*Trigger warning
When French pensioner Dominique Pelicot was convicted in 2024 of drugging his wife Gisèle unconscious and facilitating her rape by over 70 men, many of them strangers recruited online, the world briefly recoiled in horror. The website he used to find accomplices, Coco, was shut down. Public outrage peaked, and then faded.
But as a months-long CNN As Equals investigation has now revealed, the networks that made the Pelicot case possible didn’t disappear. They quietly moved, multiplied and grew.
Hidden world hiding in plain sight
The CNN investigation uncovered an online ecosystem where men share videos of drugging and sexually assaulting their wives or partners, trade tips on sedatives and dosages and livestream assaults to paying viewers – all while sheltering behind anonymity.
At the centre of this is a US-based pornography website, Motherless.com, which recorded approximately 62 million visits in February 2025 alone. The site hosts over 20,000 user-uploaded videos tagged under so-called “sleep content,” which shows footage of women who are unconscious or sedated. Some videos have crossed 50,000 views. The site describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.” However, the legality of its content is seriously questionable.
Videos are organised using tags such as “#passedout” and “#eyecheck,” with the latter referring to a practice where perpetrators lift the closed eyelids of women to verify they are asleep or unconscious before filming the assault.
As if that isn’t shocking enough, inside these communities, users don’t just watch, they advise.
In one group chat obtained by CNN, users casually exchanged guidance on how to sedate a spouse. “ALWAYS start low. You’re thinking long game so if first time ain’t enough, up the dose,” wrote one user, responding to another who said he was “shit scared of overdose.”
One user claimed to be running a delivery business, dispatching “sleeping liquids,” which he described as tasteless and odourless, to addresses worldwide from the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in North Africa, charging approximately Rs 15,000 (EUR 150) per bottle.
The abuse is also monetised in real time. Some users advertised livestreams of assaults on drugged women for around Rs 1,800 (USD 20) per viewer, with cryptocurrency payments.
‘You don’t worry about who you lie next to’
CNN also spoke with survivors who lived through exactly what these online communities celebrate.
Zoe Watts, a mother of four from Devon, England, discovered in 2018 that her husband of 16 years had been crushing their son’s sleeping medication into her nightly cup of tea and raping her while she was unconscious. She alleged he had been doing it for years.
“We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street… but we don’t worry about who you lie next to. I didn’t realise I had to,” Watts told CNN. When he confessed one Sunday after returning from church, he recited his crimes “as if it was a shopping list,” she said.
Watts stayed silent initially, worried about her children and unsure how to process what had happened. Eventually, a panic attack led her to confide in her sister. Their mother called the police. The legal process stretched over four years, during which her children were bullied at school and her social world collapsed.
“There’s a shame and a guilt that comes with it – ‘Oh, maybe I should have known,'” she said. Watts also described the dismissal she faced from people around her, being told, “Yeah, but he’s your husband” or “You weren’t awake, so it’s not the same as being taken down an alleyway, is it?”
Gaslit into silence
In Wigan, England, Amanda Stanhope described a five-year period during which she would fall asleep without knowing how, and wake up bruised, in different clothes, with no memory of the night before. When she woke during an assault and confronted her partner, he allegedly told her she was imagining things and that she was “mental” and “crazy.”
“Even though I felt 100 per cent sure that something had happened… he was trying to change my reality,” Stanhope told CNN.
After her brother helped her go to the police, her former partner was charged with rape and sexual assault. He died by suicide before the case went to trial.
Stanhope now posts awareness videos on social media, drawing courage partly from Gisèle Pelicot, who famously declared at her ex-husband’s trial that “shame must change sides.”
In Italy, a survivor CNN identified only as Valentina discovered footage that her husband of 20 years had recorded. It videos of him sexually assaulting her after drugging her with alcohol and sedatives. In 2021, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for multiple aggravated sexual assaults.
“I can’t conceive of the fact that a woman could be treated like slaughterhouse meat. Because in the end, that’s what I was,” she said.
‘An online rape academy’
Annabelle Montagne, a psychologist who assessed half of the men convicted in the Pelicot trial, told CNN that the appeal of these communities is partly social, with participants forming a sense of “brotherhood” that reinforces their behaviour and meets “narcissistic” needs.
Sandrine Josso, a French lawmaker who was herself drugged by a former senator and has since campaigned against drug-facilitated sexual abuse, said, “I would even call them an online rape academy, where every subject is taught. There are all the ‘subjects’ and ‘disciplines’ needed to become a good rapist or sexual predator.”
Law professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University in the United Kingdom told CNN that governments have been reluctant to go after the “heart of the problem,” that is, the online platforms that make this ecosystem possible.
In the UK, regulator Ofcom investigated Motherless.com’s parent company in 2025 for failing to complete a risk assessment and fined it in February 2026 for not having adequate age checks. But Ofcom told CNN its job was “not to tell platforms which specific content to take down.”
The site has largely avoided accountability in the US under “safe harbour” legal protections that shield platforms from liability for user-uploaded content.
Perpetrators are adapting
Drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) is also becoming harder to detect and prosecute. Michel Cramer Bornemann, a US-based sleep specialist, told CNN that perpetrators are increasingly moving away from the classic “date rape” drugs like Rohypnol and GHB, which are tightly controlled, towards more accessible prescription sedatives such as zolpidem (sold in the US under the brand name Ambien). These drugs act quickly and leave the body faster, reducing the window for forensic detection.
A World Health Organisation (WHO) spokesperson told CNN there are no accurate global estimates, given how underreported such assaults are. Conviction rates for sexual offences remain low across Europe and the US.
When Amanda Stanhope showed police a video of her partner assaulting her while she appeared unconscious, she was told, “We can’t use that, it isn’t clear evidence, because it looks like you’re pretending to be asleep.”
