Part Two: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

0:00Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where this week we're talking about some websites that enable horrific sex crimes and the actions of Dominique Pelico who is just a monster. You know what was in the part one of this episode, right? I don't probably don't need to remind you. I mean, I guess I should, but first I should introduce our guest, Richard Todd. Richard, welcome back. Also, I'm sorry. Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's a little bit of a rough one, but still happy to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a rough one and a podcast that only does rough ones. Do you have any pluggables? You want to plug up top here? I do. And I've kind of been thinking about it as we've been having this conversation. You know, I just published an audiobook with Simon and Schuster called Love It First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy, where we look at AI companions and people who use AI for

1:01things like romance, emotional support, and sex. 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 fact use AI to create an AI companion who will do what your girlfriend, and slash wife won't do. And I don't know, something about this conversation is just really making me think about that dynamic, dynamic, that every woman and girl should just be yours for the taking, that that should be the world that people live in. Well, just the attitude that like women are not partners, they're like almost like a vending machine that this wins a sex or emotional comfort, right? As opposed to like a person. Yeah. 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 the

2:02crimes in this. You know, in the same way, like obviously not every, a lot of people who are seeking AI companionship are not sex criminals. I'm the same way Dominic Pelico 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 them with these women to know that you're using them as sexual objects. There's a line between that and people like wanting to take the human out of having a human partner, I think, probably. Anyway. I would absolutely agree with you. Yeah. This isn't I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do

3:05our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillert, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. This is Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files.

4:07Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to pro society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we left off last episode at the start of the 20 teens when Dominique Pelicose started drugging his wife and using Coco to recruit dozens of anonymous men, all of whom lived

5:09within 15 to 30 miles of their home, to sexually assault her in the dead of night. Before we get further into this story, and 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 were meeting online to do this sort of thing. In fact, Dominique is a distinct outlier within the community of sleep content officiant autos. Both in that he commit, I should say, non-consensual sleep content officiant autos. 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 experienced drugging women 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. Most guys just don't have the, I don't know, guts seems like the wrong word. Most of them are not willing to like cross that line, which is still, they're still

6:10abusing, they're participating just as someone who shares CSAM, right, 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 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 in an LLC in New York City. This build itself as a moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever, although their definition of legal 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

7:14on that one. Yeah, could not like size 78 font bold. Every page on motherless.com featured this disclaimer. All content posted this site is 100% user contributed. All the legal 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. 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, and again, most of the stuff pointed here is not like a 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 a, I mean, there's, I've had a 2011 California civil suit that described the logo pretty well as quote, a depiction

8:18of a mother holding a child's hand with a large red circle with a cross through it around it. And seemingly ejaculating fat like 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, a circle with a cross or with a, a slash through it thing. The ghost buster's thing. Yeah, like it goes buster's thing, but with like a mom and a kid. Yeah. Said filing also did the website had a separate logo on some certain pages that was just a young girl in ballerina shoes swinging from the roof in a matter I can only describe as upsetting. Yeah, you'll see it here. It's it's not super great. Not like that. I don't like that. Nope. Don't like that. God. 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

9:20of the content offerings. We found a legal hidden camera video. Some included images or videos of women often purported to be perpetrators female family members in the shower 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 and included the woman's full name in the title with a photo of the woman on her 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, a huge amount of the content here is just repackaged like professionally made born that someone kind of files a serial numbers often says, oh, this is totally real. So at least there's that a lot of these sleep videos were like porn that consenting adults

10:25made where they're acting and people were just uploaded and say it was a real video. But far too much of it was real and often really illegal. In 2012, Dutch citizen Aiden Cobon posted topless photos of Amanda Todd, a 15 year old girl to motherless as part of a black male 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 screened cap 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. And 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 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, but it's not

11:30where the relationship starts. Like these people like Todd started interacting with this person on like a video chat website. I'm not sure if it was chat roulette, but chat roulette 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 chat and clients that a lot of kids are using. And like the whole thing with chat roulette was like our friend of the pod Cody Johnson did like a parody song called you're going to see a dick if you're on chat roulette because people would just expose themselves on it. Like in a lot of kids got like shit like that happened a lot on chat roulette. Now, yeah, I was on chat roulette in O'Magle and it really would be you would you would you would get matched with somebody who was already masturbating. Yeah, he wasn't even there wasn't even like a conversation. It was already happening. And this is also a good place to highlight the difference between a site like chat roulette and Coco or motherless were 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 chat roulette or these other sites.

12:30They weren't built for like weird sex stuff. That was just signed of a thing that it was a side effect of an obvious side effect that they should have done more to 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 away to masturbate in front of kids. That was not the purpose of chat roulette. And I don't really think there's much in the way of like blame to a site other than like we guys should have known that would have been a thing. Like that. That was a predictable problem. 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 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.

13:31None of these abusers are totally reliant on any one of these sites. And 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? These communities are independent of these websites to some extent at least. And certainly these individual abusers are a contemporary vice report by people. Patrick McGuire summarized quote, petafiles find young girls on webcam chat sites like blog TV could coerce them to taking their clothes off, screenshot their images clandestinely, and share the screencaps with each other in a sick bartering system. 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. But unfortunately, like Isaac Steele, his early life, I don't know, I got nothing, right? 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 while the violating the privacy of others.

14:36Yeah. Huh. Interesting. Various legal filings list him as the owner, operator, and soul employee of motherless.com. The website collective shout collected a number of these filings and point to a 2018 case ventura content, the 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 have uploaded to a different site to fill out his own, right? So 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 was started by stealing a bunch of content from a bunch of other places. And that included a lot of 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?

15:37We don't 100% know that this was the guy who founded motherless.com. That's still kind of a mystery. But 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, Lang admitted that he used the miners to engage in sexually explicit content while the miners 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. Sounds like his M.O. for sure. Sounds like it probably was. Sleep pornography exploded on motherless during the same years that Dominique was active and Coco over in France. It started around 2010 or 2011, right? I don't know entirely why but that is really when this stuff takes off to a big degree and

16:41it seems to be consistent in a couple of different countries. 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 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 Polico. And so a smaller subset of more experienced users made money and clout providing these newer people with the tools of the trade. Per CNN quote, one motherless user claimed to be running a business selling a dispatching sleeping liquids to any address in the world.

17:43The man who said he was based in Suta, a tiny Spanish enclave on the North African coast, said on his telegram account that it would cost 150 euros, approximately 175 dollars, for a bottle of the liquid that he 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 like posted pictures of it and people seem 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 and offering advice on sleeping drugs via motherless.com. And we know the same thing is happening in Cocoa 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 like communities. Yeah. You talking about how this is really an enterprise. It's not just, you know, it's a business. It's a business. It's a business. It's a business. They're hustling. Yeah, it's a side hustle.

18:44Men who got into this as a business would advertise their content with tags like hashtag passed out and hashtag iCheck. The latter was a hallmark of all these videos. The iCheck is like one of the things guys who are into this really demand in all of their videos. And 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 this content, I guess. Some iCheck videos were found to have a mast over 50,000 views. So again, this is not massive in terms of like internet content, but 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. Preveiers 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.

19:45Of course. There's always a crypto thread to this kind of nonsense always. 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 the that motherless received 62 million visits in a single month February. Now that is a lot. I should note, obviously, there's a 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 number 62 million visits has been misinterpreted as like there were articles where people would be like 62 million men attended a rape academy. 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. I think people literally thought there was an actual school where classes were being

20:49sold online. That's not what's going on here. And I don't really think rape academy is the right way to describe motherless. 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. Sorry. I remember when that happened when I think a social media user was just earlier this year. Yeah. Like, misreported the number and I hated the conversation that resulted because the number really was inflated. If it was, it's not like, yeah. And I think 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. Yeah. Missed an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about sexual violence, but we with it because of that misreporting. And I, it's really a shame that the whole conversation just really devolved in a, in a,

21:51in a, in a bad way. I agree with you about it being called a rape academy. I think they were quoting somebody who was quoted in the article, but it just gave a really inc, inconsistent, inaccurate version of what was actually happening. And I think it did the whole conversation of disservice. 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, 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 we, I think that's part of why they did it. But the reason why this site was so dangerous and 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 forechand, you can even find pieces of this happening on like

22:55places like Reddit, right? Yeah. Those places, particularly Reddit has a lot more moderation. They attempt to crack down on it, but that stuff still happens elsewhere, right? Yeah. Craigslist doesn't have the same ring to it though. Like, yeah. And I mean, fuck the kind of shit that gets sold on Facebook at 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 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 a lot of sites that these guys were using. I mean, some of those are the accounts is like the guy who was selling the sleeping potions

23:56or whatever the fuck. He's advertising on Motherless, but he's actually operating his business out of telecom program, 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 or sold content on Motherless were trying to push users to their telegram channels as often as possible in some other places. The same things 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. 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, Michelle 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.

24:56Now 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 hook up app. So there were already activists who were pointing out before any of this stuff went viral, this place is really dangerous and they were not listened to. We'll talk more about that later. The next year, 2019, a man from breast 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, seesame, and homophobic 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 Steele, founder of the site, took no action to moderate his platform. There's were sometimes banned if their behavior elicited legal threats or serious complaints.

25:58He had moderators. People 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. Yeah. And incentivizing, I think. And incentivizing to an extent. Yeah. So what I like to incentivize. Products. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. Yeah, I'm obsessed.

26:59So obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable.

27:59I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced, but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible the first time listeners. Each week we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head?

29:01How about we flip this around? How much is the surprise one man? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I would never set expectations for something like that. It seems like if the universe allows for something like that to happen, I am open to. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway to be honest with you. I was like, is that what you need? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben stiller, no. I think there's a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like, you're like, oh, it's a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life.

30:02I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Benieto and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind or wake up to a new version

31:05of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Your ad breaks cracked me up. 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? Solid question. I don't think it exists. Yeah. It does not exist. So we're getting up to the moment where the story of what Dominic 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, Dominic Polico went out to the grocery store and was caught for the second time we know of taking up skirt 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 non-shelons how unconcerned

32:09he was that he had been caught doing this, made the security I think like, I need this needs to be escalated. This is more serious and I need and 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 emphasized 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 up skirts. He's doing something else, right? 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? And the police, once they start talking to him, notice the same thing that like, wow, this guy is really non-shelon 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. Leighette, to interview Dominic immediately after 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

33:10people at this point. Pre the BBC, Dr. Leighette noted how, easily, he dismissed his crime like a gentile grandfather caught pocketing a few cigarettes. Dr. Leighette detected a dissonance in the man's behavior and the strong implication that he was 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 they confiscate his hard drive, his computer and multiple phones because Dominic was providing content to this large community on cocoa. 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, but archived, he had archived conversations between them when he would have like planned meetups and stuff to have them come over.

34:11Coco doesn't save that stuff, right? It's supposed to be anonymous. He archived all of this content. And so police. And so police like trophies for him. I mean, they're also advertising. I don't use making money off of this, but the cloud surely matters. And he also, he gets off on other men raping his wife when she's asleep, right? That's what I'm referring to. This allows him to recruit. Yeah. It's allows him to relive what he's done. 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. I just think that is a. But yeah, he didn't want to be the only guy punished for this, right? No, that was him wanting to share the blame. Right, right, right. Which does not make a no. He's shaped for four. No, I just still scum of the earth. Yeah.

35:11And 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 them and he'd been bringing over. Now, there's a break because he, he bails out or whatever and goes home and he like contacts Jacelle 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 going to want it 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 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 have this stuff.

36:12No, but no, like, like, I understand the thinking of like crazy. We don't want to do this right away. Leaving this woman and her family alone with this guy, calm the fuck on. Knowing that he's the abuser to give them a little bit of grace, I don't know how quickly they realized it was Giselle. Okay. 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 had for they have them come into the station together and they separate them immediately, right? They take him in the custody and then they they talk to Giselle, right? And this is just that's a particular example from part one. That's like if they found out some guy was a mass shooter and sent him to be to a school. Yeah. Yeah.

37:12Or if they if they knew some guy had been committing a series of like murders in the woods and they didn't know where he's done was and they just like let him go home for a couple of weeks. Well, they get their ducks in a row. I don't know. I don't know exactly what to compare it to, but like it's really weird that they do that. You got to be a real journey mother fucker to be like, I'm going to I got one last one before I go away. You got to be a real sick puppy. Yeah. I mean, it's 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. That's horrible. They're the police are responsible for this woman for that last one for sure. Again, it's their fault. Yeah. It's all of that fucking entire system that is unbelievably evil. Yeah, it's really bleak. And I'm guaranteeing nothing happened to those assholes who didn't do their fucking jobs. No, I mean, they get cheap. Of course not. And in her narrative too, they get a lot of credit because they caught him and stuff. And yeah, I don't again, and I don't I don't 100% know when they, but they're definitely

38:14was a gap at which they knew she was his primary victim and he was still free. Right? 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 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 and she's like, Hey, do you think you know your husband 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 like again, the police ask like, are you guys, do you guys partner swap, right? And as, as just later recalled, quote, I heard myself stammering that swinging was inconceivable for me. I didn't bear other men touching me. I needed feelings, right?

39:14And I don't know how you'd respond to this. Maybe this is the first point they, they 100% knew again, I, I, I, I, that I have trouble believing that. But the police officer then, I don't know what response 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? Yeah, which, and then he shows her evidence of what had happened. And she is shocked, doesn't believe it at first. And then it becomes kind of impossible tonight, because there's so many photos, right? But it, 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 and a police station realizing the foundation of this life that you've built for half a century and raised three kids with and a multiple grandkids with this person that he has been doing this to you. I, I can't even comprehend what that, the effect that would have on you.

40:19And on the rest of the family, by the way, once they all find out, which we'll talk about later, this hits the, the family like a fucking bomb. It's horrifying. Yeah. 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 central. I still think there is some attitude, even from the police that we're hearing that this must somehow be consensual. There must have been something. There must have been something. Yeah. 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? Also, I'm not exactly familiar with like the French police system, but I, but, but, you know, why was like a random cop, the one delivering this traumatic information to her? That random cop was not properly trained. They bring in a, they bring in a psych. They do bring in a psych. But, but the cop is the one who says that thing to her, right?

41:21But I don't, he may have, I don't know because there are police and stuff who have in different countries training for, like, I don't know if he was trained. And for these kind of, like, I don't know. So I don't know, like, go in on that. That delivery is a little insane to me. I, but I don't know, I honestly don't know what you say. I don't know how you deliver the news, but it just, 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, I'm not just to say, I have a bachelor's in psychology. So I like don't know how you would handle that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Also, I feel like it would have been better if the person delivering the news there was a woman. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm just doing opinions at this point. Yeah. So, per an article in the independent by Jane Dalton about this experience, the first photo showed a man raping 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

42:24Dominique Pelleco had took up his wife over the years when he regularly knocked her unconscious by lacing her food and drink with drugs. Miss Pelleco could not believe that the inert woman in the photos was her. I did not recognize the individuals 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 rate me. She recalls being told by the officer, Laurent Pare. God, that's so awful. Yeah. It's just. I mean, and the sheer extent of the crime, the number of men who were involved is some degree, the number of men that they actually were able to identify by name. That all comes out of her period of months, right? Is there 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, major national story as soon as this gets out into the media. Well, Jacelle initially stays anonymous. She has a right to do that.

43:25Rate victims have the right to be anonymous in France. And so initially she's using a pseudonym and the, but also that means that the names of the perpetrators and whatnot, the alleged perpetrators at this point, are also being kept from the public, right? Like they also are obfuscated to a degree because of like she, 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 that outrage spends the gamut of things, 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 Steele moved the registration of his website to the island of Guernsey, a self-governing committee that uses the .GG URL. There were immediate calls to prosecute Steele, but for the Guardian, holding Steele accountable

44:25for 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 Steele nowhere to be found. Now, as that 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 was still online. In 2022, a 23-year-old man from Marseille barely survived being run over by three men in a car after arriving for a hook-up arranged via Coco. Per the Guardian, law enforcement officials arrested four people in the town of Sao Poli, later this year, that year, after they were accused of posing as men looking for hook-ups on the site, then luring victims to meet them before violently attacking and roving them. This has been going on for years and years. The country, the national media does not pay attention to it, and either do the police

45:28until the story of Dominique and Giselle Pellico goes viral. That's what makes them care about the other stuff that had been going on on Coco. That same year, as the investigation to Polico's crimes wound on and the government to rest it in charge dozens of men, the investigating judges off has contacted Zincote. The company Mr. Steedle had used to register Coco in 2011 and asked for data connected to the case. Steedle earned or his employees never responded. The next year, Zincote shut down and he created a new website, a new company to register the website in 2024. But in 2023, France passed a new law that allows them to prosecute cases like this by looping multiple crimes enabled by a website together into one big case. So you don't have to prosecute each of these as like an individual thing in order to go after the people running and administering a website like this. This law also allows prosecutors to hold administrators liable for some activity on their site.

46:29Site 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, I, I, 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 are you endorse it or whatever, I'm trying to describe how the news sites I have read described it. I don't inherently have 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, Coco definitely was doing that. And Isaac Steele was for sure aware of it. It was the main reason people were like spending like using fucking cocoa was to do stuff like this, right? As the investigations continued, journalists also began to look into cocoa 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,

47:33CNN found several strikingly similar patterns between those messages and the ones exchanged by Dominique Pellaco with users on Coco. Around three and four of the accounts 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. There's also frequently sought to move conversations over to private messaging platforms such as Skype or Snapchat, Snapchat and Skype declined to comment. See, I was right with my Evan Speagle and in part one, you really called it. You did? I'd forgotten that. But yeah, that is important and I've been trying to point out this is as much as we're focusing on Coco and motherless, these are spokes in like a wheel, right? They're not the wheel. Here in enormous 18-month international effort involving notches the French government by the government's civil guerrilla, Lithuania, Hungary and Germany to name a few, Coco was shut down in the summer of 2024 and more than 5.6 million euros were seized from Isaac

48:38Stiedel in multiple bank accounts. Stiedel was questioned by France with French prosecutors present and three of his associates 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 it's journalists were able to sign into the website in seconds without any registration or checks. Posing as a 13-year-old girl, the journalists were immediately contacted by users who persisted in sending them nude photos and sexually explicit messages, even after they were made aware that the girl was on age. 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 it was taken down, users simply jumped to other platforms. There were plenty to choose from.

50:34This 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 and have bonds outside of that. That's the ultimate problem. The website is a tool that they're using and it's a weapon that they're using and it's important to take that down and it's important to punish people who knowingly provide these folks with weapons, but the community that's brotherhood still exists and is still out there offending. This problem also exists outside of weird internet communities. One of France's leading lawmakers crusading against drug facilitated sexual abuse is Sandrine Jasso. She was once drugged and assaulted by a former French senator. When CNN investigated similar communities on motherless intelligence, woman after woman came forward with horrific stories of being drugged and raped by their partner's husbands,

51:35boyfriends, all sorts of stuff. But no one I'm aware of endured quite what Jacelle Pelleco did. One early article on her case in Le Monde wrote, quote, as she awaits the trial to give her answers, she clings to her anonymity as an essential factor to rebuilding her life and you'll notice I'm using her real name. 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 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. She decided at 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 like filmed and also so that everyone would get to see the names of the men who had raped her and see their faces. Well, they were being tried. That was very important. And she decided that the ultimate thing that she described in her memoir that made her choose to not be anonymous, even though that was obviously terrifying and very difficult

52:41and painful is that her attitude is right now the problem is 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, 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 just try to insure 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.

53:42We're saying 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 I had to choose a picture. I thought, why don't really want to use her picture as the face of this horrible crime, but then reading exactly what you just read that she intentionally wanted her image. So that it wasn't just a Jane Doe or an anonymous person that it was her. And yeah, ultimately I did use her image in my Instagram carousel about this situation. And I think 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 would have been like, had she not had the bravery to attach this to her name and her face and her story. Yeah, would this have been as well known?

54:45And would more of the discourse have been like, oh, well, this is probably just some weird kink thing that she got, right? How much of it would have been that? Yeah, I mean, a very heroic and like really difficult choice to make. She's a hero. Yeah, most, and her memoir is very good. Most of the men who had raped her tried to deny that they had known she was really unaware of what was happening. Oh, I thought she was into it. I thought she made a hand gesture towards me. And like to me, I know she may have been quote unquote conscious for some of these, but when you wear that drugged out on binzos, you can be awake. You can even talk, but you're not forming memories, right? And you're not consenting because you're drugged out of your fucking mind. Also, also they have been told that that she will be that way before coming to the house. So shut the fuck up. Yes. Your lards and rapists. We hate you. This is the, for his part, and I, again, I don't want this to come across positively for him, but don't many testified repeatedly that these men were lying.

55:47And 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? 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 sea salmon owners and traders to give you one representative example. I'm going to quote from an article in the Monde by Lorraine De Fouscher. Lorraine De Fouscher? I don't know. Not French. I tried. I got, I think I got Jezelle's name right. I worked really hard on that and on a Polico. But quote, in one of Dominique P's videos, Christian L, that's the other perpetrator, carries out the rapal wearing a uniform shirt, bearing the words, Baklou firefighters. He is careful to whisper and not to make any sudden movements. In police custody, he protested faintly, explaining that the husband had told him that his wife agreed, but that she was shy.

56:49When 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 to that the fact that she was unconscious turned him on. In prison, the firefighter insisted that his girlfriend go get his computer from the fire station. Otherwise, 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 Mets 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 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 with them 30 miles of their fucking house, nearly every one of them was a sex criminal, 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 like this guy is working

57:53at negotiating 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 and 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. And of course, it's at the point of the anecdote. Why did this dip shit wear his work uniform to do this? Great question. What was working there? I don't know. I cannot answer that question for you. I certainly can. Stupid is a 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 monster steeds to his wife. He absolved her of any blame. And in some cases, he 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

58:54to rights. One of the things that Jacelle 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 fighting within the family by making them like distrust each other. Classic, good user. Again, he's only being honest and open in this because they've got him fucking dead to rights. And we'll talk. There's some other things. He's not open and honest about that we'll talk about. But first, here's ads. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smile

59:56good, that's not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture

1:00:57moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. From to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up, don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me.

1:01:57I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is A's Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman. Not that great. Can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip this around? How much is the surprise one man?

1:02:58Actually you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. I'm Scott. This entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that. It sounds like if the universe allows for something like that to happen. I am open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride. Fine. Yeah. It's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway to be honest with you. I was like, is that smell that was exactly that? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Ben still or no? I think there's a lot of times out of context people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like you're like, oh, it's so stupid. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right. Fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us.

1:03:59Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode. But he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So while Dominic 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. These found photos here, someone else took up his daughter, Carolyn, while asleep. Obviously, there were those videos of his daughters-in-law. His one of his grandsons, he is, he raped or did something to, I don't think the exact extent is known, but that some of this stuff, people realized 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

1:05:02the unconsensual photos and stuff. 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? And I mean, one of the fucking horror, initially there's like even, and she 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, right? 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, right? Like this is such a, and this, I think the family it sounds like from Jezeleus County is doing a lot better now, but for like a year, this shatters them all. How hard is this? Like, her oldest kid was 50. You're a mature middle aged adult and you realize that like your entire foundation of your family life is a lie and that your dad not only may have like raped and abused you, but your kids and like, it's, I can't even comprehend the level of fucked that that is to your head.

1:06:02And I think for like as women, we're often kind of told to fear strangers, people in a dark alley and the idea that the threat comes from inside the house. In your, yeah, the call is kind of from inside the house. The threat is your own family inside of your own home. I do think that is, it's a special level of shattering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, 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. The oldest, their oldest son, David, has stated that his son was convinced he was abused by his grandfather. I'm going to quote again from the New York Times describing David's testimony. David Polico, a sales manager for a champagne company, said that he had shared a passion for soccer tennis and movie going with his father. He described the magical surprise birthday parties. His parents had planned for him in his siblings to the light and envy of all their friends.

1:07:03I lost and I have the feeling today all my childhood has disappeared. It was a race, 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. And like obviously, I won't even say that that's not a crime 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, I Jesus. Like, yeah, I don't know how you deal with this like as a person. I remember reading about a similar case where a woman, her husband was drugging her and every night he before bed, he would bring her this mug of tea. And then she found out what happened to the police. Just this idea that like this gesture that I had interpreted as sweet that happened regularly

1:08:06every day. He made me my favorite dinner. Exactly. And the instance of that is now something that has been totally re-contextualized in your mind in the most horrific way. As just, yeah, I, yeah, God. Dominic received the maximum sentence, 20 years in prison, which at his age is in the 70s means a life sentence. He's going to die in prison. How many years did it? 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 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. For 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 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

1:09:09presiding 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. That's horrific. That's horrific. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what I'd say the right sentences, but certainly none of them should have watched 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 political home were not the only perpetrators, and the French government started rounding up the staff at Coco, such as it was in 2024. Two site moderators were arrested, and Paris prosecutor Lorraine Bacal 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 anonymous site, that's startling. Yeah. Isaac Steedle himself was arrested and charged in January of 2025 with complicity and drug

1:10:10trafficking, possession, and distribution of CSAM, corruption of a minor through the internet and criminal conspiracy. His lawyer, Julian Zanada, denies Steedle's guilt. It is worth noting that queer advocacy organizations in France 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 the Monde, at least 300 men were trapped and violently attacked between 2018 and 2022 according to our colleagues. That's a quote from SOS homophobies. Oh my God. 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 were toot in Coco's without her knowledge board are still out there. Years after Coco was shut down, CNN published that investigate two years, CNN published that investigation into motherless.com where the same shit happens.

1:11:14And 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 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 has 39 years old and a billionaire. And he is guilty of exactly the kinds of crimes, same kinds of crimes as Isaac Steedle. 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 the BBC. Fences 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 Telegram. He's accused of failing to cooperate with law enforcement over drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud. That's what they're saying happens on Telegram, because Durov was released.

1:12:14He was eventually like the next year. 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, the case against him is still ongoing. One of the difficulties is that Telegram is a much larger operation than Cocoa. And it is not primarily used by people who are doing illegal shit and doing bad shit even I should say. It is primarily... In a lot of places it's almost as common as WhatsApp. But it also is a high for white supremacist terrorism. They call it terrorgram for a reason. People have planned a lot of attacks and radicalized others to commit a lot of attacks via Telegram. A lot of CSAM has 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.

1:13:19The University of Toronto Policy researcher John Scott Raeleton described Pavell Durov's arrest by French authorities as unprecedented. This is the first time a real founder in a major sense has been arrested for crimes committed using a large app or website. 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 for and what Cocoa was used for have provided governments and state security services with an excuse to attack into end encryption, which they hate for other reasons. 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 upscrewed pictures in 2010. The fact that this was encrypted isn't why he didn't get caught for so long. He didn't get caught for so long because no one was really looking to find guys like him doing this. Really? Because they didn't see it as that big of a thing. I really think. Yeah, it was not an encryption thing that let this all occur.

1:14:23I 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. Order the point 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 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 a legal business. Whereas both Coco and Telegram choices were made not to moderate certain things. Prices are 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. And that's very different from a dumb pipe that just happens to be encrypted.

1:15:24Again, encryption is not the fucking issue here. And there is free speech. I just hate how it's so easy to conflate these things. As you said, make people who are breaking the law and profiting off of horrific illegal content, the face of what? I don't know. I just feel like in these conversations, we have kind of lost our way. And it's so easy to turn advocating for the importance of free speech into, oh, we should be protecting people who are talented in us using that banner to continue to profit from criminal behavior. Right. I don't think you really necessarily need new laws and new restrictions on the internet. 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. Law enforcement could be going after this stuff if they really cared, right?

1:16:26They 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. Yep. That's, I guess, my answer. I agree. That was not directed at you, Bridget. Sorry. No way. That was directed like a hypothetical person arguing with me. Yes. I agree with you. Again, it's an issue that like you find yourself on the opposite end of people, you know, it's an issue that like you find like strange bedfellows and you're, you know, arguing against things that you can't believe, you're like, you can't believe that you have to make this argument, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. Again, my, 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.

1:17:29So like, again, if you actually, if you care about freedom of speech and encryption and stuff, you shouldn't be like defending fucking Pavel Durov or Isaac Steele. No. What you should be doing is fucking getting livid at the fact that more isn't being done to stop these kind 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 endangers all of our freedom, right? Not and again, I don't 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, okay, 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 pissed at 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

1:18:31that 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 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 and as well as endangering other people's lives, right? Not to put the lives above the rights or anything like that. I just, I never get, I never get the argument that like we should focus entirely on like 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. Yeah. Yeah, that's where I land, I guess. I have one final thought and it's just that, wow, is she a brave woman? Yeah. Yep. And I'm sorry the system failed you and the amount of people that she's helped by being

1:19:35so courageous is. Yeah, it's, she's an incredible person. I do, I should probably end. There is some uplifting stuff in her memoir, Him to Life, that I should note, which is that there's some fucked up handsome good stuff. Like she, so she obviously was left with a lot of financial issues. She divorced her husband. Some of her in-laws, like the parents of one of the 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 she met a man who had just retired there. He initially, he had bought a retirement house with his wife there and then she contracted a horrible illness and died very suddenly. It is there about to start their retirement and he and Giselle met and fell in love and lived together at least the last I checked. So I mean, that's I guess the good thing is that her life has gone on. She's continued to find happiness.

1:20:36She under, 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. And Bart, she has two sons, right? So that's, her life goes on. She's not a victim as 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. A true survivor. Yeah. Yeah. In the sexual violence community, we often don't use the word victim. It's survivor. Yeah. So people go on to live full lives and, you know, their life does not end with what happened to them. They are not, that's not the only thing that they are. That's a measure of their entire life. It can feel that way when you're experiencing sexual violence for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly while you're in court. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's what I've had this week, everybody.

1:21:38Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone media. For more from Cool Zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Basters are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Basterd. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Bignero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes,

1:22:38without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Each week we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Someone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillert, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,

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