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

On a so-called dating website, Pelicot was able to freely chat with others about sexual violence and instigate rape of his then-wife. He drugged Gisele Pelicot and, while unconscious, raped her over 200 times by 70 men, all of whom met Pelicot online for the first time.

CNN was given exclusive access to French police reports that included thousands of messages Pelicot exchanged with these men in chat rooms, on Skype and via text message.

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

Although the site was shut down, Pelicot says he had previously recruited men – which was not the case on the dark web – CNN has uncovered similar open French online forums where rape and sexual abuse are still actively discussed by users.

Pelicot himself had been active under pseudonyms in an online community where sexual abuse was shared and normalized. The police reports show how the 72-year-old over time set up an elaborate framework to organize his wife’s abuse.

Gisele Pelicot testified that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, however, the frequent sedatives and sexual abuse took a physical toll. Her husband accompanied her on several doctor’s visits, during which she complained of memory loss and abdominal pain, according to court documents.

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

During the upskirting investigation, police officers seized 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 horrific sex crimes cases in modern French history.

Gisele Pelicot waived her anonymity and faced the defendants in a trial that was open to the media and the public.

While 15 people, including Pelicot, have pleaded guilty to rape, others said they believed their husband’s consent was enough. In court, Pelicot’s defense attorney, Beatrice Zavarro, rejected claims from her co-defendants that Pelicot acted as a “conductor” who forced and manipulated her into abusing his wife.

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

All 51 defendants are presumed innocent pending sentencing, which is expected on December 19th. Prosecutors have requested prison sentences of four to 20 years; Pelicot is seeking a maximum sentence of 20 years.

The case turned France on its head, and many say the landmark trial will be remembered as the country’s reckoning with sexual violence in the digital age. Activists have called for the law to be changed to require consent for sexual relationships. The government has also announced new measures to combat violence against women in light of the case.

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

“It’s time we change the way we view rape.”

For years, platforms like Coco.fr gave voice to this misogynistic discourse.

According to Le Parisien, it was founded in 2003 and marketed as a dating website. At its peak in 2023, it received 778,000 visits per month, according to Le Parisien. The site’s completely unmoderated chat rooms promoted graphic discussions on often illicit topics.

Rather than simply stimulating discussions about illegal activities, cases of violence soon spilled over into the real world. A significant number of Coco users claimed they were attacked at meetings organized through the site. According to French media, at least two murders in France are linked to encounters arranged on the Coco.

French NGOs had already identified Coco as a threat in 2013 and called on the government and internet service providers to shut down the website – to no avail. The French Interior Ministry was asked for comment and referred CNN back to the prosecutor handling the case. The prosecutor said regulating websites like Coco is the responsibility of the platforms themselves. French internet service provider Bouygues told CNN that it needs 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 advocates have warned that a lack of adequate security measures could allow other sites to step in and take its place.

Mathias Darmon, a lawyer with the French NGO Innocence en hazard who has been pushing for Coco’s closure, told CNN it was “obvious” that once such a site is shut down, “others, even dozens, will take its place.” will occur”. .”

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

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

About three-quarters of the accounts active when CNN collected data were registered as men.

There was a clear trend of men sharing explicit photos of their wives and girlfriends on the site for the enjoyment of other men. It is unclear whether the photos were taken with the women’s consent or exchanged.

CNN has reproduced some of the news stories examined here:

Users also often tried to move conversations to private messaging platforms like Skype or Snapchat. Snapchat declined to comment when asked by CNN to comment on the possibility that its platform could be used to share intimate images without consent. When asked whether Dominique Pelicot used its messaging service to organize alleged rapes, Skype declined to comment.

Women in general and often female partners in particular were often objectified and addressed 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 real encounters.

The two lawyers representing Gisele Pelicot have repeatedly warned in court that such dangers remain if websites like Coco are allowed to operate without sufficient oversight or legal challenge.

One of them, Antoine Camus, has likened the website to the “murder weapon” with which Dominique Pelicot committed 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 investigation by the French cybercrime unit could set an important precedent and help shut down similar websites more quickly. Julien Zanetta, a lawyer for Coco founder Isaac Steidl, told CNN his client declined to comment on Pelicot’s use of the website in the alleged crimes.

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

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

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 committed his alleged crimes.

Annette Dumont, 62, who has lived in Mazan for more than a decade, described to CNN the fear felt by many of the women still living there.

“It could very well happen again tomorrow in a different location,” she said.

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

As CNN reported on this story

CNN has aggregated more than 5,700 news stories from 30 topic rooms in a free, adults-only service that any user can read and post under a pseudonym. The messages were collected every minute over a 24-hour period from November 19 to 20 using an automated script, and more than 700 images published in these messages were also downloaded. The messages were translated from French to English using Amazon Translate, a cloud-based service.