The Rapists Her Husband Found Online
A French court convicted Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men in December 2024 of the mass rape of his then-wife, Gisele Pelicot, whom he drugged and offered to strangers recruited online over nearly a decade. She waived her right to anonymity so the trial would be held in public.
On 19 December 2024, a court in Avignon, France, convicted Dominique Pelicot, 72, and 49 other men in the drugging and mass rape of his then-wife, Gisele Pelicot. Dominique Pelicot received the maximum sentence of 20 years for aggravated rape, while the co-defendants were handed terms ranging from three to 15 years, CBS News reported.
Of the men convicted, 47 were found guilty of rape, two of attempted rape and two of sexual assault, according to Al Jazeera. The same account reported that Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife with sedatives from 2011 to 2020 and invited strangers to assault her while she was unconscious in the family home in the village of Mazan.
A chatroom that named the crime
Dominique Pelicot recruited the men through Coco, an anonymous French chat platform, prosecutors said. According to RTE, he used a chatroom on the site called “A son insu” — French for “without their knowledge.” The same report said French authorities shut the platform down in June 2024, and that prosecutors alleged it had been used to commit numerous sex crimes, including rape, paedophilia and murder.
The case exposed how a lightly moderated online space could function as a marketplace for abuse. Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau said that “in total, more than 23,000 acts have been reported as having been committed through Coco,” CBS News reported. Al Jazeera reported that men who featured in 20 further videos of assaults shown in court had not been identified and remained at large, and that police believed Gisele Pelicot had been assaulted by a total of 72 men.
A trial made public by choice
Gisele Pelicot, 72, waived her right to anonymity and asked that the proceedings be open, an unusual decision in a French rape case, CBS News reported. Speaking outside the court after the verdict, she said, “It's not for us to feel shame — it's for them,” referring to the men who assaulted her, according to the same report.
She also said she had opened the trial to public view deliberately. “I wanted to open the doors of this trial last September so that society could see what was happening,” she said, according to CBS News. Crowds holding signs of support greeted her as she arrived at the court, and the case fed a wider debate in France over how the law defines rape and consent, the same report noted.
Questions that outlived the verdict
The convictions did not close the story of the platform. In 2026, French prosecutors opened an inquiry into a website that appeared to be a successor to Coco, France 24 reported, raising concern that the space used to organise the abuse had reconstituted itself online after being shut down.
Researchers who study online harm point to a recurring pattern: anonymous, thinly moderated forums can lower the barrier to coordinating offline crimes, and enforcement often lags behind the speed at which such spaces spread and reappear. The Pelicot case, one of the most heavily documented of its kind, has become a reference point in that debate.