The founder of the anonymous chat site that Dominique Pelicot used to recruit men to rape his unconscious wife has been arrested in France.
Isaac Steidl, 44, was called in by French authorities for questioning over claims his site, Coco.fr, facilitated 23,051 crimes, including murder, rape, and paedophilia.
Feltesse & Zanatta, the law firm representing Steidl, declined to comment ‘at this stage’, saying Steidl will ‘keep his declarations’ for the magistrate in charge of the inquiry.
The site was free and used a simple interface, allowing users to communicate anonymously, quickly turning it into a ‘den of predators’.
Pelicot, 72, who was jailed for two decades on Thursday, used the shut-down forum to source many of men who would go on to rape his drugged wife, Gisele, in their family home.
The three-month trial heard how Pelicot, dubbed the Monster of Avignon, plied his wife with hidden tranquilisers in her food and drink so he could covertly film the abuse.
In the end, he had catalogued more than 20,000 videos of the brutal sex crimes carried out at their Mazan, Avignon, home over the span of a decade.
But at the heart of of the case was the anonymous chat site, Coco, which was founded in 2003 by Steidl.
Dominique Pelicot, 72, who was jailed for two decades on Thursday, used the shut-down site Coco to source many of men who would go on to rape his drugged wife, Gisele, in their family home
Gisele Pelicot leaves the courthouse after hearing the verdict of the court that sentenced her ex-husband to the maximum term of 20 years jail for committing and orchestrating her mass rapes with dozens of strangers he recruited online, in Avignon on December 19, 2024
The site was free and used a simple interface, allowing users to communicate anonymously, quickly turning it into a ‘den of predators’
The site advertised itself as a ‘no registration chat site’, which only required users to enter their gender, age, postcode and create a nickname, without any checks on who they were and no moderation on the content they posted.
At its peak, it had some 850,000 monthly visitors, none of whom went through vetting.
This included children, and earlier this year a journalist posed as a 15-year-old to highlight the ease with which youngsters are able to access the site and can fall prey to paedophiles.
In just five days, the undercover reporter said they received some fifty photos and videos from webcams of men masturbating, offers for prostitution and seven requests from adults to meet in person
Judges during the Pelicot trial heard that he had made contact with several men on the site, notably on a chat forum named ‘a son insu’, translating to ‘without her knowing’.
It was on this channel the elderly man would find his accomplices and invite them to the family home to sexually abuse his wife while she was unconscious.
‘I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my sleeping wife,’ Pelicot had written on his account.
‘You have to be clean without aftershave, no long dirty nails’.
Gisele’s abusers, most from within a 50 mile radius of the Pelicots’ home, were seemingly ordinary men from all walks of life and of all ages.
After making contact, he would go on to share sexually explicit photos of his wife in the forum, as well as his techniques for drugging her with crushed tranquilisers and sleeping pills.
Judges during the Pelicot trial heard that he had made contact with several men on the site, notably on a chat forum named ‘a son insu’, translating to ‘without her knowing’
Brave Gisele reacts as she leaves after the verdict in the trial for Dominique Pelicot and 50 co-accused, at the courthouse in Avignon, France
Gisele’s abusers, most from within a 50 mile radius of the Pelicots’ home, were seemingly ordinary men from all walks of life and of all ages.
In at least one conversation on the site, Pelicot mentioned the rape of his wife to another user.
In another, an abuser in the message channel was seen in messages asking Pelicot questions about Gisele’s state, attempting to confirm that there was no possibility the wife would wake.
‘Do you get her tested from time to time? Sure she’s clean? She has no idea?,’ they ask Pelicot.
His responses to this were particularly disturbing.
‘No, she puts it down to tiredness. You’re like me. You love rape mode,’ Pelicot said, ‘and abusive, perverse games’.
He goes on to reveal he is ‘about to dose her’ and explains the pair will have to wait an hour for the drug to kick in before the abuse can begin.
Police reports have revealed that initial contact between Pelicot and his accomplices were made on Coco, before they moved on to Skype where he would show the stranger a glimpse of his unconscious wife on video.
These texts would appear to involve the further stages of planning the meet-up, discussing details of times for the abuser to arrive, and the state Gisele was in.
‘I don’t know whether I will try to have her f**ked this evening. Will you come if I do?,’ one message from Pelicot read.
‘To f**k her?,’ the abuser asks. ‘In theory yes, at that hour I shouldn’t be asleep… but it can’t be too late’.
Gisele testified in court that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions for decades, but over time, the sedation and frequent sexual abuse began to take a physical toll on her
Dominique Pelicot is pictured arriving at the courthouse this morning to face the verdict
Pelicot then goes on to explain that he will be ‘dosing’ his wife shortly, and tells the online stranger to ‘plan to come tonight around 3am’.
‘One hour after taking the meds she is completely asleep. I don’t understand why we have to wait four hours?,’ the abuser asks.
Pelicot chillingly responds: ‘The longer we wait, the deeper she sinks into sleep’.
The site has also been named in other cases – in April last year, a 22-year-old man was beaten to death in Grande-Synthe near Dunkirk after agreeing to meet local youths posing as a girl under the age of 18 on Coco.
Although the site asked users to confirm that they were over 18, they could quickly change their age once the gained access to the platform and chat with a made-up username.
Called ‘a den of predators’ in France, human rights organisations, LGBTQ+ activists, and child protection association all raised concerns over it.
According to Mediapart, a French news website, at least 300 men were assaulted after they attempted to meet underage children from the site who wound up being posers between 2018 and 2022.
In May, ten men aged between 25 and 60 were jailed in northern France for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl they had found on the chat site.
A gay man was also lured and ambushed in Marseille in early October 2023, prompting the SOS Homophobie association to request the site’s closure.
And in 2019, a father from Brest was arrested after years of exchanging child pornography images and videos with other users.
The three-month trial heard how Pelicot, dubbed the Monster of Avignon, plied his wife with hidden tranquilisers in her food and drink so he could covertly film the abuse
Dominique Pelicot, convicted of drugging and raping his then-wife Gisele Pelicot, appears with his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro at the courthouse in Avignon, France, December 16, 2024 in this courtroom sketch before his conviction
Coco was unmoderated to the extent that Pelicot was able to use the forum for years without any detection or penalty.
Gisele testified in court that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions for decades, but over time, the sedation and frequent sexual abuse began to take a physical toll on her.
Pelicot had gone with his wife on a number of doctor’s visits where she complained of memory loss and pelvic pain, court documents have stated.
But Pelicot’s atrocities were only brought to light after he was arrested in a nearby supermarket in September 2020 for filming upskirt videos of female customers.
Coco was finally shut down last summer, with the chief Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau describing it as a ‘facilitator of criminal offences’.
She added that the people running the disturbing site were suspected of ‘providing an online platform to allow an illegal transaction in an organised gang’.
In the June statement, Beccuau said bank accounts linked to the site had been frozen in Hungary, Lithuania, Germany and Holland and £4.3million had been seized.
Steidl, who is believed to have grown up in a village in Provence, was questioned in Bulgaria at the time.
On Thursday, inside a packed Vaucluse criminal courtroom in Avignon, 47 men, including Pelicot, were convicted of rape.
Two others were found guilty of attempted rape, and another two guilty of sexual assault.
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