CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses sexual violence.
On March 26, CNN published an investigation exposing a hidden online network of men drugging and raping their wives and partners. But much of the initial response didn’t centre on the women in the story — it fixated on a number.
The piece revealed that user‑generated porn site Motherless.com had “around 62 million visits in February alone”, and that within it sat more than 20,000 “sleep” videos featuring unconscious or sedated women, many tagged with things like “#passedout” and “#eyecheck”. Through that content, CNN journalists traced their way into chat groups where men shared tips on sedatives, livestreamed assaults and swapped footage of women they said were their partners.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what much of the internet has chosen to focus on.
How the misinformation spiral started
On TikTok and Instagram, short clips reduced the article down into a single sentence: that CNN had supposedly found “62 million men” in a course teaching them how to drug and assault women. The number was shocking, shareable and easy to screenshot. It was also wrong.
Creators like Christian Divyne stepped in to unpack the actual story, explaining that 62 million refers to total monthly visits to Motherless, not a headcount of men in a rape chat. In a follow‑up video, he walked viewers through the article: the 20,000 “sleep” videos with hundreds of thousands of views, the “Zzz” group where around 1,000 men were allegedly sharing advice and the sellers offering “sleeping liquids” shipped worldwide. He stressed that “1,000 men in an international group chat on how to drug and assault women is still awful” and that “no matter how many men it is, it’s still awful, it’s still heinous, and the priority is still women’s safety”, while urging people to read the piece before spreading inflated claims.
So the misinformation didn’t come from CNN’s investigation itself, but from how its findings were summarised and amplified online. That nuance has mostly been lost in the shouting.
“Numbers are easier to argue against than the reality of men’s violence”
Anti-family violence advocate and writer Tarang Chawla told PEDESTRIAN.TV that the reaction says a lot about what we’re comfortable discussing.
“Numbers are easier to argue against than the reality of men’s violence. The statistic gave defensive men a technicality to latch onto. It let them move the conversation away from what the reporting was actually about: men allegedly sharing tactics and material relating to drugging, assaulting and filming women, so they debated the metric instead of confronting the behaviour,” he said.
He added that he sees something deeper in the rush to frame this as a data issue rather than a violence issue.
“I also think there is a cultural comfort in treating sexual violence as a misinformation problem rather than a gendered violence problem,” he said.
“Correcting a statistic feels manageable. Grappling with the fact that this abuse can be tech‑facilitated, socially reinforced, and perpetrated by husbands or partners is much more confronting.”
When parts of the internet decided the “real” scandal was an incorrect paraphrase, not the existence of livestreamed rapes of unconscious women, Chawla says that followed “a familiar pattern in public conversations about men’s violence against women”.
“The danger is that we end up in a conversation where people are more offended by feminist discourse than by the abuse itself. Accuracy should sharpen our analysis, not shrink our moral imagination.”
This story is not about a disputed number
Dr Tessa Boyd‑Caine, CEO of ANROWS (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety), describes the story as both “horrendous” and under‑discussed here. For her, the fixation on the 62 million figure is part of a broader tendency to minimise violence against women.
“Look, I mean this story is not about a disputed number. It’s about a shocking existence and scale of behaviour that is deeply distressing and also highly criminal,” she told P.TV.
“I think the kind of debate about numbers is actually an example of how we tend to minimise really serious violence against women. We’re having a debate about a statistic rather than confronting that this behaviour aligns with the broader evidence that attitudes tend to excuse and even normalise harm or violence against women.”
Boyd‑Caine points out that the CNN piece itself is upfront about the limits of the data. The journalists quote the World Health Organisation, which describes reliable, specific data on drug‑facilitated sexual assault as “scarce by design”, because perpetrators deliberately conceal and underreport these crimes. In that context, she says, other forms of evidence become crucial.
“Women are telling their stories, and then technology is validating that. Technology is verifying their accounts because these assaults, this abuse is being streamed,” she said.
“So there’s no suggestion that this is fake news. This is clearly… evidence of deep deep violence against women within what they consider to be the safety of their homes, and that’s the problem that we need to tackle.”
What we lose when we only argue about the stat
Both ANROWS and prevention organisation Our Watch stress that accuracy in reporting still matters. Our Watch CEO Patty Kinnersly has said that “when reporting is accurate, respectful to survivors and grounded in evidence, it helps shift the attitudes that drive violence against women”, but warned that poor coverage can “reinforce harmful attitudes and contribute to a culture where violence is tolerated”.
In this situation though, the loudest misinformation has emerged in the social media echo chamber around the story, not in the investigation itself. Boyd‑Caine worries that letting that debate dominate ends up harming the very people the piece was trying to centre.
“One of the most harmful things for victims and survivors of violence against women and children is when their stories are not heard,” she said.
“If we minimise those stories, if we shift the debate to a debate about statistics, we are buying into those attitudes that excuse this behaviour, and that is a key driver of violence.”
Chawla, reflecting on the survivors who spoke to CNN and the women he advocates for, says the article underlines how fragile our cultural understanding of consent still is.
“Too many people still treat consent as the absence of resistance, rather than the presence of free, informed and ongoing agreement. When a woman is asleep, incapacitated, drugged or unable to choose, there is no consent. The fact that this still needs to be said, and defended, tells us how much work remains,” he said.
The “62 million men” line was wrong.
It needed to be corrected and ultimately the internet has addressed the misinformation spread by social media users.
But if the conversation stops there, we’re letting a misquote overshadow what the reporters actually uncovered: men coaching each other on how to drug and rape their partners, platforms hosting and profiting from “sleep” content, and survivors still fighting to have assaults in their own beds recognised as rape.
That should be more than enough to hold our attention.
Help is available.
If you’re in distress, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online. If it’s an emergency, please call 000.
Under 25? You can reach the Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800 or chat online.
Lead image: TikTok @CC Reads / @Christian Divyne / @Brenna Pérez
The post Why Are We Fixated On ’62 Million Men’ Instead Of The Digital Rape Culture CNN Exposed? appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
