The founder of a website that Dominique Pelicot used to invite dozens of men to rape his wife after he drugged her was indicted in France on Thursday on a myriad of charges, including some related to the case.
If he is found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 7.5 million euros, or about 7.7 million dollars.
The site’s founder, Isaac Steidl, 44, was released from prison on Thursday. The investigating judge’s office said he had been placed under “judicial supervision”, had to pay bail of 100,000 euros and was banned from leaving France.
A website he created in 2003, called coco.fr, became notorious in France during the trial of Mr. Pelicot and 50 other men, who are all found guilty last monthmainly due to the rape of Mr. Pelicot’s now ex-wife, Gisèle, while she was heavily sedated.
One of the charges against Mr. Steidl related to the Pelicot case is that he administered an online platform to facilitate the illegal transactions of an organized gang. Other charges include complicity in drug trafficking, complicity in the possession and distribution of child pornography, aggravated pimping and aggravated money laundering.
Mr. Steidl “firmly denies the allegations against him and undertakes to cooperate fully to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for the alleged crimes,” his lawyer, Julien Zanatta, told Agence France-Presse.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot said he met all the men in a private chat room on a website called “Without Her Knowledge.” Most of the defendants denied ever seeing that chat room.
They agreed, however, that they had met him on the site and then switched the conversation to text messages or Skype to arrange a visit to the Pelicots’ home in southern France, where they joined him in raping his now ex-wife while she was in deeply drugged state.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement that the website was implicated in more than 23,000 cases in France alone from 2021 to 2024, involving 480 alleged victims. The cases included allegations of child sexual abuse, pimping, prostitution, rape, drug trafficking, fraud and murder, police and prosecutors said in a statement.
The site was shut down in June after an 18-month investigation that spanned Europe. The police froze bank accounts in Hungary, Lithuania, Germany and the Netherlands and seized 5 million euros, the Paris prosecutor said at the time.
Mr. Steidl’s home in Bulgaria was searched at the request of French judges during the operation, prosecutors said.
Mr. Steidl grew up in the southern French province of Var. In April 2023, the French government agreed to his request to renounce his French citizenship. Last June, after his site was shut down, he was interviewed by an investigating judge in Bulgaria, with French law enforcement officials present.
French non-profit organizations that fight against child abuse, homophobia and illegal internet content have raised the alarm about the site for years. Petition seeking winding up signed by more than 20,000 people.
“The Coco site was a den of pedophiles,” said Sophie Antoine, who works on legal issues and advocacy for the French organization Law Against Child Prostitution.
Ms Antoine said her organization often used it to show childcare professionals “how open the darknet really is.” Registration was free and only required name, age and zip code. Once you were logged in, other users could contact you to chat and make suggestions — but once you logged out, those conversations were immediately deleted, she said.
