70,000 Monsters in Plain Sight: How Telegram Account Made Dominique Pelicot’s Horrific Crime Possible

Dominique Pelicot’s heinous act of organizing a brutal assault on his own wife by 50 men, seems extremely shocking to anyone with a wise human soul and conscience. If this is not enough to shck you, the chilling reality is that the medium for such a crime thrives in the shadowy corners of the internet. Telegram groups, some boasting as many as 70,000 members, serve as cesspools of inhumanity, uniting predators across the globe. These online meetups are not just female-hating echo chambers but rather laboratories where systemic and planned sexual violence is born.

Here, men share the stories of their crime.

They brag about raping their wives, girlfriends, sisters, even their mothers. Their words are coated in pride, as though cruelty was a badge to wear. Worse is the distribution of clear step-by-step ‘how-to’ guidelines for drugging, subjugating, and shattering feminine souls. It is anxious to imagine that such wickedness exists only in the deepest, most unreachable corners of the internet. However, it is dangerously commonplace. These predators operate with virtual impunity, using encryption and anonymity to carry out their heinous crimes.

What is more scary is the circulation of these heinous acts via consumer items. The networks, very randomly, without any grief or fear, post links to online businesses selling sedatives disguised as common products. The monetisation of violence, in which implements of coercion are promoted as household items, demonstrates how deeply ingrained this culture of abuse has grown. The messages in these groups blur the lines between predators and enablers, creating a seamless network where the boundaries of humanity have long since eroded.

Consider for a moment the personal lives of these 70,000 animal skinned men. How many of them are fathers of daughters? How many wake each day in wives’, sisters’, mothers’ homes with wives, only to log in and plot their destruction via Telegram? He was entrusted in those roles; in those jobs of care, they betrayed enormous betrayal of trust in women’s lives. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing, silent, insidious predators of women who unwittingly share their lives with them.

The psychological trauma that these victims of these crimes bear is unimaginable. For Dominique Pelicot‘s wife, the act is not just physical, rather it’s a complete dismantling of safety, love, and trust; a monstrous offence that no amount of therapy can fully repair. The complicity of 50 men in her assault is a grotesque multiplication of betrayal, each Chauvinist man stripping away another layer of her humanity. But her story is far from unique. The Telegram groups reveal a systematic and global assault on women’s dignity, with thousands of victims whose names we may never know.

These groups are men who appear to be respectable in society: doctors, teachers, engineers, and even law enforcement officers. This speaks to an ugly truth: the ability for evil is not located at the margins of society. It is hidden at its center, masked behind well-groomed facades and professional credentials. These men go back to their day jobs, kiss the children goodnight, and retire into the dark of their screens to plot the desecration of other people’s lives.

The scale of such operations is truly staggering. One South Korean case exposed how the infamous “Nth Room” on Telegram organized sexual exploitation of children by broadcasting it in real time to its members for pay. In Europe, such chat groups, as have been uncovered in Germany and France, have provided the means of distributing rape videos and photos as well as instructional material, along with boasting of real-life conquests. The web of violence cuts across continents, a spiderweb of cruelty facilitated by technology and fueled by shared hatred.

Each and every member of these groups should lose custody of their children. No daughter should ever have to grow up under the shadow of a father who secretly subscribes to a culture of violence. No wife or girlfriend should ever have to sleep beside a man who sees her as nothing more than a potential victim. Families deserve to know the truth about these men. Communities need to be warned. For as long as these predators walk free among us, no woman is ever truly safe.

It is easy to claim that “not all men” are part of this monstrosity, but when 70,000 of them actively participate, the argument rings hollow. These groups are not isolated aberrations; they are part of a broader, systemic problem that cannot be ignored. Each participant, each silent observer, each anonymous enabler is complicit. Their actions promote the culture of violence that creeps into every pore of society and undermines the work women have worked so hard for.

We are exhausted. Exhausted from fighting an endless battle, from living in a world where safety is something of privilege, not right. And that is why we opt for a bear every, single, time. Because the failure of the system to protect women forces us to prioritize our survival over the bruised egos of those who proclaim themselves “not like the others.”

This is not about passive outrage, but a cry for accountability – governments must decisively act with speed to end these networks once and for all, tech companies with responsibility for hosting these crimes as well, and society must engage with the distasteful reality concerning the pervasive cultural violence that perpetuates these outfits. Until we do, the shadow of Dominique Pelicot and the 70,000 others like him will continue to haunt us all.