Inside the Disturbing Online 'Rape Academies' Where Dominic Pelicot Fans Share Tips and Film Assaults on Unconscious Partners

VIDEO after video shows unconscious women being sexually assaulted by the man that is supposed to love them the most.

Underneath, in sick chats, men are asking how to do the same thing to their wives or partners without them ever having any idea – sharing tips about the dosage of drugs needed to knock out their partners.

Gisèle Pelicot opted to waive her anonymity saying the shame was her husband’sCredit: AFP CNN journalist Saskya spent time messaging men who drug and rape their wivesCredit: Courtesy of CNN Dominique Pélicot used similar websites to arrange for men to rape his wifeCredit: Police Handout

This isn’t a hidden corner of the dark web; instead, it’s on niche websites most of us wouldn’t know.

These kinds of sites were brought up in the trial of who had drugged and raped his wife of 50 years, Gisele, and allowed 72 other men to rape her.

And, as a bombshell new investigation by CNN reveals, they are shockingly prevalent and accessible, with one even boasting of having 62 million views in February alone.

The legality of the so-called ‘sleep’ or ‘eye-check’ videos is questionable, as men lift the women’s eyelids to show that they are sedated or asleep, unaware of the violation of their bodies.

However, there is a possibility that some of these videos are also being posed up to get likes and clicks for money.

On one of the sites, a man was selling “sleeping liquids” to anywhere in the world for just 150 euros.

He boasted: “Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.”

Some of the sites even offer users achievement badges for the number of videos they post and the time they’ve been on the platform.

In social messaging chats linked to the platforms, men are boasting about how they’ve filmed their unconscious wives, and one asks, “How much are you willing to pay to watch me f**k my wife while she sleeps?”

Pélicot was initially arrested for upskirting a woman in a supermarket near their home in France in 2020.

Men boasted on the sites about how they had drugged their wives to sexually assault themCredit: Courtesy of CNN

A police investigation uncovered more than 20,000 images and videos of an unconscious and drugged Gisele being . She had no memory of the incidents.

Investigative journalist Saskya Vandoorne started looking into the vile sites after hearing that Pélicot used Coco, a page that has since been taken down, and a chatroom to find men to assault his wife.

She didn’t expect the scale of what she discovered.

Speaking to The Sun, Saskya said: “I was shocked at how widespread it is.

“There are thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of videos depicting women who appear to be sedated, and then the men would go on to perform sex acts on them.

“It really is glorified behaviour on there. It’s a very dark and terrifying brotherhood and you get the sense they are proud of what they’re doing and that they’re getting something from sharing this type of content with the group.”

During her CNN investigation, Saskya found that many of these sickening websites aren’t even hidden on the dark web, and many link to forums or group chats where advice on tactics can be swapped.

And while the men are trying to hide their identities, women are starting to speak out and hold their abusers accountable thanks to Gisele’s choice to waive her anonymity.

Following the case in France, women across the globe, including the UK, are waiving anonymity to speak out about the abuse they’ve faced by the person they trusted as a loving partner.

Gisele became a national hero after going public with her storyCredit: AFP

Many users on these twisted sites are making money from their sick acts. Livestreams showing drugged women being assaulted in real time are advertised at $20 per viewer.

One man’s post claimed to have streamed the rape of his “unconscious wife” to other users for money, adding: “They told me what to do and I did it.”

Trawling through the popular sites hosting the sleep videos, Saskya realised that it was like a sick version of social media that propelled men to go to extremes.

And the longest user they found had been posting content for 15 years.

“It’s like a dark social media where you get rewards for the time you’ve been posting,” she said.

“I think it’s a silver medal for five years and gold for ten years, which makes it slightly gamified.

“Then you have your profile, which shows how many videos you’ve uploaded and how many views they’ve got on each video, which seems to push them to do more extreme content to get the likes, views and friend requests.”

When Saskya and her team accessed the group chats, it was there that they started to see the sense of impunity the men had.

“The messages they send are really casual,” she said. “It’ll be ‘Hey, I’m thinking of drugging and raping my wife. Can anybody recommend the kind of drugs that we should use?’ It’s all centred around that.

“We witnessed men joining for the first time, and you could tell they’d never done it before. That they were curious to find out what was going on, what other men had done.

“Then you could really see this kind of coaching that happens again and again between them.

“The users who have been there for a long time and sharing this content are really sort-of looked up to. They were kind of revered, and they would give these kind-of tutorials of what to do.

“If you’ve got all these men encouraging you to commit a crime, are you more likely to do it? I don’t have an answer to that, but I do think it’s harmful.”

Zoe was left horrified when her husband confessed his crimes to her one dayCredit: Courtesy of CNN

One woman who spoke to CNN is Zoe Watts, whose husband confessed after church that he had been drugging her with their son’s sleeping medication in her nightly tea and assaulting her.

“At the end of a very busy day… I was just grateful I had a cup of tea before I went to bed, because I was so tired and didn’t have to make it,” she said, adding: “You don’t expect anything other than innocence to come from your partner.”

The couple have four children together, which left Zoe agonising over what she should do.

She kept what he had told her secret, but following a panic attack in front of her sister, their mum called the cops. Zoe eventually decided to press charges.

Her ex-husband is serving an 11-year sentence for rape, sexual assault by penetration and drugging.

Zoe still struggles to use the word rape to describe what happened to her and has faced questions as to if it actually was rape.

She said: “I’ve had people say: ‘Yeah, but he’s your husband,’ or ‘but you weren’t awake.’ ‘So… it’s not the same as being taken down an alleyway, is it?’”

She added: “There’s a shame and a guilt that comes with it, that, ‘Oh, maybe I should have known, or I can’t believe I didn’t realise. Why didn’t I connect those dots?’ she said.”