The High Commissioner for Children, Sarah el Haïry, warned on Saturday of the resurgence of the Coco website, closed by the courts in 2024 after being accused of having been used in the commission of numerous sexual crimes, promising to “track down” its initiators.
Daily life West France revealed on Friday the reopening under a new URL address and under the name Cocoland of the platform at the center of several criminal cases including the resounding Mazan rape trial. For ten years, Dominique Pelicot – sentenced to 20 years in prison – hit his wife Gisèle Pélicot with anxiolytics to rape her and have her raped by dozens of men recruited via Coco.
“Homophobic ambushes, rapes, drug trafficking”
“The return of the Coco site is a real slap in the face to the promise of protection we make,” reacted Sarah el Haïry on RMC. “These sites are not innocuous places, they use all the loopholes, they look for prey, the prey are children” and facilitate “homophobic ambushes, rapes, drug trafficking and human trafficking”. “There are procedures that have been launched, they will make it possible to close them, we will track them down, we will harass them, we will not give them a break,” she warned.
Registered abroad, considered a den of predators by child protection associations and implicated in homophobic ambushes, the Coco website was closed by the courts in June 2024.
Its founder, the Italian Isaac Steidl, was indicted on January 9, 2025 in Paris, notably for complicity in drug trafficking, possession and distribution of child pornography images, corruption of minors via the Internet and criminal conspiracy. He disputes the accusations.
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