"I know I did something terrible and that it has had terrible consequences," Zhongyi J*, a 28-year-old Chinese student, told a Munich court in February. Today, J* was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder and seven counts of aggravated rape and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison. The judge described J*'s crimes as "monstrous acts," adding that "we have entered uncharted legal territory."  

In a case reminiscent of the long-term abuse perpetrated by Dominique Pelicot against his wife Gisele in France, J* had been accused of drugging and raping his neighbor at least seven times between February and December 2024. Prosecutors said J* knowingly administered life-threatening doses of sedatives and anaesthetics.

J*'s trial in Munich is part of a broader series of investigations into eight men who were members of a Telegram chat group called the "German Driving School." All but one of the men are Chinese, and all but one live in Germany. Their victims — those that have been identified — were almost exclusively Chinese women and were the men's partners, colleagues, friends or acquaintances. Most were not aware of what had happened to them until they were contacted by the police. 

In the Telegram chat group, the men used code words to discuss what medications to use to sedate women, the dosages, what they did to women once they were unconscious, including what tools and objects were used. They also shared photographs and recordings of their crimes. "Looking for a car" referred to the search for a new victim; "oil" or "fuel" were code-words for sedatives; "luxury car" referred to an especially attractive woman and sedated women were referred to as "dead pigs."

Dapeng Z*, the ringleader of the group who lives in Frankfurt, was the first to be arrested by the police after several of his victims filed charges in the west-central state of Hesse. In January 2021, Z* mixed a sedative into a female friend's evening meal, raped her, and took photographs and film of his crimes using his phone, a digital camera, and a GoPro attached to his head. Z* went on to drug and rape multiple female colleagues. 

Another member of the group, Tong Z*, a student from Berlin, was convicted of rape in August 2025. He drugged and raped a woman during a date and filmed his crimes. He also secretly recorded another eight women using hidden cameras he had installed in bathrooms. His chat group pseudonym was "God by Day, Devil by Night."

The group's activities were exposed after Dapeng Z* began targeting women looking to sublet their apartments in January 2024. At the viewings, he covered their mouths and noses with a cloth drenched in anesthetic, raped them and documented the assaults. All of the four women remembered what had happened and reported it to the police and in November 2024 he was finally arrested. 

Misogynistic abuse fueled by online chat groups

"What I think makes this case particularly striking [...] is simply the dehumanization that becomes so clear in the way the perpetrators treat the victims: comparing them to cars or even calling them dead pigs," Charlotte Hirz, a psychologist at LARA, a resource center for victims of sexualized violence in Berlin, told DW. 

Online chat groups like the Telegram group run by Dapeng Z* helped to reinforce the process of dehumanization and fuel misogynistic fantasies among men, according to Hirz. "If there's no social corrective, or no one looking in from the outside to say, 'What's going on here?' or 'Are you guys actually crazy?', then of course these violent fantasies can gain much more traction," she said.

The STRG_F investigative reporting team at German public broadcaster NDR spent over a year uncovering these types of networks on Telegram. It found chat groups with hundreds to tens of thousands of members who discussed how to drug and rape women, and also shared recordings of their alleged crimes. "It's not rape if she doesn't know it happened," wrote one user. Online stores even placed links to date rape drugs and other substances with sedative effects in the chats.

The possession and viewing of real-life sexual assaults is not a criminal offense. Being a member of a chat group in which such material is shared is also not enough to be prosecuted. Germany's Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig, of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), plans to make the distribution of such images a criminal offense as part of a broader package of reforms.

Germany's rape laws have come under scrutiny in recent weeks following protests in the wake of allegations made by TV-personality Collien Fernandes against her ex-husband, actor Christian Ulmen. Fernandes has accused Ulmen of distributing hundreds of AI-generated pornographic images of her online, as well as being behind social media accounts impersonating her. Ulmen denies the allegations. 

In remarks during Zhongyi J*'s sentencing in Munich, the judge said that "this is not a Chinese or French phenomenon, but also a German one. A global one."

The judge told the defendant that he was "lucky" not to have been sentenced to life in prison. "Life in prison would have been a possibility; 11 years is a lenient sentence for your crimes. But the defendant has shown remorse, made a partial confession, and is still young. And a victim-offender mediation process took place," the judge said.

*Editor's note: Deutsche Welle follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and urges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.

If you or someone you know are experiencing or have experienced any kind of gender-based violence, the website lila.help (https://lila.help) lists trustworthy helplines and NGOs that offer support in almost every country in the world.

Edited by Rina Goldenberg