This article contains references to rape and sexual assault.
When Gisèle Pélicot first chose to come forward about the crimes of her ex-husband Dominique, the world was horrified. People all over the globe were in disbelief that a man could perpetuate a campaign of drugging and raping his wife without her knowledge, and even more sickened that dozens of men joined him in his crimes.
But as CNN Paris bureau chief Saskya Vandoorne learned, he is far from alone.
Vandoorne recently published a bombshell investigative report of online “rape academies,” where men from all over the globe gather to plan and share imagery of themselves drugging and raping their women partners. By going undercover in these groups for months, Vandoorne was able to shine a light on not just how prevalent these types of crimes are, but the forces in our society that are allowing this to continue.
Below, Vandoorne shares what drove her to investigate these internet communities hiding in plain sight, and what every woman needs to know about this type of gender-based violence. This story has been lightly edited and condensed for readability.
It all began with the Gisèle Pélicot mass rape trial. I was there inside the courtroom, so the trial took on a special significance for me. The last day in court, her lawyer, Antoine Camus, began saying that even though all 51 defendants had been found guilty, the weapon of the crime—Coco—had not been put on trial.
Coco was the website that Dominic Pélicot used to recruit all of the men [the chatroom-style website was shut down by French authorities in June 2024 after an 18-month investigation linked it to several crimes]. After the trial was over, I wanted to see if anything had replaced Coco. It started as a dating website, and then turned into this very dark corner of the internet where lots of nefarious activity was taking place.
My colleagues, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, and I went to CNN and explained that we would need to go undercover in these spaces if we wanted the men to speak to us openly, and they said yes. The terrifying thing was I knew it wasn’t going to be that difficult. Coco wasn’t on the dark web, and I imagined a lot of the websites that had taken its place wouldn’t be either. Just doing a Google search of “Coco website replacement” revealed one that had taken its place. There were guys saying things like, “Isn’t it sad that Coco’s been taken down? Please join us here to carry on the conversation.” All of these guys were talking about sharing pictures of their girlfriends and wives and what they wanted to do to them. The way that they spoke about them, objectified them, dehumanized them. From that website, we heard about Motherless, the porn site we ended up going on.
We wanted to get into these websites, but we knew the only way we could have open conversations would be to create a fake identity, a male persona. We needed to be really careful never to encourage anybody there. We were undercover, but we remained journalists in that all we did was ask questions. We presented ourselves as a very curious man who wanted to understand, to know what it was these guys were doing. So our questions always came across as very innocent. “What are you doing? How do you do it? How long have you been doing it for?” We were under very strict ethical guidelines, and images and videos are currency on these platforms. A lot of men are exchanging videos and pictures of their wives. We, of course, could never do that. So we found a lot of our conversations could only get so far; eventually the users didn’t trust us.
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