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

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

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

CNN gained exclusive access to French police reports containing thousands of the messages exchanged by Pelicot with these men in chatrooms, on Skype and over text.

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

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

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 she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, however, the frequent sedation and sexual abuse began to take a physical toll. Her husband accompanied her on several doctor’s visits during which she complained about 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 prison sentence for this offense.

Whilst investigating the upskirting, police officers confiscated his hard drive, laptop and phones and found hundreds of images and videos of his wife of 50 years allegedly being raped, opening one of the most horrifying sex offense cases in modern French history.

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

While 15 including Pelicot have pleaded guilty to rape, others said they thought that a husband’s consent sufficed. In court, Pelicot’s defense lawyer Beatrice Zavarro denied claims by co-defendants that Pelicot acted as a “conductor” who forced and manipulated them to abuse his wife.

During his testimony, Pelicot himself stressed that the responsibility for the rapes should be shared among the accused, saying: “I am a rapist just like all the others in this room.”

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

The case has upended France, with many saying that the landmark trial will be remembered as the country’s reckoning with sexual violence in the digital age. Campaigners have called for the law to be changed to require consent to 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 that the macho, patriarchal society that trivializes rape changes,” 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.

Set up in 2003 and marketed as a dating site, at its peak in 2023 it received 778,000 visits a month, according to Le Parisien. The site’s entirely unmoderated chatrooms fostered graphic discussions on often illegal subjects.

Rather than merely facilitating discussions on illegal activity, instances of violence soon began spilling over into the real world. Significant numbers of Coco users began alleging they were attacked during meet-ups arranged through the site. At least two murders in France have been linked to encounters arranged on Coco, according to French media.

As early as 2013, French NGOs had identified Coco as a threat, calling on the government and internet service providers to shut down the website with no success. Approached for comment, the French interior ministry referred CNN back to the prosecutor handling the case. The prosecutor said the regulation of websites like Coco is a responsibility assumed by the platforms themselves. French internet service provider Bouygues told CNN that it would need either a court order or injunction from French authorities to be able to shut down a website like Coco.

While Coco was closed down over the summer, NGOs and lawyers have warned that a lack of adequate safeguards may allow other websites to step in and take its place.

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

As 11 weeks of hearings in the Pelicot trial played out, CNN gathered data from one of the websites that is trying to take Coco’s place.

Having examined nearly 6,000 messages sent in the course of 24 hours on 30 different chatrooms on the site, CNN found several strikingly similar patterns between those messages and the ones exchanged by Dominique Pelicot with users on Coco.

Around three in four of the accounts that were active when CNN was gathering data were registered as men.

A clear trend emerged of men sharing explicit photos of their wives and girlfriends on the site for the pleasure of other men. It is unclear if the photos were taken or exchanged with the women’s consent.

CNN has reproduced some of the messages examined here:

Users also frequently sought to move conversations over 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 images without consent. When asked about Dominique Pelicot’s use of its messaging service to allegedly organize rapes, Skype declined to comment.

Women generally, and often female partners specifically, were frequently objectified and referred to by derogatory language. Some men offered up their wives to other users, in a manner strikingly similar to Pelicot, although it is unclear if any of them set up real-life encounters.

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

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

Although Coco itself is not on trial in the Pelicot case, Darmon says the ongoing probe being carried out by the French cybercrime unit could create an important precedent and help to shut down similar sites faster. Julien Zanetta, a lawyer for Coco founder Isaac Steidl, told CNN that his client declined to comment on the use of the website by Pelicot in the alleged crimes.

Efforts by authorities so far 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 still living there.

“It could very well happen again tomorrow in another place,” she said.

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