There is a corner of the internet — and it is not small — where men gather to share tips on how to drug their wives unconscious and rape them on camera.
Not metaphorically. Not as a hypothetical. As a how-to.
CNN spent months investigating it. What they found was a Telegram group called “Zzz” with nearly a thousand members from around the world, swapping advice on dosages, camera angles, and how to avoid detection. The content they shared — videos and images of women being sexually assaulted while unconscious — was treated as a commodity. A thing to be collected, traded, bragged about.
And the website where much of this content lives, Motherless.com, which describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever,” received approximately 62 million visits in February 2026 alone. It hosts more than 20,000 videos tagged as “sleep” content — the sanitized industry term for what is, in plain language, footage of rape.
Let that land before we go any further.
This isn’t a dark web anomaly. This is mainstream internet infrastructure. This is men — husbands, partners, fathers — trading techniques for violating the people they share a bed with. And the platform that hosts it is, largely, legally protected.
We need to talk about how we got here. And we need to talk about why it keeps happening.
The Law That Makes It Possible
In 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It was designed for a different internet — a nascent, fragile thing with fewer than 300,000 websites and about 40 million users worldwide. The intent was simple: allow platforms to host user content without being legally liable for what those users posted. Without it, the argument went, no one would dare build an internet forum, a comments section, or a social media platform.
That logic made sense in 1996. It makes considerably less sense when a pornographic website hosting tens of thousands of rape videos receives 62 million visits in a single month and hides behind it.
Section 230 provides immunity to online platforms from lawsuits arising from third-party content — content posted by users rather than the platform itself. In practice, this means that even when a website knowingly profits from, algorithmically amplifies, and deliberately categorizes rape footage, it cannot be sued by survivors. The women whose assaults appear in those videos have no civil legal recourse against the platform that distributed their violation to millions of viewers.
The law has been amended once in a meaningful way — the 2018 FOSTA-SESTA amendment created an exception for sex trafficking. There have been bipartisan calls for broader reform, including a 2025 bill that would sunset Section 230 immunity entirely unless platforms negotiated responsible standards. In March 2026, a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for mental health harms caused by addictive platform features — notable cracks appearing in Section 230’s armor.
But Motherless.com is still up. The “Zzz” group, which was taken down on Telegram after CNN’s investigation, will be replaced by another. And the women who were raped in those videos still have no legal pathway to hold the platforms accountable.
Section 230 was never designed to protect rape infrastructure. It is time to treat it accordingly.
The History They Don’t Teach You: Marital Rape Was Legal Until 1993
Here is something that should stop you cold.
Marital rape — a husband raping his wife — was legal in every US state until 1976. It wasn’t a crime nationwide until 1993.
The legal foundation for this goes back to a 17th-century English jurist named Matthew Hale, who declared that a husband cannot be guilty of raping his wife because she has given “irrevocable consent” through the act of marriage. Hale, who was known by contemporaries as a “rabid woman-hater,” cited no legal authority for this claim. He simply stated it. And for more than 330 years, Western legal systems accepted it as gospel.
The marital contract, under this framework, meant a woman’s body became the legal property of her husband. She had signed over her right to say no at the altar. Her consent was considered perpetual and irrevocable regardless of what she wanted, what she experienced, or what was done to her.
This wasn’t ancient history that modern law corrected swiftly. South Carolina still imposes a maximum sentence for spousal rape that is 20 years shorter than for the same crime committed by a stranger. Some states still carry legal loopholes that treat marital rape as a lesser offence. The principle that a wife’s body belongs to her husband has not been fully excised from American law — it has merely been trimmed.
And for the men gathering in the “Zzz” Telegram group, drugging their wives and filming their assaults? They are not operating from nowhere. They are operating from a cultural and legal inheritance that spent centuries telling them their wives’ bodies were theirs to use.
Christian Nationalism and the Wife as Property
This is where it gets more uncomfortable. Because the legal history of marital rape doesn’t exist in isolation — it runs directly through the same theological framework currently driving American policy.
The doctrine that a wife’s body belongs to her husband is not a fringe interpretation of Christianity. It is, historically, a mainstream one. The concept of “wifely submission” — Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord” — has been used for centuries to justify a husband’s unlimited sexual access to his wife.
Christian nationalism, the political ideology currently shaping federal law and executive orders, operates from a theological framework that defines the family as a husband-led hierarchy. Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page operational playbook — explicitly calls for federal policy to prioritize families “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children,” and to replace policies supporting other family structures with those promoting “stable, married, nuclear families.” It calls for the HHS to redirect federal funds to support a “biblically based” definition of family.
When you define the family as a hierarchy with a male head, and when that definition is rooted in a theological tradition that viewed the wife as the husband’s property, you are building a legal and cultural structure that minimizes — and historically eliminated — a wife’s right to say no.
This is not a distant theological abstraction. It is a live policy framework. And it exists on the same cultural continuum as a Telegram group where men share tips on drugging their wives.
Andrew Tate and the Industrialization of Misogyny
You cannot talk about the online rape academy without talking about the ecosystem that produced it.
Andrew Tate — self-proclaimed “King of Toxic Masculinity,” currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania which he denies — is the most Googled human being in 2022 and has over 10 million followers on X. He built his audience by marketing a specific product to young men: the idea that masculinity means dominance, that women are resources to be managed and monetized, and that feminism is an assault on men’s rightful power.
His now-defunct course, the “PhD Program” — which stood, without irony, for “Pimping Hoes Degree” — taught men how to seduce women and coerce them into working as webcam performers for his financial benefit. He described it as “my recruitment system.” He stated explicitly that it is “impossible to have a woman work for you without having sex with her.”
Research published in 2025 describes Tate’s content as facilitating “gender radicalization” — a pipeline from mainstream self-improvement content to explicit misogyny, following the same radicalization pathways as other forms of extremism. Boys aged 12 to 17 in London schools show increasing consumption of manosphere content, using Tate’s misogynistic language as “social currency.” British teachers report male students increasingly blaming women for sexual assault.
This is not a fringe problem. Netflix’s “Adolescence” — the fastest charting TV show in the platform’s history in 2025 — is a dramatization of exactly this pipeline: a teenage boy radicalized by manosphere content into murdering a female classmate. It is fiction based on the reality that educators, researchers, and parents live with every day.
Turning Point USA, the organization co-founded by Charlie Kirk and funded by major conservative donors, has platformed figures deeply embedded in the manosphere ecosystem. They have hosted speakers who promote traditional gender hierarchies, frame feminism as civilizational threat, and align ideologically with the same currents that produce Tate’s audience. The overlap between Christian nationalist politics, the manosphere, and organized conservative infrastructure is not coincidental — it is a shared ideology about who gets power and who is required to submit to it.
Why Women Don’t Trust Young Men. Let’s Be Honest About It.
There is a conversation that happens in private among women, in groups, in whisper networks, that rarely makes it to public discourse because saying it out loud invites immediate accusations of man-hating.
Here it is: a significant number of women — particularly younger women — are afraid of young men. Not all young men. But enough to constitute a pattern that is reshaping dating, relationships, and social interaction in ways researchers are only beginning to document.
Young men are being systematically exposed, through algorithmically amplified content, to an ideology that frames women as inferior, as objects of conquest, as resources to be extracted. They are being told that women who won’t submit are broken, that feminism is the enemy, that male dominance is natural and righteous. They are being told this by figures with millions of followers, by content that surfaces on every major platform, by a manosphere that has industrialized the production and distribution of misogyny.
And then they are showing up in women’s lives — in classrooms, in workplaces, on dates — carrying that ideology, often without fully realizing they’ve internalized it.
The women who pull back aren’t paranoid. They are responding rationally to available data.
When a Telegram group of nearly a thousand men can exist to share rape footage of their own wives, when a website with 62 million monthly visits hosts their content, when the cultural figures with the largest reach among young men explicitly teach that women are subordinate, women’s wariness is not a pathology. It is a reasonable response to documented harm.
The answer to this is not to tell women to trust more. The answer is to dismantle the systems producing the threat.
What Needs to Happen
Section 230 must be reformed. Not eliminated — elimination would collapse legitimate online infrastructure — but fundamentally restructured to remove immunity from platforms that knowingly profit from, categorize, and algorithmically distribute sexual assault content. A platform that tags rape footage with searchable categories is not a neutral conduit. It is a distributor. It should be treated as one.
The marital rape exemptions that remain in various state laws must be closed. Every state that treats spousal rape as a lesser offence than rape by a stranger is encoding into law the 17th-century doctrine that a wife’s body belongs to her husband. That is not a conservative value. It is a property rights relic and it needs to go.
The pipeline from manosphere content to real-world harm must be treated as a radicalization problem. Researchers are already documenting it this way. Policy and platform accountability need to catch up. When content demonstrably produces radicalized attitudes toward women that manifest in violence, the platforms distributing it at scale bear responsibility.
The connection between Christian nationalist politics and the ideology that produces marital rape culture must be named. This is not about attacking faith. It is about holding accountable a specific political movement that is using theological language to encode a hierarchy in which women’s bodily autonomy is subordinate to male authority — in law, in policy, and in culture.
Survivors deserve legal recourse. The women in those videos on Motherless.com cannot sue the platform. They cannot compel removal without navigating systems designed to protect the platform rather than them. That is a moral failure of the legal structure and it needs to change.
The Through Line
A 17th century jurist declares that a wife has no right to refuse her husband.
Three hundred and thirty years of law encode that declaration.
A political movement uses theological framing to preserve and extend a hierarchy in which women’s autonomy is subordinate to male authority.
An internet built on a 1996 law provides infrastructure immune from accountability.
A cultural ecosystem of influencers industrializes misogyny and distributes it to millions of young men.
A Telegram group of nearly a thousand men shares footage of their drugged, unconscious wives.
A website with 62 million monthly visitors hosts it all.
None of this is disconnected. None of this is a coincidence. It is a system — built over centuries, maintained through law, culture, and technology, and currently being reinforced by political movements that want us to call it “traditional values.”
We can call it what it actually is.
Sources: CNN As Equals investigation (cnn.com/drugged-raped-and-online), Snopes fact-check on 62M figure, Wikipedia/Marital Rape in the United States, Wikipedia/Section 230, Project 2025/Heritage Foundation (GLAAD, ACLU), Roberts et al. 2025 (Sage Journals), Love et al. 2025 (Sage Journals), The Conversation/Andrew Tate and the Manosphere, NBC News/Adolescence, CSE Institute/Andrew Tate, Congress.gov/Section 230 overview, Crowell & Moring/Section 230 Reform.
Thena Solara writes for yupisaidthat.com. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, contact RAINN at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or rainn.org.
