In September 2024, Amanda Stanhope sat at home in Manchester, completely absorbed, as the Gisèle Pelicot case made headlines around the world.
“Gisèle’s case was the first time I knew of someone else who had been raped while drugged,” says Stanhope. “I remember thinking: ‘Thank God I’m not alone. There’s one other person in the world this has happened to.’” At the time, Stanhope’s ex-partner, David Rogerson, was under investigation for raping her while she slept and filming the abuse. Pelicot’s husband, Dominique, was later convicted of drug-facilitated rape and sexual assault (DFSA), along with 50 strangers he had recruited online to abuse his wife.
In Exmouth, Devon, Zoe Watts was also following the Pelicot case. Her ex-husband, the father of her four children, was already serving an 11-year sentence for drugging and raping Watts over several years. “I’d never heard of it before, and I absolutely felt like it was just me,” she says. “Gisèle was like fresh air. You know that feeling when you walk into a house and open all the doors and windows to let the air and light in? Well, drug-facilitated rape is one of the doors she opened.”
The shock and horror surrounding the Pelicot case came with an unspoken belief that this was a truly awful one-off, a monstrous exception. Stanhope and Watts knew then that it wasn’t—and now we all do. Just last week, in a short hearing at Northampton Crown Court, a sobbing man in his 40s pleaded guilty to filming himself and another “person unknown” raping and sexually assaulting his partner while she was allegedly drugged or asleep. These attacks, which happened over 11 years, included tying her arms and legs, writing on her body, and penetrating her with objects.
Earlier this year, in a separate case, former Swindon councillor Philip Young pleaded guilty to a series of sexual offences, including multiple counts of rape against his ex-wife, Joanne Young, over 13 years, administering a substance to stupefy her, and voyeurism. In September, another case will go to court, this one involving 14 men accused of drugging and raping one of their wives. The husband is a man in his 60s from Stockport. The others, aged 28 to 73, include a taxi driver, recruitment consultant, paramedic, university technician, and delivery driver.
And it’s not just in the UK. A case in Germany recently led to the conviction of four men on charges related to drugging and raping women. They were part of a Telegram group called “German driving school for experts,” where members shared footage of their abuse and exchanged tips on how to carry it out using code words (women were “cars,” sedatives were “fuel,” and rape was “driving”).
In the summer of 2023, two German investigative journalists, Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh, working for Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Funk, uncovered another network of men using the porn site Motherless to connect, share advice, and post videos and photos of DFSA. One man had been uploading footage of his sedated wife being raped, abused, and sexually assaulted for nearly two decades without any consequences. (“I’m just about to slip the bitch something, let’s see what goes down tonight,” he bragged in one thread. “I gave her a few hard slaps in the face and she didn’t even notice,” he said in another.)
It took repeated pressure from Beer and Ströh before German police took action and stepped in. The wife was in shock—she initially thought the police must have come to the wrong address. She had previously seen doctors about her long, deep sleeps but never suspected this. Later, she said she “loved and trusted” her husband.She described her husband as her partner through “thick and thin.” (He passed away before the case went to trial.)
A CNN investigation into Motherless and its related DFSA networks led to the arrest of a man in Poland. In April of this year, Project Medusa was launched—a joint effort to dismantle DFSA networks, led by Germany and the UK, with support from Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, the US, and Europol. So far, 156 perpetrators and victims have been identified.
Watts, 43, and Stanhope, 53, connected through their involvement in the CNN report. That report inspired Watts to start a survivor-led campaign group, the first of its kind. Stanhope joined as an adviser. The group’s name, #EndEyeCheck, refers to the practice where perpetrators pull open an unconscious victim’s eyelid to check they are sedated—something often filmed and shared online. Watts has set several goals: teaching about DFSA in schools, investigating how it’s policed and prosecuted, raising awareness among medical professionals to spot common signs in victims, and banning “sleep content” from porn sites.
“The first step, though, has to be gathering information,” says Watts. “Until we understand the scale and magnitude, no one is going to act.” Reliable data on DFSA is scarce—partly because so few cases are detected or prosecuted—but over 400 people have already completed the online survey on the #EndEyeCheck site. Survivors who have reached out to the group range from women in their early 20s to the oldest, who is 70 and still recovering from something that happened three decades ago.
For these women, finding each other, sharing experiences, and spotting patterns and parallels has been life-changing after so much isolation. “This crime really dissociates you from understanding it, from making sense of it; there are so many gaps,” says Watts. “You can’t sit in a group with other women who have PTSD, because you have no memories. There are no dedicated facilities or support services. It’s a silent crime, just like domestic violence was 20 years ago. Now, with finding other survivors, putting the puzzle together, every day’s a school day.”
Watts met her husband when she was 17 and he was 28. “He was churchgoing and everyone’s friend. He seemed to have integrity and morals,” she says. They got married, had four children, and ran a printing business together.
Watts only found out he had been adding sedatives to her evening tea, raping her, and filming the abuse when he told her in February 2018. By then, they had been together for 18 years and married for 14. It was a dramatic “confession” after a Valentine’s Day church service about love, and he downplayed everything. He said he had been putting medication in her tea and “having sex” with her afterward, and that he took photos because he thought she’d prefer him looking at her images rather than other women on porn sites. At the same time, he told her he’d had an affair with her friend when Watts was pregnant with their second child, years earlier. Watts “understood” the affair right away, and at first, she focused on that. It was six months before she contacted the police to report him for drugging and raping her.
“You don’t understand what you’re hearing, because, until then, I didn’t even know something like this was a possibility,” says Watts. “I’d been telling my daughters how to get home safely at night. I’d not been telling them that the person they’ve already met and fallen in love with might drug and rape them.”
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‘You live in confusion for years because nothing makes sense’ … Amanda Stanhope. Photograph: Florence Law/The Guardian
“The experienceThe experience of DFSA is different from an alleyway rape,” she continues. “Neither is ‘worse’—it’s not a competition—but this kind of crime completely changes your reality. It’s not like I went through an attack and then came back to the safety of my home and the comfort of my husband. It’s like a nuclear bomb going off inside your family. You start questioning every conversation, every interaction. The person you thought you married, the one you planned to spend the next 60 years with, isn’t that person anymore. The bed you thought was safe isn’t—it never was.”
For Watts, raising awareness and recognizing the signs is crucial. “There were definitely signs, but I didn’t understand them,” she says. “One was recurring urinary infections. Thrush. Tiredness. Nausea. Confusion. Migraines. At one point, I thought I had a brain tumor. My body just wasn’t healthy.” Every survivor they’ve heard from had seen a doctor at some point for issues like memory loss, anxiety, confusion, or changes in sleep patterns—always with their partner sitting right next to them. In Watts’s case, though, in the years before her husband’s “confession,” various medical professionals were directly told what was happening. She once woke up to find her husband “having sex” with her, and he acted as shocked and devastated as she was. “He said he didn’t know what he’d done, he wasn’t aware he was doing it, and he was going to see a doctor,” says Watts. He did see doctors, more than once—Watts went with him to one appointment. He explained that he was having sex with Watts at night while she was asleep, and he didn’t know why. (He didn’t mention that he was also sedating her.) One time, he was prescribed antidepressants. Another time, he was told to go to bed wearing trousers and a belt.
All of this, says Watts, is clear proof of our failure to understand this crime. “He had told people, including non-medical professionals, about this thing he’d been doing and how terrible it was, and how bad he felt,” she says. “He framed it in a way that none of them saw it as a crime. There’s definitely a belief that if you were asleep, if you didn’t say no or fight back, it doesn’t really matter—it wasn’t rape, and where’s the trauma? You’re married to him, sleeping next to him, you had sex with him anyway, so it doesn’t count. Pelicot’s case was horrifying because it didn’t ‘just’ involve her husband—there were 50 other men. I honestly believe that if it had ‘just’ been her husband doing this, the world wouldn’t have been following it. No one would have cared.”
The police took Watts seriously from the start. “In my case, they were brilliant,” she says. “I still wasn’t sure if it was rape. They said: ‘Zoe, you can’t consent if you’re sedated.'” Still, the CPS initially decided not to charge him, despite the evidence in his medical records. Watts challenged that decision. “The CPS was getting 10 emails from me a day,” she says. Even when he was charged, her husband wasn’t seen as a risk to women, and he spent four years before the trial living nearby. “He was dating, and even got a job at a recovery center,” she says. “So he was working with vulnerable women and drugs.” In 2022, he was found guilty of rape, assault by penetration, and administering a substance to overpower Watts. “Even then, there were people in town taking his side,” she says. “They said: ‘You must really hate him to have done that.'”
View image in fullscreen: A court artist sketch of Philip Young, who pleaded guilty to multiple counts of rape against his former wife. Photograph: Elizabeth Cook/PA
Stanhope, a hypnotherapist, was also let down by many people around her. She met Rogerson in 2019 at a dance event.She was completely swept off her feet, and the relationship moved very quickly. But soon, his jealousy and angry outbursts—always followed by desperate pleas for forgiveness—started to take a heavy toll. Stanhope was prescribed antidepressants, beta blockers, and sleeping pills.
She doesn’t know exactly when Rogerson began raping her while she was asleep. Looking back, she can see the warning signs. “I’d wake up and there would be a towel underneath me,” she says. “I thought I’d gone to bed in my pajamas, but in the morning I wouldn’t be wearing them.” When she asked about it, Rogerson always had an answer ready. “It was gaslighting,” she says. “He’d say different things. If I asked why a towel was there, he might say, ‘You put that there, don’t you remember?’ or he’d laugh and say, ‘You’re on so much medication, you’re losing your mind.’ Other times, he’d say, ‘Don’t you remember? You had a great time last night!’ I’d rack my brain trying to understand. You live in confusion for years because nothing makes sense.”
Few people would immediately think of DFSA (drug-facilitated sexual assault). But maybe more of us should. Instead, Stanhope went back to the doctor. “For two years, I was sure I had Alzheimer’s disease,” she says, “because of the confusion and memory loss.” Stanhope was referred to a psychiatrist and a neurologist. “It gets worse,” she says. “I was diagnosed with pseudodementia. Basically, it meant I had all the symptoms of dementia, but it wasn’t real. They suggested it was a ‘mental health’ issue.” The “solution” was more medication. “They added antipsychotics, more sedatives, and later, lithium,” she says. “If they had only asked the right questions: ‘How is your relationship? What’s going on at home?’ Maybe it could have been caught. Instead, I was completely drugged up. It turns out that when the relationship ended and the abuse stopped, I didn’t need any of the medication. I don’t take anything now.”
“So many people have said to me, ‘How could you not know?'” she continues. “It used to make me so angry. Now, I think unless you’ve been in that situation, unless you’re there, taking these medications that keep you sedated, and living with a pathological liar, you can’t begin to understand.”
There’s another reason Stanhope didn’t realize what was happening—and she only understood it recently after hearing the same thing from many other survivors. “I’ve been asked before, ‘Don’t you physically know that you’ve had sex when you wake up?'” she says. “But so many of us have experienced the same thing. Our partners usually made sure they had sex with us earlier in the evening—so when you wake up knowing you’ve had sex, you think it was that.”
Rogerson’s crimes only came to light because Stanhope hit rock bottom and wanted to die. She took an overdose, and although Rogerson called 999, he raped her unconscious body while waiting for the ambulance. As he was raping her, she woke up. Afterward, Stanhope did manage to end the relationship, but when he threatened to kill himself, she was persuaded to let him sleep on the sofa while he got his life together. Again, she woke up to find him raping her. That’s when she went to the police.
Their investigation later found that Rogerson had filmed one assault and posted photos of Stanhope online. In April last year, he was charged with five counts of rape between 2021 and 2023, although none were related to DFSA, since Stanhope had knowingly taken the medications herself. Six weeks later, Rogerson took his own life.
She is still trying to make sense of it all. She believes pornography played a big part in what happened. “He was very focused on porn,” she says.He used to spend ages on his phone in the bathroom. It’s funny, because there are things I’ve been too embarrassed to say until now. It’s only since I started connecting with other survivors this year that we’ve realized we all went through the same thing. It’s really strange, but a lot of these men, including him, were into swingers’ websites and asked us to try it. I said no. The police investigation showed he had uploaded my photos to those sites without me knowing.
DFSA isn’t something that started with pornography. Gwen Seabourne, a professor who studies medieval legal history, found a case from 1292 where a doctor in southwest England drugged and raped a patient. In Victorian Britain, DFSA caused a public outcry, centered on alcohol, chloroform, and “knockout drops” (a sedative called chloral hydrate), all of which were unregulated and easy to get. “There will always be men who rape, control, and feel entitled,” says Stanhope. “The oldest survivor who contacted us experienced it decades ago—but I believe online porn has made it happen much more often.”
“Sleep content” isn’t hidden away in obscure places. In a German investigation into Motherless, search terms like “passed out,” “drugged,” and “raped” brought up tens of thousands of videos, images, and tutorials. Motherless markets itself as a “moral-free host”—but this kind of content can be found on many sites. Previous research on Pornhub and other adult sites found that one in eight videos on their landing pages shows something illegal.
Is there a kind of encouragement happening here? What might once have been a passing thought or fantasy can now, with little effort, become a focus, then an obsession, and finally a shared activity. “It’s been normalized, it’s almost seen as acceptable,” says Stanhope. “I’ve seen the messages these men share, congratulating and praising each other, giving each other advice. That’s all part of it. It’s not exactly friendship, but it’s a shared space, a common interest, built around something so awful. It’s evil.”
Finding each other has helped Stanhope, left, and Watts see the crime clearly. Photograph: Family handout
Norwegian psychologist Svein Overland has pointed out the similarities between DFSA and watching pornography. In some ways, DFSA is the logical next step of pornography. Porn is “one-way sex,” with no need to please, perform, or interact with a partner. DFSA also removes the partner by making them absent, a passive object, a container. Philosopher Kate Manne, author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, believes DFSA goes beyond that. It’s a way to avoid shame, literally “closing her eyes to his disgrace.” Would the sobbing man tried in Northampton crown court last week have written on his wife’s body and tied her up if she could have seen him? DFSA is “the stealing of her consciousness, her vigilance, her wakefulness,” writes Manne. “Drug her; shut her up; and not only silence her but escape the shame of her eyes on you.”
Prosecutions are rare and difficult, and reliable statistics don’t exist yet. In the crime survey for England and Wales ending March 2025, almost a quarter of victims were either unconscious or asleep during their most recent sexual assault by rape or penetration. “It’s a silent crime that can go unnoticed for years,” says Watts. “Unless you stumble across video evidence, what proof do you have that it happened? And even when you have images, you might be told there’s no criminal case. How can you prove you didn’t consent to them?” For Watts, the answer starts with raising awareness and vigilance—shedding light on the issue.Crime and its common patterns.
When it comes to online “communities” that share videos of drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA), Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University and author of Exposed: The Rise of Extreme Porn and How We Fight Back, says we already have the tools to take them down. “These acts are clearly criminal offences,” she explains. “It’s illegal to drug and rape someone. It’s also a crime to record or film sexual activity without consent and share it without permission. And it’s an offence to possess what’s called ‘extreme pornography,’ which includes videos of rape, whether staged or real.”
The real problem, again, is enforcement. “First, the police need to take reports seriously. Even when they do investigate, users are often anonymous and in different countries—but those challenges aren’t impossible to overcome.”
Regulating the platforms that host this material is essential. The Online Safety Act (OSA) applies to any platform with links to the UK, no matter where it’s based. Under the OSA, these platforms must prevent people from seeing “priority criminal offences”—like rape and DFSA—and remove such content when they’re told about it. “We need a regulator that’s quick and proactive,” says McGlynn. “Maybe there should be a precautionary approach that lets a regulator take something down first and then investigate.”
When it comes to pornography platforms, Ofcom hasn’t taken any action yet on content, only on age verification. An Ofcom spokesperson responded to questions about regulating sleep-related content with this statement: “The Online Safety Act requires companies to take proactive steps to assess and reduce the risk of their services being used to commit or help commit criminal offences. We are actively checking how several platforms are meeting these duties and have been working closely with law enforcement to get intelligence and support our evidence gathering. We are determined to act when we find failures, while also being careful to protect the integrity of ongoing criminal investigations.”
“Sleep doesn’t exist for me anymore. What do I do? Take sleeping pills?”
Watts has chosen not to focus on the fact that images of her being raped by her husband while she was sedated are probably online. “It’s about control,” she says. “I don’t like the thought of him being in prison and still controlling my feelings, my emotions, and my body. I have to choose where I put my energy. I’ve already spent years feeling completely disabled by what this man did to me.”
For Watts and Stanhope, recovery is a lifelong process. “Sleep doesn’t exist for me anymore. What do I do? Take sleeping pills?” asks Watts. “I’m what you’d call a ‘night owl,’ and I don’t think I’ll ever be at peace with that. There are certain things I don’t feel safe with—even being in the car, I lock myself in. I don’t trust myself to make decisions anymore, because I’ve gotten them so wrong in the past.”
“Nobody realizes the impact,” says Stanhope. “It took me a year just to be able to say the word ‘rape.’ I’ve been reliving it with PTSD. I’ve had nightmares, flashbacks to those moments when I woke up while it was happening. It hits you in waves. You think you’re over something, and then you remember something else. I’ve had so much therapy, it’s unbelievable. I’ve had weekly therapy, trauma EMDR therapy, CBT, and group therapy. For two years, therapy was my life.”
What has helped her the most is #EndEyeCheck. “This has been so validating,” she says. “It’s exhausting, but I think it has healed me. I can’t dwell on my own pain when I’m focused on the bigger challenges.”
Finding each other has helped them see the crime for what it is.Watts says, “For a long time, no friend, no doctor, no one I talked to seemed to believe I was being raped. I kept hearing that he was my husband, and since I couldn’t remember it, there was no trauma. A lot of victims feel like a bit of a fraud.” Meeting Stanhope changed everything. Earlier this year, they went to a lobbying event in Parliament together and shared a hotel room the night before.
“I watched Amanda getting ready for bed, and as usual, I couldn’t sleep,” Watts says. “In the middle of the night, I looked at her sleeping and, bless her, I just thought, ‘How the hell?’ I started crying because I suddenly saw how vulnerable we are when we’re asleep at night—and how badly we had been abused. That must have been me. It hit me in a whole new way.”
Eventually, Watts fell asleep, and the next day was very busy. She didn’t mention what had happened until the very end. “We were about to get some food, and I said, ‘Amanda, I need to tell you that I was crying last night because I saw you asleep and I broke down.’ She turned to me and said, ‘It happened to me too. I thought the same thing.’”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse is available from the following organizations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support at 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support at 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached at freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the topic The bed you thought was safe isnt safe Zoe Watts survived drugfacilitated rape and then fought back
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What is drugfacilitated rape
Its when someone is given a drug without their knowledge or consent to make them unable to resist or remember a sexual assault
2 Who is Zoe Watts
Zoe Watts is a survivor of drugfacilitated rape who publicly shared her story and fought back against her attacker through the legal system and advocacy
3 What does the quote The bed you thought was safe isnt safe mean
It means that even places you trust like your own bed can become dangerous if someone secretly drugs you The threat isnt the locationits the hidden drug
4 How did Zoe Watts fight back
She reported the crime participated in the criminal case against her attacker and has spoken out to raise awareness and help other survivors
5 Is drugfacilitated rape common
Yes its a common tactic used by predators because it leaves the victim confused with little memory making it harder to report or prove
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 What drugs are most commonly used in facilitated assault
Common ones include GHB Rohypnol and ketamine Alcohol is also frequently used as a weapon
7 How can someone tell if theyve been drugged
Signs include sudden extreme drowsiness confusion memory gaps dizziness nausea or feeling paralyzed after drinking something If you feel way more intoxicated than you should thats a red flag
8 What should you do if you suspect youve been drugged
Get to a safe place immediately Call a trusted friend or 911 Do not shower change clothes or go to the bathroom until you can get a medical exam as evidence is timesensitive
9 Why is it so hard to prove drugfacilitated assault in court
Because many drugs leave the body within hours and victims often have no clear memory Zoe Watts case succeeded because she reported quickly and
