1 week ago
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France has charged the founder of an adult website used to commit sexual offences, including by Dominique Pelicot, who recruited dozens of strangers to rape his heavily sedated wife, prosecutors said.
Italian national Isaac Steidl, the founder and manager of the Coco.fr website, was charged with a number of offences, including the administration of an online platform to facilitate an illegal transaction by an organised gang.
The website was used by Pelicot to recruit strangers to rape his heavily-sedated wife, Gisèle Pelicot, over a decade. Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in jail last month after a trial that turned his former wife into a feminist icon.
The Coco website was shut down by the French authorities in June 2024 when an investigation was opened.
Lawyers representing Steidl declined to comment after his arrest on Tuesday, saying Steidl would “keep his declarations” for the magistrate in charge of the inquiry.
The website hit the headlines after it was revealed that Pelicot, 72, had used a Coco chatroom called A son insu (without their knowledge) to recruit more than 80 men to rape and sexually abuse his then wife, who he had rendered unconscious with a cocktail of prescription drugs.
Pelicot was stopped after he was caught filming up the skirts of shoppers in a local supermarket.
Also convicted in the trial in Avignon that ended in his 20-year jail term were 50 other men who were identified from the tens of thousands of videos and photographs Pelicot made of the abuse of his wife. They were also convicted and sentenced to between three and 15 years. Seventeen men have appealed against their convictions.
French media reported that Steidl, 44, created the website in 2003 with help from his parents with an investment of €2,000 shortly after he graduated as a computer engineer. It was allegedly intended as a platform for romantic meetings but quickly attracted the attention of drug dealers, paedophiles and sex offenders. After Pelicot’s arrest, the French site was transferred to a URL registered in Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
Police say they have frozen €5m in bank accounts linked to the site in Hungary, Lithuania, Germany and the Netherlands.
Steidl, who was born in southern France, is reported to have given up his French nationality in 2023 and taken Italian citizenship. He is said to have been living in eastern Europe.
Ordering the shutting down of the website last year, Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor said it was implicated in 23,051 criminal cases involving 480 victims. In a statement she said a man of Italian nationality, born in January 1980 was “suspected of being the administrator of the site” and had been questioned by magistrates in Bulgaria.
