Part One: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

0:00Coolza media. Welcome back to Behind the Basterds. A podcast will retell 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. Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here as always. Hey, Bridget, you want to... We're so happy to have you. You want to tell the folks about your new audiobook? Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah. Speaking of things that might make you feel icky or uncomfortable or weird, have you ever heard about folks who are experiencing intimate relationships with AI companions? Boy, how do you have I? Both for that movie, her, and then since in the real world. Yeah. I have always been fascinated by movies like Her, and X Machina, and Blade Runner.

1:00X Machina is pretty fun. X Machina is good, although it does show the dark side of what happens if you surround yourself with sexy bots. Yeah. 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 audiobook out called Love It First Prompt, AI in the future of intimacy that basically tries to answer the question of, why are we all so fascinated with technology and people getting emotionally close to it? And what are the risks? What do we lose when tech companies like Open AI are vying to be where we go for emotional support? Yeah. Well, you know, Bridget, I suspect part of the answer, at least for a lot of the men who find themselves in love with chat bots. Is that like, it's a, oh, 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 chat bots, but we are talking about something else that the internet and the tech world that has enabled that's pretty horrible.

2:02As 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 Tealer in the mix. And to be honest, 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, don't forget, sure, of course. Now, wait, speak, is not his name Evan Spiegel? Who the hell is that? The Snapchat guy. Oh, I don't think about Snapchat. Does anybody? Yeah, he goes under the radar a little bit. Yeah, he's the Snapchat guy. And when I think of him, I think of how he created all those like filters, well, he didn't personally, but created that with all those filters that caused so many people to have an unhealthy relationship with what their face actually looks like. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

3:03And you know, having an, and it just caused a bunch of fraud and give people body dysmorphia. 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 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 with her in the year 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 you the story. Probably 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 lists 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 of on any of these other sites because of the clientele that it solicited.

4:09And the website we'll be talking about this week was called Coco or Coco dot F R 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 come the only country on earth to take real steps to try and punish founders of 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 din of bigotry violence and sex crimes. Is that sound familiar to anybody? Have we heard of stuff like this happening before? I've heard of Coco and that pattern because I'm sure Bridget has too because women on the internet. It's all over. 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, oh, this makes me feel

5:10like I want to take a shower after hearing about this. 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 the story, but it just is too intense to not deliver a little bit of like a heads up. And so I'll say that for the audience to heads up, this is a bad one, folks. The real bad one. This isn't I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. The King is the Lord. From Focus Features and be a claim director of Jason Bourne. The King says work harder, you work harder. Starring Andrew Garfield. In a land of kings, one man will defy an empire. There will be no peace until we are free. And ignite a revolution. 10,000 rebels converge on London based on the true story behind the legend of Robin Hood. The Uprising. Richard R. Under 1790 without parent, only in theaters September 10. Discovered at Dolby Cinema. What if your soda actually did something for you?

6:10Introducing Skypop Protein Soda. Skypop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar and real delicious soda taste. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target or King Super's. On September 19th, the Monster Energy SMX World Championship playoffs, races and delos Angeles. This is it. All the line. Now the pressure is on to deliver. And for the world's best 22 dirt bike racers, only one will go home number one. It all comes down to this. Go experience all of the action live. Coming to Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles, California, September 19th. Get your tickets now at supermodocross.com. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads so you can watch without Wi-Fi, background play, so you can lock your phone and it still plays baby. Oh, and it is completely ad free.

7:11Yes, I said it ad free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. The founder of Coco is an asshole 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 Vacluse 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. 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.

8:13And 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 love my life quote. We don't get any of that from Isaac. Don't forget the he, he, he, load bearing. He, he, load bearing. He, for sure. As a slight tangent, what do we think about Jeremy Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg in the new social network movie? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I'm here for it. I know it's controversial. Me too. Me too. I know. I know. I'm with you. You asked the trailer. No, he's doing the voice so well. I'm here for it. What do you all think? I'm into it. I'm very into it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion of Jeremy Strong, to be honest. Did you watch the session? Yeah. No. Jeremy Strong. I love Stopey. I don't, I look like you know Ball. What do you think? I think I'm too. Jeremy Strong. Yeah. You clearly know Ball. Yeah. I'm fascinated. I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie. All I've got to say about that is I, I loved, I mean, I didn't love, I loved the movie

9:15that Jesse Eisenberg came out recently with him and Karen Cokin and Poland. Yeah. That was great movie. What is it called? Fuck. Yeah. A real pain. Great movie. It really 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 or I thought that, and I thought that like maybe I just didn't like his, I didn't, 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. A man I despised. Yeah. That like I associated the two of you for years and it completely unfair way and then I found out he's like giving a kidney to a stranger. He's apparently a nice one. He's a good one. Yeah. 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. No thanks. 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.

10:16The founder of this website, Isaac Steele, we don't know a whole lot about him, but yeah, he goes to, he goes up in Southeast France, graduates college in 2003 and earned, 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 Matthew Beliard describes Mr. Steele as a mysterious man who started the website that would make him infamous Coco the same year he graduated college, 2003, with quote, the help of his parents and 2000 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 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

11:17now. There's an almost pea green background and the big center image is a coconut spilling milk onto the floor. And away, I think it's suggestive of come. Maybe that's just like where my ad goes here, but they're like, I think they're suggesting it's a little suggestive, right? This is suggestive of semen for sure. I mean, yeah, come on. That's not really a coconut milk spills. It looks more viscous. Yeah. Don't like it. Don't love it. The 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. 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? You could put your real name in, but you can put any name in and they're not taking any,

12:17they'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. Users can register in just a second or two and are asked, 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 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 both going, are going to spend a lot of time pretending that they're younger or older than they are. Just as kind of a spoiler for where some of these things, 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, but it was not otherwise super noteworthy.

13:18Now again, I haven't come across enough direct information about Isaac Steele 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 circuit 2003, in case you're too young or too old, you've 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 some of the first, you know, my space I think was out by 2003, but Facebook isn't really around Twitter, certainly isn't like the stuff that like is going to become known for like a social media is not really out yet. But there have been Zanga. I was needy right now. 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?

14:19You know, the something awful forums had been created by Richard Keonka back in 1999 and by 2003 had something like 100,000 registered members. If I'm remembering from like the banner things back when I was visiting in 2003, 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 intentionally banned, 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 Tuchan and Fuchan. Tuchan was the Japanese precursor to Fuchan. Fuchan itself started in October 2003, the same year that Coco got started. And Fuchan began after Richard Keonka forced an exodus of members of the something awful forums by banning Hintai.

15:20A legal fire sharing prior to that was common in both communities, right? It common in something awful and after this it's common in Fuchan. And it's something that the owners of the websites don't profit from directly, which is part of why Richard eventually banned it. But they profited from the sites becoming active in popular hubs of communities that are doing file sharing, right? So there's 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 like share, porn and whatnot illegally. That's a great 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 it's creation and growing popularity by 2003 is also relevant to the story. After being founded in 1995 and is an email distribution list, Craigslist quickly expanded beyond its initial Bay Area birthing pond by 2000.

16:20In 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 because it offered away 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.com bust later days of Web 1.0 when Isaac Steedle decides to create a website of his own, right? 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 a couple free online chat sites before that, but definitely.

17:21Yeah. 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 reconnect with lost friends. That's not how the website was designed. So weird. Yeah. This really does sound like he was combining a lot of things from popping off early social media platforms and just trying to make it his own thing. Exactly. And I, we don't know. He always intended this to be a place where people would like sell legal 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 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

18:22Coco 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 speak for instance. 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 like people scamming each other and then involve people like trying to share or make illegal pornography. And that just became more and more dominant over time. Irease.com, which documents internet culture describes Coco as having been created for amorous encounters and seems to suggest that the chat branding was never more than an obvious skating tactic. They note that over the years, Steele 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. Oh, I just, I have a clarifying question. It sounds like they started from what you've just read. It sounded like they started with some moderation and then shifted to basically have no moderation

19:27when they kind of leaned into this sort of illegal scam. Yeah. That is what one source says. And I, I, I, 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, he, 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 scams and the like, right? And increasingly, people are going to be doing like, because it becomes a hook up app pretty quickly. People use it for that. And then it also becomes a way for people to fake hook up, like, to convince gay men to come out where they can beat them, right? That's a major thing people do with cocoa.com. But it's also a major gay hook up app because 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? Somewhere around this starts, some around the 20 teens is when you first start seeing a

20:28large number of attacks on people getting traced back to cocoa. 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 around the, the, the start of the Trump era really. This began as seemingly consensual encounters, and according to an investigation in Leperezi N by Maxine 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 to people are just getting like beaten and robbed, but there's also a lot of like homophobic attacks, right? Because this is such a well known hook up app for gay men. Because that Leperezi N article notes, numerous traps were set by homophobic aggressors to assault rob and sometimes kill homosexual people after they had been giving a meeting place via the online chat. So that's all pretty bad. And that is again, that takes a while. The sites founded in 2003. This is all really starting to come out by like 2018-19, but there's a reason that I brought

21:29up 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 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? And not just sexual acts. People, it becomes very popular to post like pictures of women out in the world and whatnot that you snap without them realizing. So crucially, Coco 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 Coco, they start out being like, hey, I've got this video

22:30I took or this, you know, I drug this girl and I took a video of what I did and you know, 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 non-consensual pornography and the like and use Coco as 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 2018's. 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 of people and even get to partake in it. Sometimes for money, sometimes just in order to help somebody else create pornography. 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 wider site functioned.

23:33And we only know of 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 only one. So starting no later than 2011, users on Coco had created a chat room named a son in Sioux, 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 drug without her knowledge. Now 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 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?

24:35A BBC investigation by Laura Goese 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. It says nothing to do with the other thing. I'm so glad that you made that distinction because if anybody is even adjacent to consensual adult kink faces, 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 the law and is horrible with what consenting adults do because kink communities where folks are are consensually interested in things like consensual non consent. They take consent very seriously. It's just really unfair to conflate them, but also very easy to conflate them. 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 fetishes that it is not consensual.

25:36They're not interested in like playing or pretending like they like yeah, they could. 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. I know a bunch of people who do, right? Yeah, 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 were not did not involve real abuse, right? They were sad, gross men describing their fantasy, sometimes pretending their fantasies were reality, but describing fantasies. The worst behavior most people in the chat room would have gotten up to would be taking non-consensual 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 candid shots of like their girlfriend or their wife asleep, right?

26:38And then it kind of escalates because people push them and they're 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 this chat room probably aren't doing anything at all or aren't doing more than taking the occasional like picture of someone at the gym, they are consuming the content created by people who are like 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 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 like I, 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. It sounds like a real ecosystem where even if you are, you know, if- Freak-o system. Being there makes you a cog in this machine, essentially.

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30:45Again, BetterHelp.com slash behind. Get your back. Alright, so starting in the 2010s, among the boldest members of the without their knowledge chat room on Coco was Dominique Polico. Per an article in the Monde by Lorraine DeFuture, Dominique, quote, filmed his daughter's 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 sex offender associated with Coco and arguably the most infamous sex offender in modern French history. 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

31:48crimes 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 one who committed crimes on the scale against like a middle class white lady. That's entirely possible. But yeah, 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 data bank, which is an astrology based wiki that sites its source as a French lawyer named Mark Brune, 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, with my casual searching. And it gives it his 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. Shout out to the astrology girlie. I don't know what to do with that, but I found it. So you're seeing it now. I tried to describe stuff to the listeners. I don't know how to describe an astrological chart.

32:50Somebody out there is like, oh, of course, his rising is this. It makes so much sense. Oh, obviously, the green squiggly thing and the red squiggly thing both have lines and the circle thing in the middle, obviously. I don't know what it is. Somebody is cleaning something from this for sure. Somebody's learned a lot here. So Dominique was the second child of Dene and Juliet, well, Dene Pellico and Juliet Rousseau. His mother had first been married to Andre Pellico, Dennis's brother or Dene'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 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 that might, he went on, this is not a healthy family. This is 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. Dene is like an abusive asshole, right?

33:53Like he is a very aggressive man and a very cruel man. And the man who does a lot of sex crimes. The Pellico 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 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 the month, this one by honorary seckel, 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 her effort. This is, it's really bad. After his Dene's 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, like I, it's really bad. And Jeanette Dominique's half sister testified that she fled the house as a teenager to escape

34:54her stepfather's sexual abuse. That article by seckel 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 Felatio that he said he suffered at the age of nine by a nurse at a hospital. His very 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. Um, I, there's no way to verify that. We can definitely verify that his mom, that his mom was raped by his father because his other siblings saw this too. Dominique has a very strong memory of his dad raping and humiliating their mother. Like that is a thing that serious 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 is

35:57literally true because quite frankly, a lot of people get molested as kids and don't commit the kind of sex crimes Dominique's going to commit. So yeah, that's what I was thinking, you know, yeah, fuck this guy. But no, every man doesn't have a demon. Like people all, everybody's got shit to deal with, but that's different from what's going on with you, bro. Um, 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. Uh, one of it was one of the guys like why 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 much we should trust these claims. Like hiatrist Laurent Leiette 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 Pelico comes from a family with a confused history and troubled reference points marked by certain secrets and the existence of sexual relations between adults

36:58and minors. So I did again, 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. And that, I mean, this is just a tale is oldest time with cycles of abuse. So it's not really that difficult for me to imagine this. 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 elested as kids. You know, and 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 Dene Pelico as a monster. When Dominique was still 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 in a domain over which he could rule. That's how she describes Dene. He soon became the warden and the family moved into a house on the grounds.

38:02As Dominique's older 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 to his 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 suite 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 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.

39:03Now in his testimony, Dominique painted a picture of a traumatized young boy who grew into a young man with dark 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 were going to be outlining, it's like, oh, I've always had this demon inside me and I fought it for decades and then finally in my 60s, my wife's goodness wasn't enough to keep me from doing horrible things. That's not accurate. Very convenient narrative that also puts the blame on the wife for her own abuse. Like, oh, she wasn't able to help me fight these demons any longer. He simultaneously puts her up on a pedestal because he always talks about it even when he wasn't caught. 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?

40:05Like it was her example that kept me on the straight and narrow, right? So he is, you're right. He is like putting a degree of, uh, blame's not entirely the right word, but like, yeah, that is fucked up. The couple met in the home of Gisele's aunt, Andre, who just lost her husband. Gisele was there to provide, visit and provide some comfort to her aunt. She's like 19, but per her memoir, a hymn to life, quote, almost 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 Andre had hired him to help her keep her husband's business going. 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 he and Gisele hit it off immediately, right? That 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. Dene was reportedly furious when the young couple laid their sleeping bags next to each other

41:08in a tent and accused them of trying to sleep together. He would later steal their family say or their 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. He probably feels his control slipping. Yeah, yeah. I think it is that kind of situation. Like he escalates his abuse ofness against Dominique. His Dominique starts getting out of the house, right? And Dominique does take Gisele up on the offer to flee his family and live with her in Paris. They move in together. They get married. And she describes again, this is love at first sight. After she found out, as 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. 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. So initially, their primary issue as a couple was enduring all the bullshit that Dene threw

42:08their way. Here's a representative story from Gisele'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 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 is dead there. But they persevere. They power through it. For his part, Dominique says this is what drew him to Gisele. She was the opposite of my mother who was completely rebellious, right? In court, he describes Gisele 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 alive. She was among other things he was not keeping on the straight and arrow this entire time. We don't know how many sex crimes he committed outside of their marriage while they were

43:11married, 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. Gisele says they needed to do this to avoid her salary being garnished because Dominique's debts were so bad. And so on so many levels. He doesn't make a lot of money. But 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. Now, two attentive. Yeah. And also, she doesn't like, it's not perfect. She cheats on him at one point, right? 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 memoirs are 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 things like our second.

44:14And 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? 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 out of our system. Yeah, we had to get it out of our system. Now, this is all happening sometime in the early 90s during this time, but just, she 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, the, the bigger case against him. But he's 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 drugs soon dissipated and she managed to escape.

45:14Now he's working as a real estate agent at the time. This doesn't come out until decades later as a result of a DNA match when Dominique gets caught committing his other crimes. And he initially denied involvement in this, but when he was presented it with DNA evidence, he admitted to attacking this woman on impulse and fleeing what she escaped. In retrospect, she's elk and think of thought of, because she talks about in her memoir, 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 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, you know, during, I think, around the time they were separated,

46:16but it's a little unclear to me. Per Lorraine, the Fouchers article in the Monde, they found several related factors. 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 those victim to sleep and ablated weapon. Now, who does that sound like? Don't miss. Yeah, it sounds like Dominique, right? It sounds like a ZMO. 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. 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 the second one. And so I kind of think if there were a bunch of certainly murders that had the same MMO, they would have come up by now, right?

47:18That said, he definitely committed other rapes, right? It couldn't have been just these two and then the stuff that he did to his wife, right? 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, right? Giselle says that she never saw this side of her husband. Her memoir doesn't 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 last at 50 something years and started in 1971, 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 he could be like, well, but that's still probably less spousal of 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 it's like a sign.

48:18Sometimes it's still greater than no times. Well, yeah, it's still, 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? God. And I just don't know that I think it is, right? No. Because he, this is like not abnormal, unfortunately, right? And it was not, she, Giselle, it's like, I didn't notice anything, right? Again, there were pieces that all of her family members had little bits of it, but nothing that would have really tipped them over, right? 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 and bad. She never had an orgasm until that affair in her mid-30s. 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 relevant to his crimes. But also, it's just stuff that a lot of people do, unfortunately, right? Like, yeah.

49:20Talk 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 like an understanding why she's thinking, this is just how men are. This is just how men are. This is just how men are. This is just how men are. 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 relationship she's aware of. All of her friends are jealous of them. Like they have a reputation and their friend group is being like the perfect couple. That's how she's L describes it. And I think rather than like looking through their past to be like, oh, there were signs, 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 and the decades they knew him. And that's just not enough to guess that someone's going to do stuff like what he did, right? Right. And it's really upsetting, but I think it's important to be like, yes, some people

50:21can hide that well who are this kind of predator, right? And that's very scary. 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. No. And she has, she has a lot more stories of him being like an attentive and loving husband than stories of like weird creeping 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 to place with a view. Their finances still aren't good because of all of Dominic's debts. He like fails. His last business 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 like his credit's too shitty. And it winds up needing a loan from fucking his wife. Anyway, it's bad. Like he's bad with money, right? So the, the, the couple, they're not rich, but they're renting a house in an ice place and they're planning to spend their retirement there.

51:21She's got a decent pension. He's got a shitty or one. And he's, he is really angry about that. He doesn't seem to understand why she has a better pension than his and it's because like she worked more and was better at her job than he ever was. He switched careers a bunch, you know? So once they move out of Paris and they're living in the country in this place called Amazon, Dominic starts spending more and more time on the internet. Sophie Gilbert summarizes this kind of a period of time and a review of Gisele's book for the Atlantic. He's constantly on his computer. One day his son's partner walks in on Dominic masturbating behind his desk, which Dominic seems unembarassed about so much so that you can't help but wonder whether he'd planned it. In fact, at some point he's set up secret cameras to film each of his two daughters, daughters in law in the shower. Then he posted the images online. He's posting this to Coco, right? This is how it starts. 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 the shower from like this camera

52:25or not pictures of a video from his 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. I would call that. I'd call that violence. I've been 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. I just want listeners to understand that this guy is a absolute monster on so many levels like just that alone is very bad. It's very, very bad. And unfortunately that's just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. This is how he's warming up effectively. Unfortunately. Yeah. There are some, probably the biggest sign was that his email address is fetish 45 like fetish. And his family, his like kids noticed that as weird. It's like, why the fuck is this dad's email address? Like what the hell is going on with them? And again, it's France.

53:25And 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. It's like, well, these are French men, right? It's France. We're all French, right? Talk of sex and talk of like desire and whatnot is more common and less sort of stigmatized, right? 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, but it's not enough that you would guess this guy as the kind of predator that he is. The community where Dominic 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, Isaac Steele's chat site for nice people. Dominic'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, Jacelle points out that her husband was caught taking upskirt photos of women in a supermarket, not far from their apartment, quote, as early as 2010, which

54:27is 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. He gets, 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? Was he posting those images on Coco? I don't know if he posted the ones he got arrested taking, but he was posting other images on Coco. Yes. Okay. From Jacelle'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 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?

55:27I'm not, 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. 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 to always be in boys, being guys. Boys, it's not a big deal, whatever, whatever. Maybe she won't 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 only, 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 thought and did something, think of all of the violence and escalation that could have been prevented. But like, I mean, I, I, he is responsible for his crimes for sure, but there is a network of enablers that allow you to escalate. Yeah, it's a step. It really is. Yes.

56:28And it's like, 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. Yeah, they're, yeah. And it's, it's, this is not harmless. It's not harmless to take fucking candid photos or take up, like, up skirts 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. And like, Papa Oxy, I've been doing that for decades to young young celebrities. Yeah. And that's disgusting. Probably a line between that and that's too you could draw. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else is a line that we should draw? A line between now and you listening to these ads. Oh, that was so dark. Yeah. I don't know, man. I know it's brutal. This ad is brought to you by Veeve Healthcare, the makers of Devato Doloutig Revere Lemivideen. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devato. Devato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older.

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59:35A do more subscription brings you concerts and comedy, sports and museums. For seven scrawny bucks a month, you get at least one pair of tickets to something great. Discover new bands. Plath, learn, do more. And right now, do more makes interesting and adventurous easy. Because your first month's free at domorestuff.com slash free. We're back. So nobody contacted Jizelle 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 and his female family members he could get his hands on. And to do something more extreme. Now he claims that as he grew 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.

1:00:38Dominique would bait the lure by offering photos of his sleeping wife in an off-road anonymous chat rooms and win 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 God, what he's first off someone online helps him figure out like because he had experimented with ether and he kills someone probably probably killed someone unintentionally using it. So he doesn't want to do that again. He's got a prescription for a binso. I think it's leraza pam. 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 Coco who's like, don't give her more than this. Here's the perfect dose to knock her out. You're one of them. And it's telling you like you want to mix it with these muscle relaxers because that way she won't clench up. And you want to, if you give her this dose of leraza pam, you know, even if she wakes up, she won't remember what's happening because she's

1:01:39drugged, right? Like that's how binsos can work in high enough doses. Like you go away for days at a time. I remember the first time I ever 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 of them. Binsos and high doses can do that. To that nurse. Fuck you. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. 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. I hope you feel shame. I hope we're a fuck you man. You were a fucking piece of shit. You were an absolute monster. Fuck you. I don't know if they got 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 at an anonymous.

1:02:40I 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. But fuck you, nurse, whoever you are. No, it was apparently a nurse who taught him like the mixtures to use. That person is so unbelievably complicit. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, very directly. So much for this is a conversation. It's not just this nurse. It's a whole chatroom of people giving them advice and saying like, I'll 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 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.

1:03:41Here's how they describe his M.O. After initial 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 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 Steele and the website Coco. 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 predator well before he got access to Coco. Before he did anything on the internet, he was a predator. He probably would have preyed on his family members and his wife to some extent if he had never encountered this website.

1:04:43Giving 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 like 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 Steele does by making Coco. That's what this website is. It is a gun that is being handed out to any person like Dominique who wants to use it. That's the moral issue here. When 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 I'd like the dipshit end of the free speech crusaders, which I consider myself normally. Who are like well, you can't go after someone just for hosting a website where this stuff happens. I'm fucking sorry. If I were to buy an or own a large venue and run like a farmer's market or something out of it, right? 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. It started out as people selling like food they'd grown or whatever, like little crafts.

1:05:48Then one day some guy comes in with a bunch of ghost guns and maps of a bunch of local schools. That day a guy comes in with like a table full of like CSAM, like fucking child sex abuse images. I keep taking their hundred dollars 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 like 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 have any kind of free speech argument in my fucking mind anymore, right? That's where I land on this morally. I hardly agree. You really summarized the kind of complexities of this argument well, you know, we are all sort of in the digital rights space. Yeah. 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, get the internet, all of that. And so the conversations are particularly-

1:06:48Right, particularly- Ridiculous encryption and shit. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There's got to be standards, right? There has to be standards. Yes. Sorry. 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 a legal content that is harming and abusing women and girls. Perhaps that's the line. And if that's like the main use of your website is 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, but certainly not with the series of crimes being committed against New Zealand, but it is like 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

1:07:50ability to communicate freely on the internet to encryption to privacy, then people like Isaac Steele, 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? Like that's what he's doing here. Anyway, not the primary issue, but important to say. So back to Gisele, obviously this goes on him bringing anonymous men over to rape her while she is drugged for a decade. Right, 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. Gisele would wake up on many days with severe brain fog and would often like not have memories 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

1:08:50no 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. She's losing day. 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 also to shit. 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 Gisele's autobiography. I mean, all women to be honest. Yeah, but this is, I'm not denying that. Specifically a geriatrician. Yeah, yeah, I'll quote it here. I spent a decade having endless medical examinations, blood tests, scans, multiple courses of vaginal pesseries, 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 with demolition work, never wondering what

1:09:50might be going on, never attempting a diagnosis. And Dominique always there by my side, he knew. And one of the things she'll point out, like, I'm waking up wet and will be like, well, this just happens to all ladies, you know, you're just losing control. Yeah, it's fine. Don't worry about it, right? 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. If it had better, like, really most places I can think of, um, it's like medical gas lighting. We're essentially there just saying, oh, she's just up, you're just uptight as the problem. 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, like, pelvic area, her husband had the gall to quip. What have you been getting up to during the day? Oh my God. Dominique. Yeah. And of course, we know that, you know, what Gisele was doing had nothing to do here, right? And everything to do with how Dominique spent his nights on cocoa, right? That's what's actually at fault here, but she doesn't know and she's not going to for

1:10:53years. And we'll talk about how she learns what happens next and what happens to Isaac Steele and the cocoa and at least one other founder of a website 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 in part two. I shouldn't have gotten such an upbeat part two there. Bridget, how are you doing? 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. It has to happen. He sees it real asshole. We have to talk about these things. And you know, but when 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 the script is quite the opposite. There's so much empathy in this script.

1:11:54And I think it's important to cover these stories, not just with the facts, but with your feelings. Yes. This is horrific. I've been on Bastard's a few times. I don't think y'all have ever reached out to be to give the heads up before. It's up. Yeah. 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 armilieu. But this is just such another level. I mean, I was talking to my partner about it. And you just wanted the thing she said is that like, yeah, it's kind of just impossible to ever like fully trust a man. Yeah. It is. You never know. You never know. You never know. And I don't know what else to take from this story. Yeah. 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,

1:12:55well, they're married. Kind of husband really assault a right. Right. Oh, yeah. That's just don't think we're. Yeah. There's a number of quotes like that. Yeah. And that was the one of the dominant narratives that I remember watching in real time. 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 then when you hear about somebody committing sexual violence to, to, to, domestically, to their wife, I think a lot of people are like, it's just domestic issues. This is a marriage. It's intimate. It's their business. It doesn't have anything to do with a wider societal issue. Yeah. And this, this couldn't be more obviously a wider societal issue. Not just the fact that like 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.

1:13:5850 were were convicted. But there's like 70 or so that they, they had pictures or videos or evidence of that, because Dominique's documenting all of it. 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 show up in a couple of nights. He would tell them where she was during the day so that they should, 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, 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 happen to be on this website within like a 40-minute drive of her home who are immediately willing to be like, yeah, I'll rate 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

1:15:01of just random dudes in any given society who would, if they felt like it was safe, easily an absolutely drug and on, raping unconscious drug 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 dip-cultural differences there maybe. I don't know, but it's, it incredibly, it's just, yeah, I don't know. I don't have anything else to say about it today. We'll talk more in part too, I guess. I'm gonna go stand outside, during our break to feel the sun. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Sorry, everybody. Behind the bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. Or check us out on the IHurtRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,

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