The trial of a 71-year-old man has gripped France and horrified the world after he admitted to repeatedly drugging his wife and, over the course of decades, soliciting dozens of men online to rape her while she was unconscious. Dominique Pelicot’s confessions as well as the public bravery of his wife Gisèle have forced a nationwide reckoning over sexual assault and the double lives people lead through the internet, reports The Guardian.
As a court in Avignon has heard Pelicot’s case and allegations against 50 other defendants over the last several weeks, a pattern has emerged of men who lived publicly upstanding lives while allegedly engaging in abhorrent acts online and in private. As the men accused of mass rape have taken the stand, they have detailed how Pelicot found them and coordinated his abuse on an illicit chat forum called Coco.
What has emerged during the trial is that the scale of Pelicot’s crimes and his ability to keep them concealed for so many years would seemingly not have been possible without Coco and its administrators’ disregard for the content being shared on the platform. The site has become one of the starkest examples in memory of how platforms can result in extreme harm when left unmoderated.
Since its founding in 2003, Coco has been implicated in killings, pedophilia, homophobic attacks and sexual assaults as it evaded accountability and led law enforcement on an international manhunt. When European authorities finally shut down Coco earlier this year and arrested its founder along with other executives, the website had been cited in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity and more than 480 victims had been involved in judicial proceedings involving the site, according to French prosecutors.
Founded by the software engineer Isaac Steidl while he was in his early 20s, Coco launched as a free chat site with a simple interface allowing users to communicate anonymously. Although the site asked users to confirm that they were over 18, they could quickly change their age once they gained access to the platform and chat with an invented username.
“It looked so innocent. It was this very 90s design, with coconut trees and a smiley face and it said “this is a website for nice people,” said Sophie Antoine, an officer for legal advocacy at the French anti-child prostitution organization ACPE. “But you went in, and it was like a jungle.”