The founder of the website used by Dominique Pelicot to recruit strangers to rape his wife has been arrested in France.
Isaac Steidl, 44, is being interviewed by Paris detectives over the use of the website by criminals involved in more than 23,000 crimes including rape, murder and paedophilia.
France Info radio said Isaac Steidl reported to police on Tuesday morning after being summoned from his home outside the country and agreeing to fly back to Paris. He can be held for questioning for up to 96 hours.
The Coco website was shut down by the French authorities in June 2024 when an investigation was opened.
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 wife, Gisèle, 72, who he had rendered unconscious with a cocktail of prescription drugs.
In December, a court in Avignon sentenced retired electrician Pelicot to 20 years for drugging and raping his wife and inviting strangers to rape her at the couple’s home in the Provençal town of Mazan between 2011 and 2020.
Pelicot was only stopped after he was caught filming up the skirts of shoppers in a local supermarket.
Another 50 other men identified from the tens of thousands of videos and photographs Pelicot made of the abuse of his wife and discovered on his hard drive were also convicted and sentenced to between three and 15 years. Since the convictions, 17 have appealed.
The website has also been named in other criminal investigations. In April last year a 22-year-old man was beaten to death by a group of young men near Dunkirk after he arranged to meet what he believed to be girl under the age of 18 through the site.
French media reported that Steidl created the website in 2010 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 it quickly attracted the attention of drug dealers, pedophiles and sex offenders. After Pelicot’s arrest, the French site was transferred to a URL registered on Guernsey, 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 and 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.
Le Parisian reported that Steidl is being questioned on allegations of “the unlawful administration of an online platform as part of a criminal organisation, criminal conspiracy and complicity in offences and crimes related to aggravated procuring, the distribution and sharing of pedophile videos and money laundering”.
