How Dominique Pelicot is accused of organizing France’s worst sex crime in a generation

(CNN) – Dominique Pelicot told the police that he was looking for men to rape his wife, Gisele. All he had to do was open his laptop and go online.

It was on a so-called dating website that Pelicot could freely chat with others about sexual violence and instigate the rape of his then wife. Gisele Pelicot was drugged by him and, while unconscious, raped over 200 times by 70 men, all of whom first met Pelicot online.

CNN obtained exclusive access to French police reports containing thousands of messages Pelicot exchanged with these men in chat rooms, on Skype and over text.

These messages have served as key evidence in the trial against Dominique Pelicot and the 50 co-defendants the police have tracked down. Most of them, including Pelicot, have been charged with aggravated rape in a case that has horrified France and forced the country to address systematic male violence against women.

Despite the shutdown of the website Pelicot says he used to recruit men – which was not on the dark web – CNN has uncovered similar open French online forums where rape and sexual abuse are still actively discussed by users.

By using pseudonyms, Pelicot himself had engaged in an online community where sexual abuse was shared and normalized. Over time, the police reports show how the 72-year-old put together an elaborate framework to organize the abuse of his wife.

Gisele Pelicot has testified that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, however, the frequent sedation and sexual assault began to take a physical turn. Her husband accompanied her to several doctor’s appointments where she complained of memory loss and pelvic pain, according to court documents.

It was only after Dominique Pelicot was arrested in a nearby supermarket in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of female customers, for which he was later convicted, that his dark web of crimes came to light. Pelicot received an eight-month suspended sentence for this offense.

While searching the district, police officers confiscated his hard drive, laptop and phones and found hundreds of photos and videos of his wife of 50 years allegedly being raped, opening one of the most horrific sex crime cases in modern French history.

Gisele Pelicot chose to waive her anonymity and face the accused men in a trial open to the media and members of the public.

While 15, including Pelicot, have pleaded guilty to rape, others said they believed a man’s consent was sufficient. In court, Pelicot’s defense attorney, Beatrice Zavarro, rejected claims by co-defendants that Pelicot acted as a “conductor” who coerced and manipulated them into abusing his wife.

During his testimony, Pelicot himself emphasized that responsibility for the rapes should be shared between the accused, saying: “I’m a rapist just like everyone else in this room.”

All 51 defendants are presumed innocent until the verdicts, which are expected on December 19. The public prosecutor has requested prison terms of four to 20 years, with the maximum sentence of 20 years for Pelicot.

The case has rocked France, and many say the landmark trial will be remembered as the country’s showdown with sexual violence in the digital age. Campaigners have called for the law to be changed so that consent must be given for sexual relations. The government has also announced new measures to combat violence against women in light of the case.

“It’s time for the macho, patriarchal society that trivializes rape to change,” Gisele Pelicot said in her final statement to the court.

“It’s time we changed the way we look at rape.”

For years, spaces like Coco.fr gave voice to this kind of misogynistic discourse.

Created in 2003 and marketed as a dating site, at its peak in 2023 it received 778,000 visits per month, according to Le Parisien. The site’s completely unmoderated chat rooms fostered graphic discussions about often illegal topics.

Instead of simply facilitating discussions of illegal activity, instances of violence quickly began spilling over into the real world. A significant number of Coco users began to claim that they were attacked during meetings arranged through the site. At least two murders in France have been linked to meetings organized at Coco, according to French media.

Already in 2013, French NGOs had identified Coco as a threat and called on the government and ISPs to shut down the website without success. The French Interior Ministry referred CNN back to the prosecutor handling the case. The prosecutor said that the regulation of sites like Coco is a responsibility that the platforms themselves take on. French ISP Bouygues told CNN it would require either a court order or an injunction from French authorities to shut down a website like Coco.

While Coco was shut down over the summer, NGOs and lawyers have warned that a lack of adequate security measures could allow other sites to step in and take its place.

Mathias Darmon, a lawyer working for the French NGO “Innocence en danger,” which campaigned for Coco to be shut down, told CNN it was “obvious” that when a site like that closes, “others, even dozens, show up to replace it.”

As 11 weeks of hearings in the Pelicot trial unfolded, CNN collected data from one of the sites trying to take Coco’s place.

After examining nearly 6,000 messages sent over a 24-hour period in 30 different chat rooms on the site, CNN found several strikingly similar patterns between those messages and those that Dominique Pelicot exchanged with users on Coco.

About three out of four of the accounts active when CNN collected the data were registered as men.

There was a clear tendency for men to share explicit pictures of their wives and girlfriends on the site for the enjoyment of other men. It is unclear whether the photos were taken or shared with the women’s consent.

CNN has reproduced some of the investigated messages here:

Users also often sought to move conversations to private messaging platforms such as Skype or Snapchat. Snapchat declined to comment when asked by CNN to weigh in on the prospect of its platform being used to share intimate photos without consent. When asked about Dominique Pelicot’s use of its messaging service to allegedly organize rapes, Skype declined to comment.

Women in general, and often female partners specifically, were often objectified and referred to with derogatory language. Some men offered their wives to other users, in a manner strikingly similar to Pelicot, although it is unclear whether any of them arranged meetings in real life.

The two lawyers representing Gisele Pelicot have repeatedly warned in court that such dangers will continue to exist if websites like Coco are allowed to operate without adequate scrutiny or legal challenge.

One of them, Antoine Camus, has compared the site to the “murder weapon” used by Dominique Pelicot to carry out his alleged crimes, telling the court that “without this website” the case “would never have reached such proportions.”

Although Coco is not itself a defendant in the Pelicot case, Darmon says the ongoing investigation being carried out by France’s cybercrime unit could set an important precedent and help shut down similar sites more quickly. Julien Zanetta, an attorney for Coco founder Isaac Steidl, told CNN that his client declined to comment on Pelicot’s use of the website in the alleged crimes.

Credits (from top right): Abdul Saboor/Reuters, Geoffroy va der Hasselt/AFP/Getty Images, Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images, Manon Cruz/Reuters

Credits (from top left): Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images, Geoffroy va der Hasselt/AFP/Getty Images, Manon Cruz/Reuters, Abdul Saboor/Reuters

So far, the authorities’ efforts have done little to assuage the concerns of many women in France, including in the medieval village of Mazan, where Pelicot carried out his alleged crimes.

Annette Dumont, 62, who has lived in Mazan for over a decade, described to CNN the anxiety felt by many of the women who still live there.

“It could easily happen again tomorrow somewhere else,” she said.

Another resident, Nedeljka Macan, said: “We can’t do anything. We stay here in Mazan.”

This is how CNN reported this story

CNN collected more than 5,700 messages from 30 themed rooms on a free, adults-only service where any user can read and write under a pseudonym. The messages were collected every minute for a 24-hour period from November 19 to November 20 using an automated script, and more than 700 images in these messages were also downloaded. The messages were translated from French to English using Amazon Translate, a cloud-based service.