They Didn't Hide This. They Built It.
Inside the online communities teaching men to drug, assault, and disappear.
By Tom Hicks - The Unredacted Bastard | Independent Journalist • Democracy’s Fire Alarm • Professional Shit-Stirrer
A note before you read this:
This article discusses drug-facilitated sexual assault, including accounts from survivors. The reporting is based on a documented CNN investigation. It is not easy to read. It is not meant to be.
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, help is available. In the US, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or visit RAINN.org. International resources are available through UN Women at endvawnow.org.
This story exists because the people it describes are counting on silence. That’s the only reason it’s here.
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Bastard’s Law
The internet didn’t invent rape. It gave rapists a classroom, a community, and a curriculum. That’s a different problem entirely.
CNN spent months undercover inside a global network of men teaching each other how to drug and rape their partners and avoid getting caught. What they found wasn’t a fringe phenomenon hiding in some dark corner of the internet that takes effort to locate.
It was a school. With students. And homework. And a grading system.
Let me tell you what one of the students was doing on his phone.
He was in a private Telegram group with close to a thousand other men. Poland. West Africa. Wherever. All hours, day and night. Comparing notes. What dose. What to mix it into. How long before it works. Whether one pill is enough or if you need two plus some alcohol. How to make sure she doesn’t remember anything in the morning.
His name, for our purposes, is Piotr. His wife was sitting across from him at a restaurant the night investigators tracked him down. She had no idea what her husband had been up to. No idea what group he belonged to. No idea what he’d been doing to her.
He told undercover reporters he was “hiding everything well.”
That’s not a man who snapped. That’s not a crime of passion or a moment of weakness or any of the other things we reach for when we don’t want to look at something directly.
That’s a man who went to school and passed his fucking exams.
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Here is what this actually is, said plainly.
There are online communities where men trade operational advice on how to render their partners unconscious and assault them. Those same communities teach members how to manage the aftermath. How to make her doubt herself. How to answer questions. How to make the things that don’t add up seem like they add up. There are men in these groups selling the drugs. There were men in these groups charging twenty dollars a head, cryptocurrency only, to watch a livestream of an unconscious woman being raped by her husband while the paying audience typed instructions.
A French lawmaker named Sandrine Josso, who was herself drugged by a sitting senator, called these groups “schools of violence.”
“I would even call them an online rape academy,” she said. “Where every subject is taught.”
She’s not reaching for a dramatic phrase. She’s describing the architecture accurately.
This isn’t men being monstrous in isolation. This is men being monstrous together, systematically, with peer support and iterative improvement and a shared interest in not getting caught.
That last part is the part that should keep you up at night.
The Women
Before we go any further into how the system works, let’s be clear about what the system does to actual human beings. Because the tendency in stories like this is to spend so much time on the mechanics that the people disappear.
Zoe Watts had been married for sixteen years. Four kids. They had just come back from church on an otherwise ordinary Sunday when her husband sat down and read her a list. He had been crushing their son’s sleeping medication into her tea at night. For years. Photographing it. Raping her while she was unconscious.
Like a shopping list, she said. He said it like a shopping list.
“You don’t expect anything other than innocence to come from your partner.”
He is currently serving eleven years.
Amanda Stanhope spent five years waking up with bruises she couldn’t explain, in different clothes, with no memory of how she got there. Every time she tried to make sense of it, her partner shut it down. She was imagining things. She was on too much medication. She was crazy. The physical evidence was there. Her own body was telling her something. And she was made to doubt her own perception of reality so consistently and so skillfully that she started to believe it.
That is not a byproduct of the abuse. That is a separate skill set. That is something that gets discussed and refined in these groups. How to manage her afterward. How to keep her confused. How to make the story yours instead of hers.
Valentina, a mother of two in northern Italy, found the videos her husband of twenty years had made. She was unconscious in them.
“I can’t conceive of the fact that a woman could be treated like slaughterhouse meat,” she said. “Because in the end, that’s what I was.”
Three women. Three countries. Three men who, the evidence suggests, did not arrive at this behavior entirely on their own.
What The Word “Community” Is Doing In This Sentence
I want to be precise about what these groups functionally are. Because calling them a “community” makes them sound like a subreddit for vintage watch collectors, and they are not that.
Inside the Telegram group that investigators infiltrated, men were not just sharing stories. They were solving problems. One member worried about dosage and the risk of overdose. The group told him to start low and think long game. Another reported that his first attempt had not worked well enough. The group analyzed why and offered adjustments. Someone had moved into paid content. Livestreams. An unconscious woman. Paying viewers direct the action in real time.
The abuse was treated as a commodity.
That word is doing real work. A commodity is something you produce, refine, distribute, and sell. That is what was happening. Not a crime of passion. A production pipeline.
A psychologist named Annabelle Montagne assessed half the men convicted in the Pelicot trial. Fifty men who raped Gisèle Pelicot while she was drugged unconscious by her husband. Over two hundred times. Seventy men total, not all of whom were ever found.
She said the group dynamic is not incidental to how this works. It is central to it. The men are creating bonds. Meeting narcissistic needs. Building an identity around shared behavior that they collectively reinforce as normal.
That is what normalization actually is. Not a passive drift. An active process. And it works faster than you think, because repetition rewires what registers as extreme.
The Part Nobody Is Talking About Enough
The act is monstrous. The community infrastructure enabling the act is monstrous. But there is a third layer to this that gets undercovered because it is harder to explain, and it is maybe the most infuriating piece of all of it.
They teach the cover-up.
Not as an afterthought. As curriculum.
How to handle her if she starts asking questions. How to manage her perception of events. How to make your version of reality feel more solid than hers. How to frame yourself as concerned and confused rather than guilty. How to make the gaps in her memory work for you instead of against you. The men in these groups coach each other on this. They share what worked and what drew too much attention. It is the same peer review structure as the rest of it. Operational refinement through collective experience.
Stanhope’s partner ran this play for years. She knew something was wrong. Her body was telling her. And she was gaslit so systematically that she spent years doubting her own sanity instead of his behavior.
The legal strategy is part of the curriculum too. Several of the men convicted in the Pelicot trial claimed they believed the rapes were part of a consensual arrangement. Watts told investigators her ex-husband used the same line. That he thought she had asked for it. These are not independent men arriving at the same defense by coincidence. This is a shared script, developed and distributed in advance of ever needing it.
And then there is the chemistry.
The drugs of choice are shifting. Rohypnol and GHB are controlled, detectable for days, and associated in the public mind with the phrase “date rape drug.” Too recognizable. Too traceable. The groups have pivoted toward prescription sedatives, specifically zolpidem. Ambien. The insomnia medication in medicine cabinets in tens of millions of homes across this country. It works fast. It exits the body in seven to eight hours. It does not appear on a standard toxicology screen the way the older drugs do. It is prescribed legally, which means having it is not itself suspicious.
The curriculum updated itself based on what was getting people caught.
That is not a group of men doing terrible things. That is a research and development operation.
The Platforms That Are Fine With This
Let me name some names.
Motherless.com. Over twenty thousand videos in the “sleep” category. Hundreds of thousands of views. Established community tags specifically for categorizing videos of unconscious women being assaulted. The site describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.”
The legality of some of what is hosted there is, per the investigation, in serious doubt.
The UK’s communications regulator looked into Motherless. Not for the content, but for the parent company allegedly failing to file a proper illegal content risk assessment. The investigation closed when the company handed over the paperwork.
Paperwork.
A regulatory body looked at a platform potentially hosting rape footage and closed its investigation because the company filed the right forms.
A follow-up investigation resulted in a fine earlier this year. Not for the content. For insufficient age verification on pornography.
In the United States, Motherless operates under Section 230, the law that shields platforms from liability for what their users upload. As long as Motherless is not the one doing the uploading, it is largely untouchable under current law regardless of what is on the site.
Telegram told investigators that content encouraging sexual violence is forbidden and removed when discovered. A group with nearly a thousand members coaching men on how to drug and rape their partners was apparently not discovered until reporters had been inside it for months.
That statement from Telegram is not a reassurance. It is a description of the problem.
A law professor at Durham University who specializes in violence against women told investigators this persists because governments are fundamentally unwilling to go after the platforms themselves. Not just the individual men. The platforms that profit from the engagement, collect the traffic, and point to terms of service that clearly nobody is enforcing.
The platforms are not innocent bystanders who occasionally fail to catch bad actors. They are the infrastructure. Without the infrastructure, Piotr is a man with a terrible secret and no one to share it with. With the infrastructure, he is a member of a community with a thousand other students, a supplier network, and a peer support system for avoiding detection.
That is a different thing entirely.
On Calling This Rare
Here is what happens next. I have watched this cycle enough times to know exactly what comes after a story like this lands.
People call it rare. Fringe. A statistical anomaly that does not reflect anything broader. The Pelicot case was exceptional. These Telegram groups are tiny in the context of the internet. Twenty thousand videos is a rounding error. Let’s not panic.
The WHO told investigators there are no reliable estimates of how widespread drug-facilitated sexual assault actually is. Because the crime is so severely underreported. Because the mechanism of the crime, rendering someone unconscious, destroys the primary evidence, which is the victim’s memory and ability to report. Because the evasion curriculum then goes to work on whatever remains. Because when she goes to the police with a video of her ex-partner assaulting her while she was unconscious, the response she gets is, as Stanhope was told, that it looks like she might be pretending to be asleep.
In England and Wales, the proportion of sexual assault victims recorded as having been assaulted while unconscious or asleep has risen from 21% to 23% over the last decade. That number is moving in one direction. These communities have existed for years and are not contracting. When Coco, the site from the Pelicot case, was shut down, the users did not stop. They migrated. They rebuilt. They adapted. The chemistry got harder to detect. The platforms got more careful with their language while continuing to host the content.
Calling this rare is not skepticism. It is a decision about how much of this you are willing to look at directly.
What Makes It Work
Zoe Watts said something that has stayed with me since I read this investigation.
“We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street. We worry about going to our car late at night in a car park. But we don’t worry about who you lie next to.”
That is the whole thing, right there.
The trust that makes a home feel like safety is precisely what makes this possible. You do not run a toxicology screen on your tea. You do not assume the person who hands you a cup of something warm before bed has turned it into a weapon. When you wake up confused, with gaps in your memory and bruises that do not make sense, the first thing you reach for is not the worst possible explanation. You reach for something that lets you keep living in the life you thought you had.
That instinct is human. That instinct is healthy. That instinct is also exactly what the evasion curriculum is designed to exploit.
And somewhere in one of these groups, a man is getting congratulated right now for how well he managed the aftermath. For keeping her confused. For holding the story together.
Piotr is in custody. Polish authorities arrested a man matching his description in April on aggravated rape charges. He admitted to it. Faces three to twenty years.
The group he was in is still out there. Different name, different platform, same curriculum. Because that is what happens when you treat this as an individual bad actor problem instead of an infrastructure problem. You arrest one student. The school stays open.
💣 TRUTH BOMB
They didn’t hide this. They built it in plain sight, on platforms making money from the traffic, under laws written to make sure nobody could be held responsible for it. Piotr got caught. The infrastructure that made him possible is still taking enrollment.
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