Former CNN Anchor Breaks Silence on Disturbing Crime Ring Hiding In Plain Sight

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1:32Jennifer:Okay, the following story includes stories of sexual assault that may be triggering for some listeners. An explosive new CNN investigation is pulling back the curtain on what is being called a academy. Let's pop this up. Exposing a global academy and shocking group chats, men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives and swap tips. I'm getting away with it. And here to discuss this very troubling story with me is Brooke Baldwin. She's an award-winning journalist, top sub-stack writer and storyteller devoted to truth and transformation. We all loved watching her anchor on CNN. I was obsessed with CNN.

2:13Jennifer:I spent so much time with you before today. And now she's busy building a platform all on her own in independent media where it's all at. Look at you, sister. Let's go, sis. Okay. This is very troubling. It's incredibly troublesome. I mean, just on so many levels. First of all, just, it's so nice to meet you. It's so nice to meet you too. what a way to like open up a conversation but let's just dive right in because that's how we roll yeah you know so saskiah van doorn is the paris bureau chief over at cnn she produced for me when we covered terror attacks in europe once upon a time as one does as a journalist and so when i saw this story and what she explained to me is it had it first came out and i don't think it got as much as many eyeballs and then something happened and it just went poof and it went viral here in the States.

2:59And essentially the story is I, I was, I feel so naive. I just had no idea that this even existed where it's like these, a lot of times husbands, partners in the safety of one's home are taking in one woman's case, Zoe Watts, like the child's, you know, sleeping medication, crunching it up into her nighttime tea, drugging her to be unconscious. And then And there are these hashtags on these porn websites. By the way, the websites, not the dark web, like just broad daylight, where it's called like hashtag eye checks, where they're like pulling their eyelids up. So you can see that they're completely, or their limbs or, you know, so they're out.

3:39And then these men are raping their wives and partners. And then they're uploading the video to the internet where millions and millions of people are visiting every month.

3:48Jennifer:That's what I wanna talk about, the scale of this. The scale of people that viewed this was 60 million? It was like something like 62 and I know it was 80. Sasuke told me it was 80 million visits to this website, motherless.com. And then within that, like there are all these subsections of, you know, kink. And like there is a world of safe and fun kink. And then there's a world of kink that's really crime. And that is what this is. This is rape. Doesn't matter if you're, you know, if you're unconscious, you're not consenting. It's your husband. You're not consenting. Of course. And so some people, and I say some, like I was talking to a lawyer out of Texas yesterday who actually represented a lot of the young women who were survivors from Larry Nassar.

4:31And she was like, Brooke, 98 % of men do not serve time.

4:39Jennifer:And you know, I was talking to you before we clicked record. My audience, we follow a lot of politics. And this is very much linked to the psychological soil that MAGA and autocrats nationwide are harvesting for us. And it is they're promoting a form of toxic masculinity. And they are trying to diminish women's rights and diminish victims' rights. Look at the cover up of the Epstein files. Yes. And I want to just to show how depraved this is. Here is just one screenshot from these group chats. Let's pop this up, Kylie. User one, been wanting to do this to my missus for ages. I can't get blank, but honestly shit scared of overdose.

5:27Jennifer:User two says always start low. You're thinking long game. So if first time ain't enough, up the dose. And user three says blank milliliters in a milkshake. She felt nauseous. she gave her so gave her a tablet of Imodium was blank did fuck her well but she was not out enough and had no more blank on me and so yeah you interviewed some of these women were they aware the next morning it's a great question um first of all just on that screenshot that you showed on these websites, it's not just that they are uploading these videos of rape, but they are coaching one another, like man to man, like, hey, this amount of Ambien really worked for me and my wife.

6:26You should try this. Or what kinds of drugs are you using? Or there's ways in which you can procure said sleeping medication to drug one's wife. I interviewed Zoe Watts over in England, who had been with her husband for like years and years and years. And she, and this other survivor described like kind of feeling extra groggy, but you know, as women, we gaslight ourselves. Totally. We were like, Oh, we have small kids or we've moved into a new home or it must just be that I'm exhausted or I'm exhausted from work, whatever it is. Like we would never think, ah, my husband has drugged me and is fucking me unconscious.

7:05We would never think that and so what this story does is like does what great journalism does it's like shining this light into the darkness of like oh fuck like this is actually happening this is called sleep content on these porn websites and i was talking to an algorithm expert the other day on my substack where it's kind of like the manosphere where it's like a young man jumps on the internet and is like looks up, you know, great protein shake and four clicks down, they're in the territory of, you know, Andrew Tate. Nick Fuentes. Exactly. Yeah. It's the same kind of thing on these porn sites and the porn sites, by the way, aren't liable.

7:45So they're not being pulled down and it's like, all right, strangulation set, whatever.

7:52Jennifer:Hold up. So these porn sites have evidence of crime on their websites and they're not held liable. It's something to do with, and I'm not a lawyer, but it's the Communications Decency Act, like section, it's either 230 or 260, where basically that's correct. They are not liable for what is uploaded because the site itself is not uploading the video. It's these individuals. And so it's up to the individuals and then the burden falls on the woman to be aware of what's happening to her to then take it to police, which is like, you know, of course it's like on the woman to do everything, to even be aware, to know this is happening.

8:36I'm changing my vocabulary. It's not being happening to her, it's being done to her. Yeah, they're being raped.

8:41Jennifer:They're being raped. You've since interviewed two drug facilitated marital rape survivors. What stood out most to you about your interviews with these women? What struck you? What is sticking with them? Um, I think it's the fact that understandably, like women, when they find out this is done to them, we don't report it immediately. We're not like, ah, I'm being raped by my husband. Let me call police. It's, it's denial. It's like the self gaslighting that I don't want to believe it, that I want to protect my family. A lot of these, you know, women have little children. I don't want them to know that their dad is capable of this and did this to me in the net, like in the one room over.

9:26So it takes a slow process. And sometimes there's the issues of statute of limitations, but you can file in a civil case. But it just. I can't even imagine, but it just a lot of these women are now on the other side. I talked to Zoe and this happened to her for like something like 16 years. And she didn't know until her then husband fessed up like after church as if he was ticking off a grocery list. And oh, by the way, I had an affair when you were pregnant and I've been, you know, raping you. Except he's like, except I've been, you know, giving your son's sleeping medication and I've been having sex with you.

10:07And then the man says, but at least I'm not cheating on you or I'm not looking at other women on porn as though that that is some kind of justification for this behavior. That's what. And to your point about like, just let's like zoom out 30 ,000 feet. It's like you look at this president. Yeah. You look at the private island and all that happened there and beyond. The lack of any kind of consequences or justice other than like the one woman tied to the whole case is the one serving time. You know, it's like it goes on and on and on and on. Members of Congress behaving badly, this code of silence.

10:41And I just hope that through these women speaking up, and I know CNN's not done with the story. I've been in touch with Saskia. I'm like, girl, you got to come over here and talk to some American women. I just think that the more people speak up and out about it, not just about drug-induced marital rape, but just sexual assault in general. It just, it's like courage is contagious.

11:04Jennifer:I completely agree. And I also want to point out the parallels when I heard this story that I think this type of man that is being promoted with this veneer that they're somehow strong. So if you think about Pete Hegseth, who to me, he reeks of weakness of insecurity. If you think about Donald Trump, he reeks of weakness and insecurity. If you think about a lot of these men in the cabinet, and then these men that are trying to make themselves feel powerful, but they have to sedate their own wives in order to dominate them, that there is a psychological flaw in men right now that we keep talking about.

11:53Jennifer:we need to lift men up. And is it that we need to lift them up or is it that maybe we're not calling them out enough? I think it's a really old crusty system of how men and women have existed. And go with me here because I'm going to first relate it to race and then I'm going to relate it to gender. I think like having been a journalist as long as I was having a front seat to the world, you know, from CNN, when I think back to like when Obama was in the White House and you think of all the racist xenophobe fill in the blank, I feel like they all kind of crawled under their rocks and then only got more and more and more furious that this black man was the leader of the free world.

12:35And then the second Donald Trump got elected, it was like everyone got a free pass. It's like everyone crawled out from under their rocks and everyone feels free to let their, you know, freak flag fly, they're racist, misogynist, all the things. And I feel like something happened with women where Me Too happened, there felt like there was this liberation, this movement, this momentum, then I think the pendulum swung too far. And a lot of the men who watched Me Too happen were like, fuck. And now I feel this, I don't know if you feel this, I'm sitting in this gorgeous, soft, feminine, pink, luscious, you know, studio of yours.

13:18Thank you for that, by the way. And I think women are feeling more and more in charge, embodied, permission to exist. And men are like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And in terms of these rapes, it's like, they're like, whoa, when you're unconscious, I'm taking my power back. It's about power and control.

13:43Jennifer:Yeah. And I think, what do you think? I think it's about power and control because inherently they feel weak. I think Pete Hegseth feels incredibly weak and emasculated all the time. And he thinks, where does that come from? Is that like, not to get all, we don't know them and we're not therapists, but I would guess it goes way back for him. I think it goes way back. I think that even his mother had written a letter telling him to straighten up that then she had to rectify on Fox News when he was being, I think he's an alcoholic. So it can be addiction. It can be inner childhood trauma. It can be that their dad was the type of dad that said, Hey, quit being a pussy.

14:18Jennifer:Don't be a sissy. Instead of embracing somebody's emotional character, like I have two sons and it's perfectly fine for men to feel emotions and process their emotions. Feel vulnerable, feel soft my dad's generation he's a boomer he served in vietnam and these poor kids you know went my dad was either going to get drafted or he had to sign up to go serve so he and his friend signed up to go serve in vietnam and you know always knew something there was there was something locked in there you just kind of know and it wasn't until last summer my youngest son had a friend that died unexpectedly. He drowned right before their senior year.

14:59Jennifer:It was just traumatizing. My dad called me and he said, how's Roman doing? That's the name of my youngest son. I said, oh my God, this is so hard. He's grieving. He's really struggling. And my dad opened up to me, Brooke, and he's almost 80. And he said, you know, my best friend and I, we signed up to go serve in Vietnam and, um, because we were going to get drafted and we were in combat together and he got shot in front of me and he and my dad said to me I've never told anybody this but it bothered me and it sat with me all these years as friends sitting there bleeding out and men we put this burden on them you can't be a pussy you can't feel feelings and I told my dad dad I wish you would have told somebody so well we just we didn't talk about that stuff so they bury it and the universal thing is whether you're a man or your woman your parents are dysfunctional they're gonna to fuck you up.

15:54Jennifer:There's degrees of dysfunction. You know, there's some degree, like my husband's parents fucked him up. The trauma was really, really bad. Mine was moderate. You know, everybody has some, and instead of embracing these things and openly talking about them, we put this burden on men that they have to be tough guys. And particularly in those types, like maybe an uber religious culture, like I think Pete Hexeth is probably a really bad Bible thumper, which is of a religious psychosis in my opinion yes and so in this situation these you know there's some i mean i think we have to look to freud there's some mommy issues there's some daddy issues and all of these things are happening at one time you have the me too you have parity coming yeah men and women the parody is is coming like we've made major progress huge and before they get there this is the final totally it's like as we're making just that leap forward there's always is that pull back first sit down in the pullback right totally yeah i totally agree so i think those all of these things are kind of happening simultaneously and you see the worst character defects of masculinity on full display not just in the united states you see it in russia you saw it brazil yes you saw hungary just throughout there yes and this is the final push and so these journalists and this is why i always tell people i'm not a journalist i'm a commentator because Journalism is the gold standard.

17:20Jennifer:Uncovering this and shining a light on this injustice so that people who have sons and have young men in their lives can talk to them. Also, at the same time, I'm very worried about the unmitigated access youth have to porn. That's a whole part of this conversation. But I just want to first say thank you for saying all that. And I'm right there with you, sister. I'm from the South too. I love a good strong strapping man. I love some vast masculinity and some strength, but I was just saying to my former partner, you know, today on the phone, I was like, I love you vulnerable. I love you. You know, show me that side of you.

18:01I know you're tough. I know you can carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. It takes more strength to show that. Yes. Yes. So permission for men to, to, to be all that they are. And I think with porn, I think it is so prolific, especially with like, I was about to say younger folks, but I think it's just everywhere all the time, all at once. I think the issue with porn too is the algorithm. You know, it's like, I'm not a, this is my tech impersonation. Oh, you're into this. Like, I'm going to feed you this and this and this, and then it's going to get even creepier and even creepier and then creepier crawls into the crime.

18:37And that somehow needs to get fixed. And my hope is that good journalists will then through exposing stories like this and through literally crime being uploaded to the internet and thousands of men coaching one another. Like I was talking to a therapist and he was saying it's, it's, it's a lot of it is about belonging. I think this speaks to also the culture of men and the women making these strides, the men, it's a, it's a, it's a lack of identity structure. It's a belonging issue. And so it's collective abuse. They're all in on it. And literally on this website, the reporter was explaining to me, you know, if you upload X number of sleep content, you know, videos, you get like extra stars on your profile.

19:21So it's like a dopamine hit, sense of belonging and collective abuse.

19:28Jennifer:Oh my God. It's just, this is just one of these stories that really shocks the conscience. It should. Yeah. Thank you for bringing it to light on your show. It absolutely should. And I think there's, you know, if you look at our current president, his ex-wife accused him of marital rape. She retracted it later on, but at some point she made a credible claim. And of course we know about E. Jean Carroll. But there, I believe is a push to right now, to normalize this, to dehumanize women and to put women back into places where we're not sitting in these spaces doing this and you recently wrote in your sub stack and you talked about when you were covering the um uh confirmation hearings of brett cavanaugh who was you know very emotional during his which is fine i have no problem with men being emotional and he was credibly accused and i want you to share this and then if you if you're comfortable yeah i read your sub stack before you got here because i think there is liberation and collective healing in making people feel safe enough to share their stories and normalizing the humanity of women so if you'll kind of share with my listener that journey because i really thought it was beautiful

20:53if you're comfortable i am i think my emotion is coming because i've never spoken about it out loud and I really am grateful to you the timing of all of this I didn't mean for any of this to happen but you know it's it's wild when so I was on I anchored my show on CNN for so so so long and I was hosting my show it was 2018 when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was testifying and I mean if we remember to that time like the country came to a standstill like we were wall to wall on this coverage as she was she was testifying against the then nominee for the Supreme Court. And, and I just remember, like, at that time, we can all try to think back to 2018 and watching her testify, like, men and women were calling into C-SPAN, like, you know, plugging up their phone lines of all these people feeling this need to like, share their own story of rape and sexual assault.

21:49So that was extraordinary. It was a time of like, belief and memory and owning their stories. And And so I had like a 20 something year old producer who worked on my show, come into my office at that time and shared her story of rape from college. I had another producer friend of mine call me up and she wanted to tell me. And so I was honored to be this trusted space and also really brought up something that I had buried from when I was 21. And so I had written this monologue that I read on my show at the end of one of those days. and I tiptoed just as a journalist does. It was like I wanted to abide by the rules of journalism, which is you never talk about, you never make it about yourself.

22:34So I like tiptoed just up to the edge of telling my full truth, but there was one pronoun I intentionally avoided and it was the word I, like I experienced or this was done to me. And I remember feeling emotional at the time and people who were paying attention, you can hear when you listen to the clip, you can hear it in my voice you can hear my tone change my eyes got just watery but i didn't want to make it about me i we got phone calls to see an npr it was broke talking about herself and i was like i don't want to talk to anyone that's as far as i'm gonna go and i wrote my substack this past weekend because i have been so moved by the courage of these women in this Rape Academy story and having interviewed them on my sub stack, something like, you know, the book, the body keeps a score.

23:25It was like, I hadn't thought about this. My intellect hadn't thought about this thing that was done to me when I was 21 until I started doing all this research and my body just started to like vibrate with truth. And I decided that now 25 years later, you know, I wanted to share the story of when I was a 21 year old, just shy of graduating the University of North Carolina, you know, in my Carolina blue robe and going out in the world to see if I can make it as a TV reporter. And I was sitting at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a good girlfriend of mine at the time. And, you know, we're on spring break and I was 21 in college and we had had maybe a drink, maybe two, and she wanted to go home.

24:13And and I didn't. And she left me. And at that time, in 2001, there were no like there was no texting there. I had like a flip phone with maybe my parents, you know, phone number in it in Atlanta. And, and there I was just sitting all by myself, this baby 21 year old, like I wasn't a baby, but equally like, I was not a wise woman yet. And these two men approached me at the bar. And Jen, Like, I remember they had a drink. I remember I must have drunk it. I am convinced there was something in the drink. And then my memory is like, like, it went from the polo lounge, to I remember sitting in the back of an SUV, to then being at the Chateau Marmont.

25:05And then suddenly I woke up on the tile floor of my hotel bathroom with this man, half just doing a very quick check of did I, what did I, and I was so groggy. and even in that moment I was still like so southern in that moment that like when he I sort of hit him and eventually please will you leave you know I should have kicked his ass off my balcony and then it wasn't I never even thought that was sexual assault because I was like I was young I was dumb I must have brought it on myself like that wasn't like I wasn't in a dark alleyway It was like at a fancy, you know, like I just, and, and it was, I don't know what happened.

26:03I don't need to know. All I know is something really horrible was done to me. And all these years later, um, I've never spoken it out loud until you.