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
I agree with you about it being called a rape academy.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
I think they were.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
quoting somebody who was quoted in the article, but it
just gave a really in- inconsistent, inaccurate version of what
was actually happening.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
And I think it did the whole conversation a disservice.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah, I agree. And I also think it led people
to believe that A different kind of harm was being
perpetuated here because the problem– and I think the reason
why they went with the Rape Academy framing is that
it seems to tie this more into like Andrew Tate
who really does operate a Rape Academy or did. And
so I think that's part of why they did it.
But the reason why this site was so dangerous and

(20:18):
it contributed to so many bad things is the same
with Coco. It's not like an academy. It's more like
a Craigslist, right? It's a place where people can buy
and sell and advertise access to illegal content. and tools
to making illegal content and committing sex crimes, right? That's
what's happening here, and that's really bad, right? That said,
it's also not unique. People do this not just on
Motherless and Coco. Shit like this happens on 4chan. You

(20:41):
can even find pieces of this happening on places like Reddit, right?
Those places, particularly Reddit, has a lot more moderation. They
attempt to crack down on it, but that stuff still
happens elsewhere, right? Yeah. Shit fucking.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Rape Craigslist doesn't have the same ring to it, though.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Like... Yeah. And I mean, fuck, the kind of shit
that gets sold on Facebook ads sometimes is pretty sketchy
as well. So, again, and part of why I think
it's a mistake to do that is that framing this
website as a rape academy makes it seem unique and
like a massive and critical hub in this system that
is like teaching men as opposed to like, no, it's

(21:16):
just sort of one of the easiest places for guys
like this to gather and like shell it. And that's
a problem. The site was a problem and needed to
go away, but it's not like a unique load-bearing piece
of sex criminal infrastructure, and that's important for people to
understand if they want to actually fight this, right? There's

(21:37):
a lot of sites that these guys were using. I mean,
some of those early accounts is like the guy who
was selling the sleeping potions or whatever the fuck, he's
advertising on Motherless, but he's actually operating his business out
of Telegram, which is a much larger and much more
widely mainstream-accepted app that's run by a billionaire, right? And
it seems like most of the people who ran businesses

(21:59):
or sold content on Motherless were trying to push users
to their Telegram channels as often as possible in some
other places. The same thing's happening on Coco. A lot
of people on Coco are pushing folks to their Telegrams
in order to like actually do business. Yeah. So now
we return to Coco and the story of Dominique Pelico.

(22:20):
In 2018, Coco was involved in its first major crime
of national significance. Not the first one, but the first
one that like became reported on, right? A 55-year-old man,
Michel Solosi, agreed to meet up with a 22-year-old man
on Coco. Solosi was attacked by this man and beaten
to death in what a court concluded had been a
homophobic attack. The murderer was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Now,

(22:44):
at the time this happened, for a couple of years,
there had been different, like, gay rights organizations in France
that had been complaining about Coco and talking about it
as a hub of homophobic violence. They'd been trying to
warn people away from using it as a hookup app.
So there were already activists who were pointing out before
any of this stuff went viral, this place is really dangerous,

(23:04):
and they were not listened to. We'll talk more about
that later. The next year, 2019, a man from Brest
in northwest France was convicted of exchanging videos of children
being raped over the, without her knowledge, chat room, the
same place Dominique Polico frequented. These cases, and thousands of
less famous cases of harassment, revenge porn, sea salmon, homophobic

(23:25):
beatings linked to Coco by that point, inspired the creation
of a petition to ban or otherwise regulate the site.
Thousands of French citizens signed. Nothing was done. For his part,
Isaac Steadle, founder of the site, took no action to
moderate his platform. Users were sometimes banned if their behavior
elicited legal threats or serious complaints. He had moderators. People

(23:47):
got banned. But along with banning, Isaac instituted a fee
of 10 euros for users to reinstate their banned accounts.
I think, again, I think he stole that from something
awful because it's the same basic thing, right? And when
you do it that way, that's not moderation. That's fundraising.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
And incentivizing, I think.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
And incentivizing to an extent. Yeah. You know what I
like to incentivize? Products.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
We're back.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
Your ad breaks crack me up.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
They're rough. They're rough with this one. I don't know
how to do it. How do you do a good
ad break transition in this story?

Speaker 5 (24:31):
Solid question. I don't think it exists.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah. No, it does not exist. So we're getting up to...
The moment where the story of what Dominique Polico has
been doing to Giselle comes out, right? That happens in 2020.
One day in the early days of the pandemic, I
think before the lockdown, Dominique Polico went out to the

(24:55):
grocery store and was caught for the second time we
know of taking upskirt videos of unsuspecting women. A security
guard not only detained him but called the police. So whatever–
something about his behavior, and I think it was his nonchalance,
how unconcerned he was that he had been caught doing this,
made the security guard think like, I need– this needs
to be escalated. This is more serious, and I need–

(25:19):
for her part, Giselle has given a lot of credit
to the security guard. She's like talked about wanting to
meet him personally to thank him. I don't know if
she actually has, but he went beyond just like what
he was supposed to do for his job and emphasize
to the police, something is wrong with this guy. You
need to look into this. This is not, this is not,
this is whatever he's into is more than upskirts. He's

(25:39):
doing something else.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
I think is kind of the idea that he just
becomes convinced there is something more to this story than
what was already bad. Right. Yeah. Um, And the police,
once they start talking to him, notice the same thing
that like, wow, this guy is really nonchalant and chill
about being arrested for a public sex crime. And that
really disturbs them. And as a result, the police call
in a psychologist, Dr. Layette, to interview Dominique immediately after

(26:03):
his arrest, which is unusual. I don't think that's like
the norm. And it points to the fact that something
about his attitude is really upset a number of people
at this point. Per the BBC, Dr. Layette noted how
breezily he dismissed his crime, like a genteel grandfather caught
pocketing a few cigarettes. Dr. Layette detected a dissonance in
the man's behavior and the strong implication that he was

(26:23):
hiding something more serious. He told the police this one
was worth further inspection or closer inspection. So at this point,
a couple of people, including a psychiatrist, have been like, no,
there's there's we need to really look into this guy.
Like something very, very serious and extensive is wrong with
this man. He's done more than this. one crime we
know he committed. So they go to his home and

(26:44):
they confiscate his hard drive, his computer, and multiple phones.
Because Dominique was providing content to this large community on Coco,
he had documented everything in startling detail. He had carefully
archived with both photo and video proof, not just dozens
and dozens of men raping his wife at his insistence,

(27:04):
but he had archived conversations between them when he had
planned meetups and stuff to have them come over Coco
doesn't save that stuff, right? It's supposed to be anonymous.
He archived all of this content. And so police... Are these, like,
trophies for him? I mean, they're also advertising. I don't
think he's making money off of this, but the clout
surely matters. And he also... He gets off on other

(27:27):
men raping his wife when.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
She's asleep, right?

Speaker 1 (27:29):
That's what I'm referring to. This allows him to recruit. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (27:33):
It allows him to relive what he's done. I....

Speaker 1 (27:37):
I do suspect also because of how he behaves in court,
I think part of this was he always knew there
was a chance he would be caught and he wanted
to not be the only one to go down. I
do think he wanted to be able to take these
other guys down with him if he got caught. Please
don't mistake that for me giving him any credit. Absolutely not.
He didn't want to be the only guy punished for this, right?

Speaker 5 (27:59):
No, that was him wanting to share the blame. Right, right, right.
Which does not make him a.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
No, in no way, shape, or form.

Speaker 5 (28:07):
No, he's still scum of the earth. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
In some ways, maybe even makes it worse that he
clearly is thinking so, like, coolly and logically about all
of the shit he's doing. Yeah. So he has basically
handed them both the case against him and all these
other men on a silver platter. And the police start
using the information he'd gathered to investigate the men he'd
been bringing over. Now, there's a break that... Because he...
bails out or whatever and goes home and he like

(28:34):
contacts Giselle and he's like hey I'm in trouble and
you know I got caught he first he just tells
her about the upskirt photos and she's pissed she thinks
well the police are gonna want to because the police
say they need to talk to her but not for
like a week or two I guess as they're getting
stuff in order this is another point where they should
be criticized because after he gets arrested and he knows

(28:54):
he's fucked because they have all of his hard drives
he knows he is going to go away forever he
knows this is all going to come out he drugs
and rapes her again and has someone come over to
rape her again. He does that one last time. After,
and again, the police, I don't think ever should have
let him go home once they.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
Have this stuff.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
No, what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (29:15):
I understand the thinking of like, we can't, like I
get the thinking.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
We don't want to do this right away.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
But leaving this woman and her family alone with this guy,
come the fuck on.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
Knowing that he's the abuser of, To give them a
little bit of grace, I don't know how quickly they
realized it was Giselle.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Right? And I don't... 100% know at what point, but
there was definitely a gap of several days, at least,
after which they knew it was her, and he was
still free. And they have them come into the station together,
and they separate them immediately, right? They take him into custody,
and then they talk to Giselle, right? So, and this is.

Speaker 4 (29:59):
That's like, to go back to your example from part one,
that's like if they found out some guy was a
mass shooter and sent him to a school.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, or if they knew some guy had been committing
a series of murders in the woods and they didn't
know where his gun was and they just let him
go home for a couple of weeks while they get
their ducks in a row. I don't know. I don't
know exactly what to compare it to, but it's really
weird that they do that.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
You gotta be a real dirty motherfucker to be like,
I'm gonna, I want one last one before I go away.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
You gotta be a real sick puppy.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, I mean, it just also reinforces what a monster
he is. And I, again, the police, I don't think
handle this well. I think there's a lot of issues
with this initial part.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
That's horrible.

Speaker 5 (30:46):
The police are responsible for this woman getting raped again.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
It's their fault.

Speaker 4 (30:52):
Fuck them.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Fuck all of them. Fuck the entire system. That is
unbelievably evil. Yeah, it's really bleak.

Speaker 5 (30:59):
And I guarantee nothing happened to those assholes who didn't
do their fucking jobs.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
No, I mean they get– Of course not. And in
her narrative too, they get a lot of credit because
they caught him and stuff and yeah. Again, and I
don't 100% know when they– but there definitely was a
gap in which they knew she was his primary victim
and he was still free, right?

Speaker 4 (31:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
So the police sit her down because they have to
talk to her now. And again, she has gone to
the police station just thinking my husband got in trouble
for being like a weird perverted old man. And I'm
and she's thinking I'm going to make him apologize to
the woman and all this stuff. Right. Make him go
to a psychologist. And then the cops sit her down
and they're like or this one police officer sits her down.
She's like, hey. do you think you know your husband

(31:42):
so well that he can't hide things from you? And
she's like, yeah. And she's like, do you think your
husband is a good man? She's like, yes, I think
he's a very good man. Are you, and then they ask,
are you swingers? Do you guys swap partners? And that's
the other thing. Maybe they didn't fully understand what was,
although they had the chats too. So again, the police
ask like, are you guys, do you guys partner swap?

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Right.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
And As Giselle later recalled, quote, I heard myself stammering
that swinging was inconceivable for me. I couldn't bear other
men touching me. I needed feelings, right? And I don't
know how you'd respond to this. Maybe this is the
first point they 100% knew. Again, I have trouble believing that.
But the police officer then, I don't know what response

(32:26):
is the right response to give, but he says to
her very bluntly, I am going to show you photos
and videos that are not going to please you, right? Um, uh, yeah, which,
and then he shows her evidence of what had happened
and she is shocked, doesn't believe it at first. Um,
and then it becomes kind of impossible to deny because

(32:47):
there's so many photos.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
But it's this, I mean, I can't even imagine what that,
that aware, like accepting that is like, especially in the
space of a couple of minutes at a police station,
realizing that the foundation of this life that you've built
for half a century and raised three kids with and
have multiple grandkids with this person, that he has been

(33:09):
doing this to you, I can't even comprehend what that–
the effect that would have on you and on the
rest of the family, by the way, once they all
find out, which we'll talk about later. This hits the
family like a fucking bomb.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
It's– And I just not to go full like fuck
the police, but I remember reading about this, about the
police asking if they were swingers. And to your point
about they would have by now had the chats that
confirmed that this was not essential.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
I still think there is some attitude, even from the
police that we're hearing, that this must somehow be consensual.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
There must have been something.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Even though we're reading in black and white the evidence
that that is clearly not the case, this clearly must
be some sort of game between you two that you
knew about, right?

Speaker 5 (33:58):
Also, I'm not exactly familiar with the French police system,
but why was a random cop, the one delivering this
traumatic information to her, That random cop was not properly trained.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
They bring in a, they bring in a psych. They
do bring in a psych.

Speaker 5 (34:17):
But the cop is the one who says that thing
to her, right?

Speaker 1 (34:21):
But I don't, he may have, I don't know. Cause
there are police and stuff who have in different countries
training for, like, I don't know if he was trained
for these kinds of, like, I don't know. So I
don't want to like go in on that.

Speaker 5 (34:30):
That delivery is a little insane to me.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
I don't know. I honestly don't know what you say.
I don't know how you deliver that news.

Speaker 5 (34:40):
But it just seemed like a little bit of like
a mic drop situation, which is not very gentle in
my opinion. But I don't, just to say, I only
have a bachelor's in psychology, so I like don't know
how you would handle that. But like, I don't know. Also,
I feel like it would have been better if the

(35:01):
person delivering the news to her was a woman. Yeah.
But I'm just doing opinions at this point.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah. So per an article in The Independent by Jane
Dalton about this experience, the first photo showed a man
raping a woman who had been laid on her side
and dressed up in a suspender belt. That's you in
this photo, the policeman said. He then showed her another
photo and another after that from a collection of images
that Dominique Pellico had took of his wife over the
years when he regularly knocked her unconscious by lacing her

(35:28):
food and drink with drugs. Miss Pellico could not believe
that the inert woman in the photos was her. I
did not recognize the individual's. nor this woman. Her cheek
was so flabby, her mouth so limp, she was a
rag doll, she writes in her new book recounting her
story of survival and courage. 53 men had come to
our house to rape me, she recalls being told by
the officer, Laurent Perret. God, that's so awful. Yeah, it's just,

(35:53):
I mean, the, And the sheer extent of the crime,
the number of men who were involved to some degree,
the number of men that they actually were able to
like identify by name, that all comes out over a
period of months, right? As they're realizing who each of
these guys are and kind of like figuring them out.
It becomes this story, which becomes in France is known
as the Mazon rape case, right? it becomes an immediate

(36:15):
major national story as soon as this gets out into
the media. And Giselle initially stays anonymous. She has a
right to do that. Rape victims have the right to
be anonymous in France. And so initially she's using a pseudonym,
but also that means that the names of the perpetrators
and whatnot, the alleged perpetrators at this point, are also

(36:37):
being kept from the public, right? Like they also are
obfuscated to a degree because of like of her anonymity, right?
And that also means that the case itself is going
to be anonymous. Well, because they haven't been convicted yet,
I think, is kind of the idea, right? Once the
public hears about this, it sparks immediate outrage, right? And,

(37:00):
you know, that outrage spends the gamut of things, you know,
the patriarchy and rape culture, but also the website Coco
becomes targeted for very obvious reasons. In response to this
new unwanted publicity and notoriety, Isaac Steedle moved the registration
of his website to the Island of Guernsey, a self-governing
committee that uses the. gg URL. There were immediate calls

(37:22):
to prosecute Steedle, but, per The Guardian, holding Steedle accountable
for the site he created also faced another logistical hurdle.
At some point after founding the site, he moved to Bulgaria,
outside the immediate reach of French authorities, and renounced his
French citizenship. Even as Coco was publicly implicated in a
string of violence and sexual abuse, the site remained online
and with Steedle nowhere to be found. Now, as that

(37:44):
last quote makes clear, once Coco was in the news,
story after story goes viral about all of the different
horrific crimes tied to the website. Now, this is also
followed by the fact that More crimes keep being committed
because Coco is still online. In 2022, a 23-year-old man
from Marseille barely survived being run over by three men

(38:04):
in a car after arriving for a hookup arranged via Coco.
Per The Guardian, law enforcement officials arrested four people in
the town of Saint-Poli earlier that year after they were
accused of posing as men looking for hookups on the site,
then luring victims to meet them before violently attacking and
robbing them. Right? And this has been going on for
years and years. The country, the national media does not

(38:25):
pay attention to it and neither do the police until
the story of Dominique and Gisele Pelico goes viral, right?
Like that's what makes them care about the other stuff
that had been going on on Coco. That same year
as the investigation into Pelico's crimes wound on and the
government arrested and charged dozens of men … The investigating

(38:46):
judge's office contacted Zinco, the company Mr. Stiedel had used
to register Coco in 2011, and asked for data connected
to the case. Stiedel or his employees never responded. The
next year, Zinco shut down, and he created a new
company to re-register the website in 2024. But in 2023,
France passed a new law that allows them to prosecute

(39:08):
cases like this by looping multiple crimes against enabled by
a website together into one big case. You don't have
to prosecute each of these as like an individual thing
in order to go after the people at running and
like administering a website like this. This law also allows
prosecutors to hold administrators liable for some activity on their site.

(39:29):
Site founders could be found liable of being complicit if
their website allowed for illicit transactions that fund criminal endeavors,
which Coco definitely did. And I want to make it clear,
number one, I don't speak French. I am not familiar
with the specifics of this law enough to say if
I think it's a good law or I endorse it
or whatever. I'm trying to describe how the news sites
I ever had described it um i don't inherently have

(39:52):
an issue with making it easier to go after the
administrators of websites that are doing stuff like this as
long as the things they're being liable of are you
know limited in a way that is does not have
freedom of speech concerns and if that is an accurate
description that they're complicit if their site allows for illicit
transactions funding criminal endeavors um coco definitely was doing that
and isaac steedle was for sure aware of it it

(40:12):
was the main reason people were like spending like using
fucking coco was to do stuff like this right um
As the investigations continued, journalists also began to look into
Coco and its community. I found this segment from a
CNN investigation particularly telling. Having examined nearly 6,000 messages sent
in the course of 24 hours on 30 different chat
rooms on the site, CNN found several strikingly similar patterns

(40:35):
between those messages and the ones exchanged by Dominique Polico
with users on Coco. Around three in four of the
accounts that were active when CNN was gathering data were
registered as men. A clear trend emerged of men sharing
explicit photos of their wives and girlfriends on the site
for the pleasure of other men. It is unclear if
the photos were taken or exchanged with the women's consent.
Users also frequently sought to move conversations over to private

(40:58):
messaging platforms such as Skype or Snapchat. Snapchat and Skype
declined to comment.

Speaker 5 (41:03):
See, I was right with my Evan Spiegel.

Speaker 3 (41:06):
In part one. You really called it.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
You did, you did. I'd forgotten that, but yeah. That
is important, and I've been trying to point out, as
much as we're focusing on cocoa and motherless, these are
spokes in, like, a wheel, right? They're not the wheel.

Speaker 5 (41:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
After an enormous 18-month international effort involving not just the
French government, but the governments of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Hungary, and Germany,
to name a few, cocoa was shut down in the
summer of 2024, and more than 5.6 million euros were
seized from Isaac Steadle in multiple bank accounts. Steele was
questioned with French prosecutors present, and three of his associates

(41:44):
were detained and questioned as well. While Coco did pop
back up after it was taken down, it was quickly
brought back down again, although not before more reporters were
able to look into it. Per the BBC, and this
is about Coco during that brief few-day period, I think,
when it was up, French outlet BFM reported that its
journalists were able to sign into the website in seconds
without any registration or checks. Posing as a 13-year-old girl,

(42:07):
the journalists were immediately contacted by users who persisted in
sending them lewd photos and sexually explicit messages, even after
they were made aware that the girl was underage. So,
charming community at Coco. Now, again, critics of the state's
response have been quick to point out that Coco was
not unique in anything but size and notoriety, and once

(42:28):
it was taken down, users simply jumped to other platforms.
There were plenty to choose from. Many, for example... leapt
over to Telegram's then-popular ZZZZ, you know, community. That's the
name for their sleep, one of the sleep fetishist communities
on Telegram. Like snoring, right? CNN also looked into this community.
Their article quoted Annabelle Montaigne, a psychologist who assessed many

(42:51):
of the men in the Polico trial. She noted this
of the broader sleep fetish community. Within these sites, there
is also this notion of almost brotherhood, she said, adding
that participants find themselves creating bonds that meet and reinforce
their narcissistic needs. And I don't know. I'm not going
to try to get too deep into the woods of–
because there's also psychiatric analysis of Dominique, and I just don't–

(43:14):
I don't find that very compelling, to be honest. There's
pages of his psychiatrist being like, I think his brain–
he had these little boxes that he put different aspects
of his brain. I don't care.

Speaker 4 (43:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
That's not the most important thing about this to me.
You're like, a creep is a creep. I don't give
a fuck about his brain.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
A creep is a creep.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
The fact that there's this community that do feel bonded
to each other and that are reinforcing those bonds by
committing crimes together and sharing, that is important. That is
part of what makes this so hard to take out
because this is a community that is not rooted just
to a website. These are men who want to and
probably do have contact with each other outside of that

(43:55):
and have bonds outside of that. And that's the ultimate problem.
The website is a tool that they're using. It's a
weapon that they're using. And it's important to take that down.
It's important to punish people who knowingly provide these folks
with weapons. But the community, this brotherhood still exists and
is still out there offending, right? This problem also exists
outside of weird internet communities. One of France's leading lawmakers

(44:18):
crusading against drug-facilitated sexual abuse is Sandrine Josseau. She was
once drugged and assaulted by a former French senator. When
CNN investigated similar communities on Motherless and Telegram, woman after
woman came forward with horrific stories of being drugged and
raped by their partners, husbands, boyfriends, all sorts of stuff.
But no one I'm aware of endured quite what Gisele

(44:41):
Pelico did. One early article on her case in Le
Monde wrote, quote, As she awaits the trial to give
her answer, she clings to her anonymity as an essential
factor to rebuilding her life. And you'll notice I'm using
her real name. Um... which is not, that's not the
name she goes by socially anymore, but it is the
name she published her autobiography under. So I'm using it

(45:02):
in this. I think that's acceptable given that she put
her biography out in this. And she did that because
she wants maximum visibility, right? She decided very late, right
before the trial started pretty much, But she decided not
to be anonymous. She chose to cast that aside so
that the trial could be covered and filmed and also

(45:22):
so that everyone would get to see the names of
the men who had raped her and see their faces
while they were being tried. That was very important to her.
And she decided that the ultimate thing, as she described
in her memoir, that made her choose to not be anonymous,
even though that's obviously terrifying and very difficult and painful,
is that her attitude is– Right now, the problem is

(45:46):
that women who are abused by men feel this deep
sense of shame and the shame should be on the men.
And if I want that change to happen, one thing
I can do is be very public about the fact
that this happened to me so that everyone sees who
did it to me and everyone sees those men and
they cannot deny it. Part of her concern was that like, well,

(46:06):
if I'm anonymous, this will just get reported on in
a couple of like news articles, but there won't be
that like direct face connection, the name connection. People won't
know how normal these guys were who did this to me,
how many of them there were in my community. These
were just men who lived around me. And I think
it's a very heroic stance to take that she chose
to put her name out there in order to not

(46:28):
just try to ensure these men got as much justice
as possible, but so that other rape victims wouldn't feel
alone and wouldn't feel like they need to hide. She
did it for other women who were being victimized and
who had been victimized like her. And I think that's
a really heroic thing.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
Her saying the shame must the shame must change hands
that like victims and survivors should not be the ones
carrying the shame we have to shift where the shame
goes to the men and I really I can't imagine
I remember I was working on a Instagram carousel about
this and Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
People need a face and a name and a story
sometimes to care about a crime and to make that
crime and that systemic issue real for them in a
real way. And I just, I'm so curious what the
conversation around this, this would have been like, had she
not had the bravery to attach this to her name
and her face and her story.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
Would it, would this have been as well known? Would this,
and would more of the discourse have been like, oh, well,
this is probably just some weird kink thing that she got, right?
Like how much of it would have been that? Um, Yeah.
I mean, it's a very heroic and like really difficult
choice to make. She's a hero. Yeah. Most in her
memoir is very good. Most of the men who had

(48:05):
raped her tried to deny that they had known she
was really unaware of what was happening. They thought, oh,
I thought she was into it. I thought she made
a hand gesture towards me. And like, to be honest,
she may have been, quote unquote, conscious for some of these.
But when you are that drugged out on benzos, you
can be awake. You can even talk. But you're not
forming memories. Right. And you're not consenting because you're drugged

(48:27):
out of your fucking mind.

Speaker 5 (48:28):
Also, also, they have been told that that she will
be that way before coming to the house. So shut
the fuck up. You're liars and rapists.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
We hate you.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
This is the for his part. And I again, I don't.
want this to come across positively for him, but Dominique
testified repeatedly that these men were lying. And he made
it very clear, like, no, I told them it was rape.
I told them she didn't know. They were fully aware
of what they were doing. And he made it clear.
He said that he admitted to being a rapist and
he was like, and so are all these other guys, right?

(49:01):
And also a lot of the dudes who got arrested, again,
50 of them, were found to have, and Dominique also
had a lot of child sexual abuse images in his possession,
and so did a bunch of these guys. These were
often prolific CSAMA owners and traders. To give you one
representative example, I'm going to quote from an article in
Le Monde by Lorraine de Foucher. Lorraine de Foucher?

Speaker 2 (49:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
I'm not French. I think I got Giselle's name right.
I worked really hard on that and on Apollico, but... Quote,
in one of Dominique P's videos, Christian L, that's the
other perpetrator, carries out the rape while wearing a uniform
shirt bearing the words, He is careful to whisper and
not to make any sudden movements. In police custody, he

(49:44):
protested faintly, explaining that the husband had told him that
his wife agreed, but that she was shy. When confronted
with the exchanges on Coco and the images, he said
that he was disturbed by Francois P's lack of consent.
That was the pseudonym she was going by at the time.
before later admitting that the fact that she was unconscious
turned him on. From prison, the firefighter insisted that his
girlfriend go get his computer from the fire station, otherwise

(50:08):
we'd be gone for years, according to a conversation intercepted
by the prison administration. In fact, on his hard drives,
the police found 728 images showing the sexual exploitation of children,
and a Skype negotiation with a resident in Metz to
rape his sedated 15-year-old daughter. Christian explained to his parents
that he was a victim of a witch hunt, a
chain of circumstances at the wrong time that had landed

(50:30):
him in prison, but that this wasn't the case of
the century. So first off, every one of these 50
dudes who all lived within 30 miles of their fucking house,
nearly every one of them was a sex criminal of
a fairly prolific level outside of this, right? Which shows
you how fucking common that is. The fact that so
many of them had child... sexual abuse imagery and that

(50:51):
like this guy is working at negotiate on skype to
rape a child that's being drugged which also means that
like there's a lot of other guys offering up their
kids their wives their girlfriends after drugging them in such
like this is not dominique's not alone he might be
the most prolific but he might not be we really
have no way of knowing i know this isn't the point.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Of the anecdote why did this dipshit wear his work
uniform to do.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
This Great question.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
What was the thinking there?

Speaker 1 (51:17):
I don't know. I cannot answer that question for you.

Speaker 5 (51:21):
I certainly can.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
Stupid is as stupid does, Robert. Fucking idiot, yeah. But
I can't walk you through his thought process if there
was one. In court, Dominique's responses to most questions were,
I guess what you'd call the best case scenario for that.
He admitted his own monstrous deeds to his wife. He
absolved her of any blame. And in some cases, he

(51:42):
even argued with his own defense attorney to defend his
wife and repeatedly chimed in to ensure his fellow defendants
were convicted. However, that is Dominique when he cannot get away,
when he knows the evidence is dead to rights. One
of the things that Giselle points out in her memoir
is that after he was arrested, one of the first
things he did was he tried to incite arguments and

(52:02):
fighting within the family by making them like, distrust each
other classic because again he he's only being honest and
open in this because they've got him fucking dead to
rights um and we'll talk there's some other things he's
not open and honest about that we'll talk about um
but first here's ads and we're back so while dominique

(52:30):
admitted to every crime that he was proven to have
committed he continued to deny in court that he had
done anything at all to harm his children, their children,
or his in-laws. Police found photos he or someone else
took of his daughter Carolyn while asleep. Obviously, there was
videos of his daughters-in-law. One of his grandsons, he raped

(52:53):
or did something. I don't think the exact extent is known,
but some of this stuff, people realized that As a
result of this, oh, that time when I felt really
woozy and didn't remember something and I was with grandpa, right?
We don't know how many of his family members he
physically abused in addition to like the unconsensual photos and stuff.

(53:17):
But all of them, like his daughter, Carolyn, there's no
hard evidence that he drugged or raped her. She believes
that he drugged and raped her and I can't imagine
why she wouldn't, right?

Speaker 5 (53:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
And I mean, one of the fucking initially there's like
even and Giselle doesn't talk about it for obvious reasons much.
But there was a point early in the case in
which they kind of suspected her.

Speaker 4 (53:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
Because you don't know. You just hear that your dad
did this. You're not going to assume, well, mom couldn't
have known anything about it in the first days after
you find this out.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
Like this is such a and this I think the family,
it sounds like from Giselle's count is doing a lot
better now. But for like a year, this shatters them all.

Speaker 3 (53:55):
Of course.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Her oldest kid was 50. You're a mature middle-aged adult,
and you realize that your entire foundation of your family
life is a lie, and that your dad not only
may have raped and abused you, but your kids, and
I can't even comprehend the level of fucked that that
is to your head.

Speaker 5 (54:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
I feel like as women, we're often kind of told
to fear strangers.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
People in a dark alley, and the idea that the
threat is.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
Call is coming from inside the house.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Yeah, the call is coming from inside the house. The
threat is your own family inside of your own home.
I do think that is... It's just a special level
of shattering.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (54:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
Jesus. The couple's youngest son, Florian, went to a divorce
that he blames on this, and I... Don't doubt that.
I can imagine the stress of this making it very
difficult to be a good and effective partner to your spouse, right?
Like just a fucking nightmare. Their oldest son, David, has
stated that his son is convinced he was abused by

(54:59):
his grandfather. I'm going to quote again from the New
York Times describing David's testimony. David Palico, a sales manager
for a champagne company, said that he had shared a
passion for soccer, tennis, and moviegoing with his father. He
described the magical surprise birthday parties his parents had planned
for him and his siblings to the delight and envy
of all their friends. I lost, and I have the
feeling today, all my childhood has disappeared. It was erased,

(55:20):
he said. Now his hope is that, above all, in
the future, we can erase, make disappear in our heads,
the man who is to the left, he said, pointing
to his father in the box.

Speaker 4 (55:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
And, like, obviously, you know, I won't even say that
that's not a crime game. Commensurate to like the sexual assaults,
this destruction of your kids understanding of their entire life.
That is a horrible crime that deserves to be mentioned
right up alongside the rapes. That's an unbelievable violation to
molest your grandkids and to like to just like Jesus. Like, yeah,

(55:54):
I don't know how you deal with this, like as
a person.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
I remember reading about a similar case where a woman,
her husband was drugging her and every night before bed
he would bring her this mug of tea.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
And when she found out what happened and was talking.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
To the police, just this idea that like this gesture
that I had interpreted as sweet that happened regularly.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
He made me my favorite dinner.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
Every instance of that is now something that has been
totally recontextualized in your mind in the most horrific way.

Speaker 5 (56:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
As just, yeah, I, yeah, God. Dominique received the maximum sentence,
20 years in prison, which at his age, he's in
his 70s, means a life sentence. He's going to die
in prison. Wait, how many years did he get? 20.
That's the maximum that French law allowed, right? So he
got the max sentence and he's going to die in prison.
He's fucking 70 something. The other 50 men on trial

(56:50):
were all convicted. Most of them received six to nine
year sentences, which most reporting I've seen will note was
lighter than the terms recommended by the prosecution because the
prosecution had asked for 10 to 18 years. Per the
New York Times, the sentences are relatively lenient given the
gravity of the acts, which could have been classified as torture,
said Lorraine Castillo, a lawyer whose practice in Paris focuses

(57:11):
on violence against women. The men got a huge gift
by being tried in a regional criminal court, she said,
adding that she believed the relatively low sentences reflected a
strategic decision by the five presiding judges to avoid costly
appeals that would jam up the appeals court. Six of
the perpetrators were released the day of their conviction for
time served.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
That's horrific.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
That's horrific.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Yeah. I don't know what I'd say the right sentence is,
but certainly none of them should have walked free on
that day. 10 to 18 certainly sounds.
Better. As I've noted and discussed throughout these episodes, Dominique
and the men he brought into the Pelico home were
not the only perpetrators, and the French government started rounding

(57:52):
up the staff at Coco, such as it was in 2024.
Two site moderators were arrested, and Paris prosecutor Laurie Bacow
has stated that since their investigation began, more than 23,000
criminal acts have been tied to Coco. 23,000 individual criminal acts.
23,000 that they know of. And considering this is an

(58:13):
anonymous site, that's startling. Isaac Steedle himself was arrested and
charged in January of 2025 with complicity in drug trafficking, possession,
and distribution of CSAM, corruption of a minor through the internet,
and criminal conspiracy. His lawyer, Julian Zanotta, denies Steedle's guilt.
It is worth noting that queer advocacy organizations in France

(58:34):
had been lobbying for Coco's closure without any sort of
progress for years. The SOS Homophobia Association started demanding this
after that vehicular attack on a gay man in Marseille
in like 2022. To quote again from Le Monde, at
least 300 men were trapped and violently attacked between 2018
and 2022, according to our colleagues. That's a quote from

(58:56):
SOS Homophobia.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Oh my God. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
Yeah. It is a good thing that Steedle and his
associates are being brought to justice, and it is good
that Coco was taken down, but all this only happened
because Dominique's crimes went so fucking viral, and people should
not forget that. They also should not forget that the
vast majority of people who partook in Coco's without her
knowledge board are still out there. Years after Coco was
shut down, CNN published that investigation into Motherless.com, where the

(59:22):
same shit happens. And now that that's been taken down,
because Motherless is down after that investigation, at least was
last I read anything about it, people have surely migrated
to new platforms, including Telegram. Now, I brought up Telegram
a number of times in these episodes. Men on Coco
and Motherless regularly tried to direct their fans and customers

(59:43):
to private Telegram channels. The founder of Telegram is a
tech CEO named Pavel Durov, who I am sure we
will talk about more in the future. He is 39
years old and a billionaire, and he is guilty of
exactly the same kinds of crimes as Isaac Steele. Probably
quite a few more of them, to be honest. In
late August of 2024, Durov was detained after his private
jet landed in France and arrested under a warrant for,

(01:00:05):
per the BBC, offenses related to the popular messaging app.
The investigation is reportedly about a lack of moderation, with Mr.
Durov accused of failing to take steps to curb criminal
uses of telegrams. He's accused of failure to cooperate with
law enforcement over drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud, right?
That's what they're saying happens on Telegram because it does.
Durov was released. He was eventually– like the next year,

(01:00:28):
he was allowed to go home to Dubai for limited visits.
He's not allowed to leave for more than two weeks
at a time while like his case is being processed.
Of course, he lives in Dubai. Telegram is now based
out of Dubai. Durov is also wanted in Russia. He's
been charged with crimes there. I'm not as familiar with
it because it's the Russian government. I don't actually know
if they're entirely– I'm not as familiar with that. But yeah,

(01:00:53):
the case against him is still ongoing. One of the
difficulties is that Telegram is a much larger operation than Coco,
and it is not primarily used by people who are
doing illegal shit and doing bad shit even, I should say.
In a lot of places, it's almost as common as WhatsApp, right?
But it also is a hive for white supremacist terrorism.

(01:01:13):
They call it Terrorgram for a reason, right? People have
planned a lot of attacks and radicalized others to commit
a lot of attacks via Telegram. A lot of CSAM
is distributed and created via Telegram, a lot of sexual
abuse-related content. And Durov became a billionaire profiting off of
that for all of these years. University of Toronto policy
researcher John Scott Railton described Pavel Durov's arrest by French

(01:01:36):
authorities as unprecedented. This is the first time a real
founder in like a major sense has been arrested for
like crimes committed using a large app or website, right? Now,
there are a lot of valid civil rights and freedom
of speech concerns here, mostly in the fact that the
justified disgust and fear over what Telegram has been used

(01:01:57):
for and what Cocoa is used for have provided governments
and state security services with an excuse to attack end-to-end encryption,
which they hate for other reasons. And end-to-end encryption had
nothing to do with why these crimes were able to
be committed for so long. Again, he was busted for
taking upskirt pictures in 2010, right? Like, the fact that
this was encrypted isn't why he didn't get caught for

(01:02:19):
so long. He didn't get caught for so long because
no one was really looking to find guys like him
doing this. Really?

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Because they didn't see it as that big of a thing,
I really think.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Yeah, it was not an encryption thing that let this
all occur, right? I will always fight against any attempt
by governments to criminalize the use of encrypted messaging as
a whole. It is incredibly poisonous to let scum like
Durov become the face of that movement. So I simply
do not defend this guy. He was very well aware
of what he was involved in. More to the point,

(01:02:51):
encryption does not require people to build services that enable
sexual abuse in the trading of child pornography. Criminals use Signal, too,
for instance, for some bad things, but in the same
way that a rapist might use a smartphone to, like,
document his crimes or whatever, the smartphone isn't responsible for that.
It just had a camera, right? There's nothing about Signal
that specifically encourages or makes it easy to operate in

(01:03:13):
a legal business, whereas both Coco and Telegram... Choices were
made not to moderate certain things. Choices were made to
profit off of banning people for breaking the law in
Coco's case. Choices were made to make these services better
places for people to organize and plan these kind of crimes.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
And that's very different from a dumb pipe that just
happens to be encrypted. Right. And again, encryption is not
the fucking issue here. Neither is free speech.

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):
I just hate how it's so easy to conflate these things.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
And as you said, like make people who are breaking
the law and profiting off of horrific illegal content, the
face of, you know, what, like, I don't know. I
just feel like these con in these conversations, we have
kind of lost our way and it's so easy to turn,
you know, advocating for the importance of free speech into, oh,

(01:04:05):
we should be protecting people who are counting on us
using that banner to continue to profit from criminal behavior.

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
Number one, I don't think you really necessarily need new
laws and new restrictions on the internet to stop these people.
What you do need is an understanding that they're doing
it and a willingness to go after them and prosecute
them and look into these. A lot of these communities
are very easy to just wind up in a chat
room where people are selling these rape drugs. It's not hard.

(01:04:34):
Law enforcement could be going after this stuff if they
really cared, right? They don't. They chose not to give
because it's probably more work than they want to do
because they're fucking lazy assholes. But not enough of them
focus on this shit. Like you don't need new laws.
You don't need anything like that. What you do need
is authorities to care about stopping this.

Speaker 5 (01:04:53):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
That's, I guess, my answer.

Speaker 5 (01:04:56):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
That was not directed at you, Bridget. Sorry. No. That
was directed like a hypothetical person arguing with me.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
Yes. I agree with you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Again, it's an issue that you find yourself on the
opposite end of people. It's an issue that you find
strange bedfellows and you're arguing against things that you can't believe.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
That you have to make this argument, I guess is
what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
Yeah. Again, you can't divorce your concern for freedom of
speech from Like the practical political realities and the practical
political realities that every time people hear about shit like this,
it makes them potentially more willing to support these shitty laws.
So like if– again, if you actually– if you care
about freedom of speech and encryption and stuff, you shouldn't

(01:05:46):
be like defending fucking Pavel Durov or Isaac Steadle. No.
What you should be doing is– fucking getting livid at
the fact that more isn't being done to stop these
kinds of crimes that are already illegal and that are
being committed very obviously in the open in a lot
of cases, right? More could be done to scare these
motherfuckers and the less like people getting away with this

(01:06:09):
endangers all of our freedom, right? Not, and again, I don't,
I mean, to distract from their victims by saying that.
But that's my response to people who try to bring
up the fucking free speech issue. It's the same thing
I feel about guns, honestly, that like, OK, but like
if you believe firearms should be legal, then you should
be really fucking pissed at like bad gun manufacturer advertisements
that are like encouraging fucked up shit. You should be

(01:06:31):
pissed at. uh gun shops that are selling like illegally
or that are selling like moving shit across the fucking
border like you should be really angry at a lot
of things that happen in the firearms industry that enable
all of the fucking horrible violence that is part of
why people want to ban guns right like if you
actually care about that right your issue should not be

(01:06:53):
with defending the blank right of someone to like sell
firearms to a cartel or a 15 year old Your
issue should be with the people doing that who are
endangering your rights as well as endangering other people's lives, right?
Not to put the lives above the rights or anything
like that. I never get the argument that you should

(01:07:13):
focus entirely on fucking defending the founder of a website
that enabled a bunch of rapes because you care about
free speech. If you care about free speech, you should
care about stopping those rapists.

Speaker 5 (01:07:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
That's where I land, I guess.

Speaker 5 (01:07:29):
I have one final thought, and it's just that, wow,
is she a brave woman.

Speaker 4 (01:07:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
Yep.

Speaker 5 (01:07:39):
And I'm sorry the system failed you and the amount
of people that she's helped by being so courageous.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Yeah. She's an incredible person. I do. I should probably end.
There is some up. lifting stuff in her memoir a
hymn to life that i should note which is that
uh i mean there's some fucked up and some good
stuff mostly like she so she obviously was left a
lot of financial issues she divorced her husband uh some
of her in-laws like the parents of one of the

(01:08:11):
people one of her kids married they had like a
really nice house on an island that was like a
vacation getaway because they were more affluent she was like
staying there for a while and And she met a
man who had just retired there. He had initially, he
had bought a retirement house with his wife there. And
then she contracted a horrible illness and died very suddenly,
right as they're about to start their retirement. And he

(01:08:33):
and Giselle met and fell in love and lived together.
At least the last I checked. Um, so I mean, that's,
I guess the good thing is that her life has
gone on. She's continued to find happiness. Um, she even
writes in the book that like, I understand why this
has led some people to just like hate men in general,
this story, but that's not the effect it had on me.

(01:08:55):
In part, she has two sons, right?

Speaker 4 (01:08:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:59):
So, that's, her life goes on. She's not a victim
as a, that's not a, I mean, she was a
victim of a crime, but she is not a victim
as a fundamental nature of her personality or character. She's
an incredibly resilient and very brave woman who I hope
continues to be happy afterwards.

Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
A true survivor.

Speaker 5 (01:09:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
Yeah, in the sexual violence community, we often don't use
the word victim.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
It's survivor.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
Yeah, survivor.

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
People go on to live full lives, and their life
does not end with what happened to them. That is
not the only thing that they are. No. It's a
measure of their entire life. It can feel that way
when you're experiencing sexual violence, for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
Yeah, certainly while you're in court. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):
Anyway, that's what I had this week, everybody.

Speaker 5 (01:09:50):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
Sorry. Bye.

Speaker 5 (01:09:56):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
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