During Sexual Assault Awareness month, a new and troubling expose from CNN puts the spotlight on the hidden, online world of men secretly wanting to learn the best ways to sexually abuse the women that love and trust them — their own partners.
As a part of the “As Equals Series” on gender inequality, reporters went undercover on websites and chatrooms like Motherless and Telegram, where men seek advice on best practices to sexually abuse and manipul
ate their partners. Some porn websites highlight so-called “sleep” content, with more than 20,000 videos of men filming themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show a state of sleeping or being sedated, with some “eyecheck” videos gaining 50,000 views.The “sleep” content is often categorized with descriptive tags like #passedout and #eyecheck. In one “Zzz” chat group, a user admitted to wanting to do this to his “mrs,” but was fearful of an overdose. But another user jumped at the opportunity to show the “proper” way. “Always start low. You’re thinking of a long game so if its first time isn’t enough, up the dose,” the user responded.
Another Motherless user, said to be located on the North African coast, claims to have a business selling “sleeping liquids”—a bottle of the liquid, described as “tasteless and odorless,” for roughly $175 each, to any address in the world. “Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything,” he said.
To showcase its worth, users sometimes livestream the abuse in real time for $20; however, cryptocurrency is the preferred method of payment. Like a user in West Africa who claimed his wife was sleeping, he heard snoring. He then climbed on top of her before the video ended.
While some men push being careful to avoid getting caught, that’s not always the case—some just outright confess. “We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street, or who’s even friending us on Facebook. You know, we worry about going to our car late at night in a car park, but we don’t worry about who you lie next to. I didn’t realize I had to,” Zoe Watts said.
She was a victim of her husband of 16 years and mother to their four children, who confessed to his disturbing ways on a random Sunday in 2018.
He admitted that the sexual abuse had been going on for years. “He just sort of said… ‘I’ve been using our son’s sleeping medication to put in your last cup of tea at night, to tie you down, take photographs and rape you,’” she remembered. “At the end of a very busy day… I was just grateful I had a cup of tea before I went to bed, because I was so tired and didn’t have to make it,” she said.
“You don’t expect anything other than innocence to come from your partner. I’ve had people say: ‘Yeah, but he’s your husband,’ or ‘but you weren’t awake.’ ‘So… it’s not the same as being taken down an alleyway, is it?”
While Watts’ abuser is serving an 11-year sentence for rape, sexual assault by penetration, and drugging, his victim continues to struggle with using the word rape to describe what happened to her, labeling it as too painful.
She’s not alone, as troubling data
from the World Health Organization shows close to one in three women around the world are subjected to sexual violence by their partner during their lifetime, a figure that has barely changed since 2000. In 2025, 316 million women, with 11% being age 15 or older, experienced physical or sexual abuse by an intimate partner.The progress on limiting the amount of violence within intimate partner violence has been incredibly slow, with the decline only reaching 0.2% annually in the last 20 years.
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