Part Two: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Call Zone Media.

**Robert** (0:05)
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where this week, we're talking about some websites that enable horrific sex crimes and the actions of Dominique Pelicot, who is just a monster.
You know what was in the part one of this episode, right? I probably don't need to remind you. I mean, I guess I should, but first I should introduce our guest, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome back. Also, I'm sorry.

**Bridget Todd** (0:34)
Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's a little bit of a rough one, but still happy to be here.

**Robert** (0:39)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. This is a rough one and a podcast that only does rough ones. Do you have any pluggables? You want to plug up top here?

**Bridget Todd** (0:46)
I do, and I've been thinking about it as we've been having this conversation. I just published an audio book with Simon and Schuster called Love It First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy, where we look at AI companions and people who use AI for things like romance, emotional support, and sex.
Some of the marketing of the companies that make and market AI companions, they really lean into this very toxic attitude that women and girls should just be for the taking and that you can in fact use AI to create an AI companion who will do what your girlfriend slash wife won't do. And I don't know, something about this conversation is just really making me think about that dynamic, the dynamic that every woman and girl should just be yours for the taking, that that should be the world that people live in.

**Robert** (1:36)
Well, and just the attitude that like women are not partners, they're like almost like a vending machine that dispenses sex or emotional comfort, right? As opposed to like a person. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's what this story is about too, unfortunately. There is a real direct tie between the AI girlfriend stuff that's going on and yeah, the crimes in this, you know?
And in the same way, like obviously not every... Plenty of people who are seeking AI companionship are not sex criminals in the same way Dominique Pelicot is. I don't mean to suggest that. But there's like, there's a line between these things, right? There's similar motivations that are pushing the people who are into this weird sleep fetish thing where you definitely don't want these women to know that you're using them as sexual objects. There's a line between that and people like wanting to take the human out of having a human partner, I think probably. Anyway.

**Bridget Todd** (2:39)
I would absolutely agree with you.

**Robert** (2:42)
Yeah.
So we left off last episode at the start of the 20 Teens when Dominique Pelicot started drugging his wife and using Coco to recruit dozens of anonymous men, all of whom lived within 15 to 30 miles of their home to sexually assault her in the dead of night. Before we get further into this story, it's important for you to know that just as Dominique was not alone in his crimes, Coco was not the only place where men were meeting online to do this sort of thing. In fact, Dominique is a distinct outlier within the community of sleep content aficionados, both in that he commit, I should say, non-consensual sleep content aficionados, both in that he commits actual abuse rather than fantasizing about it, and that his years of experience as a rapist and murderer meant that by the time Coco came around, he already had experienced drugging women, assaulting them, and covering his tracks while committing sex crimes. Most of the guys who get interested in this stuff start at zero, and they have to find a community of like-minded abusers before they can offend, and most don't offend directly, they offend by partaking, purchasing, supporting other people. Most guys just don't have the, I don't know, gut seems like the wrong word. Most of them are not willing to cross that line, which is still, they're still abusing, they're participating just as someone who shares CSAM, is participating in the abuse of children, even if they're not making it or directly molesting children themselves. I'm not saying that to reduce their culpability. There was an investigation that went very viral earlier this year by CNN.
And the term they used for the website they were looking into was an online rape academy. And that academy was the website motherless.com, which is, I mean, just from the name, you can tell this is a place where some upsetting stuff happens. The website domain was first registered in 2005, two years after Coco, but nothing went up there until 2008, when a guy named Joshua Lange founded that in an LLC in New York City. Motherless built itself as a moral-free file host where anything legal is hosted forever. Although their definition of legal was quite expansive and included a lot of illegal things, right? Legal deserves all of the quotation marks. There's a shortage of quotation marks now because of how many we had to put around legal. Yeah, could not. Size 78 font. Bold.