So I was wondering what I was going to do for the cold open of this episode, you know, that I can

clip down, put on TikTok, Insta, all of that promotion per episode. I was working on a completely

different story this week. I had my notes, my outline, double fisting Celsius. I had the entire

system humming along. And then this story hit the media and split second, everything changed.

And I know, I know, I know, y'all, every podcast, every substack, every breathless Instagram

post or infographic this week is going to open with some version of, we need to talk about

something difficult. But you know me, let's skip the throat

clearing and we're just going to go ahead and get into it. CNN spent months going undercover

inside a network of online communities where men are teaching other men how to drug and

rape their wives. Not strangers, their wives. The women they are

married to. The women they share a bed, a mortgage, rent, maybe even children with. These men are

swapping tips on dosages and medications. They're sharing videos of the assaults. They are live streaming for paying audiences.

They're running a delivery service, an actual business shipping sedatives to addresses around the world.

And the website at the center of all of this? It had 62 million visits in a single month, down from

73 million the month before. February was a slow month for a for a rape website, apparently.

Let that one land. 62 million people. And most of the traffic is from the United States, not the dark web, not some

encrypted server in a country you can't find on a map, a dot-com website accessible from any browser

on any phone in any living room and any suburb in this country. Right now, still live, still

operational, at least as I'm recording this. And they're calling it the Rape Academy.

And that's not sensationalism. That's not clickbait. That is what it is called.

A French lawmaker who herself was drugged by a sitting senator looked at the structure of these communities.

The forums, the tutorials,

...