TThe 71-year-old man’s trial shocked France and the world. That’s because he admitted to repeatedly drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of men online to rape her while she was unconscious over several decades. Dominic Perico’s confession and his wife Gisele’s public courage have sparked a national reckoning about sexual assault and the double lives people lead online.
As an Avignon court heard allegations against Perico and 50 other defendants in recent weeks, it revealed a pattern of men who allegedly lived honest lives in public but committed abhorrent acts online and in private. has emerged. The men accused of gang rape took the stand and detailed how Pericot discovered them and orchestrated the abuse on an illegal chat forum called Coco.
It became clear during the trial that the scale of Pericot’s crimes and his ability to keep them hidden for so many years would not have been possible without Coco and its administrators’ disregard for the content shared on the platform. It seems like it was. The site became one of the clearest examples to remember of how platforms can cause extreme harm if left unmoderated.
Since its founding in 2003, Coco has been implicated in murder, pedophilia, homophobic attacks, and sexual assault as it evaded accountability and led law enforcement in international investigations. When European authorities finally shut down Coco earlier this year and arrested its founders and other executives, the website was cited in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity and arrested more than 480 people, according to Agence France-Presse. Victims have reportedly been involved in judicial proceedings related to this site. Prosecutor.
A haven for online harm
Founded by software engineer Isaac Steidl in his early 20s, Coco launched as a free chat site with a simple interface that allowed users to communicate anonymously. The site asked users to confirm they were over 18, but they could change their age as soon as they could access the platform and chat with their own usernames.
“It looked very innocent,” said Sophie Antoine, director of legal advocacy for French anti-child prostitution organization ACPE. “This is a website for people,” it said. “But when we walked in, it was like a jungle.”
When a user registers on the site, they are presented with a public landing page with a list of different chat forums dedicated to different subjects. Due to the sexual nature of the sites, many of these forums were dedicated to specific fetishes or contained explicit content. People could also participate in private chats on Coco and send messages directly to other users. As one French journalist said: Pretend to be a 15 year old girl The site that was discovered was flooded with people soliciting sex and sending nude images.
“It was very accessible, very explicit. There was no control over it,” Antoine said.
Although the site never gained mainstream popularity, it became well-known among child safety advocates and LGBTQ+ rights groups who monitor sites online that could cause harm. ACPE has been involved in Koko operations for years, with Antoine training people on how to use the site for research purposes while also warning authorities about illegal and dangerous activities there.
In Pericot’s case, he used an anonymous pseudonym on Coco and solicited men on a forum called “Song In Soo” I ended up coming to his house in the small town of Mazan, meaning “without her knowledge.” Pericot claimed on the forum that his wife shares his fetish for men who have sex with her while she sleeps, but that her husband was drugging her against her will and that she She never publicly stated that she knew anything about his abuse or that she did not consent to it. Although many of the men claimed to have believed they were engaged in consensual sexual role-play, investigators said Perricott explicitly used the word “rape” several times and told potential assailants that he was engaging in sexual role-play. It was discovered that he had explained that he had administered drugs to him.
Coco was unscrupulous enough to allow Pericot to use the forum for years without any penalties, but authorities finally became aware of his presence in 2020 when a woman was shopping. This comes after Pericot was caught by grocery store security after attempting to record a video without his consent. In the unlikely event that a user is kicked out of Coco due to complaints or legal threats, researchers and authorities say the site will charge a small fee of around 10 euros to reinstate the banned account. .
Despite the site becoming a well-known haven for online abuse, rights groups and authorities faced various legal hurdles in investigating and taking legal action. European Union regulations have long had broad provisions, similar to Section 230 in the United States, that protect website owners from liability for the content on their sites. Things got complicated because Coco also moved where it was hosted, moving from a fully French site to a domain registered on the autonomous island of Guernsey with a .gg URL.
Mr. Steidl faced other logistical hurdles in holding him accountable for the site he created. At some point after the site was founded, Mr. Steidl moved to Bulgaria, out of the reach of French authorities, and renounced his French citizenship. Despite it becoming public that Coco was involved in a series of assaults and sexual abuses, the site remained online and Steidl was nowhere to be found.
murder, assault, child abuse
While Pericot was leveraging Coco to carry out its attacks, a number of other exploits were also taking place in forums and chats across the site. Over the years, a number of serious crimes involving Coco have been widely reported in France, leading to calls among human rights groups for the platform to be shut down.
One of the earliest cases was in 2018 when 55-year-old Michel Sorossi was murdered by a 22-year-old man with whom she had arranged to meet. Mr Sorossi was found bludgeoned to death in his home on the outskirts of Paris, and a court ruled that the killing was a homophobic attack. The perpetrator was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A wave of similar “ambush attacks” on gay men lured into meeting strangers here followed. In 2022, a 24-year-old man from Marseille claimed to have narrowly escaped three people who tried to run him over with their car when he arrived at a meetup arranged through Coco. Earlier this year, law enforcement authorities arrested four people in the city of Saint-Porois on suspicion of posing as men looking for a date on a dating site, luring their victims, then violently assaulting and robbing them.
Violent attacks ambushing gay men have proliferated on the platform, while the site has also been used for child sexual abuse. A man from Brest, a city in northwestern France. Enrolled in 2019 Using the same “without her knowledge” forum as Pericot to exchange child rape videos. In one of the most high-profile cases, 77-year-old former French pop star Richard DeWitt was arrested for sexually soliciting an undercover police officer who he believed was a 13-year-old girl. The court sentenced DeWitt to 3 years imprisonment last year.
In yet another case, two teenage boys was arrested earlier this year A man has been charged with the murder of a 22-year-old man on the outskirts of Dunkirk. It is believed that the two boys pretended to be girls meeting here, ambushed the man who showed up, and bludgeoned him to death in the parking lot.
This myriad of incidents has attracted the attention of French LGBTQ+ rights organizations such as SOS Homophobie and child protection organizations such as ACPE, who have begun calling on authorities to take more aggressive action against the site.
“We’ve been talking about this for years and asking for it to be shut down,” Antoine said. “But there were different European laws and it was complicated.”
the end of here
Koko’s ability to evade authorities depended on a combination of legal protections for internet providers, complex international investigation procedures, and concealed origins. Sites seeking to avoid scrutiny use a variety of tools to hide exactly where they operate, allowing law enforcement to add layers of obfuscation before discovering the site’s origin and owner. I am forced to peel it off.
When authorities finally searched for Coco, it took a massive 18 months of international effort and recent changes to French law. In December 2023, France’s national anti-organized crime authority Junarco launched an investigation against Coco using a 2023 law known as “Plate management expert” may hold the administrator responsible for certain activities on the site. The law allows authorities to charge site founders with complicity in crimes, such as using sites or apps to conduct illegal transactions that fund gangs. Violations are punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 500,000 euros.
Prosecutors used the same law to file preliminary charges against billionaire Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was arrested earlier this year. Mr. Durov’s arrest attracted international attention And it sparked a debate about the extent to which governments should hold platforms accountable for illegal content.
Along with Junarco, agencies in countries including Lithuania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany and the Netherlands coordinated efforts to oust Coco in June of this year. International authorities took down the Germany-based server, seized approximately 5.6 million euros and froze several bank accounts associated with the site. In Bulgaria, local authorities arrested Steidl and questioned him in the presence of French prosecutors. Three of Steidl’s colleagues, including his wife, were also detained for questioning in France and later released. According to National media and Junarco press release.
French prosecutors have not released a statement about the next steps in the criminal case involving Coco and Steidl, but the site remains offline. LGBTQ+ rights groups and child abuse prevention organizations celebrated the closure but warned that similar sites could fill the void.
Meanwhile, French society is grappling with the question of why such acts by men of all ages and backgrounds go undetected for so long, and Pericotte’s trial is still ongoing. It’s an issue that anti-sexual abuse activists say requires the country to rethink how these crimes occur and who is the perpetrator.
“We’re trying to dismantle the idea that these criminals are monsters,” Antoine said. “The Mazan incident showed that when you use a website like Coco, these people can become your neighbors. Even in small towns, people go online and find these people. You could commit a crime.”
Kari Paul contributed reporting
Source: www.theguardian.com
