A 44-year-old Chinese national who went on a rape spree for years before he was caught has now been sentenced in an extraordinary case in Frankfurt. The details of the case are especially disturbing, considering the scale of the rapes and the fact that many women were so drugged that they never even knew they were raped until police informed them later.
In the Frankfurt Regional Court, the man, who has not been named, was found guilty on Friday of last week of attempted murder, aggravated rape, dangerous bodily harm, the distribution of violent pornographic content, and illegal trafficking in narcotics and pharmaceuticals.
The suspect was sentenced to 14 years in prison and ordered to be in subsequent preventive detention. The court also ordered him to pay five-figure sums to each of his approximately victims, who were mostly Chinese as well.
According to the court’s findings, between January 2020 and November 2024, the Chinese citizen drugged and raped women aged between 18 and 33 in several German cities, including Frankfurt, Göttingen, Nuremberg, Mannheim, and Dreieich.
According to Tagesschau, there were 20 different crimes tried during the trial, but there was no specific number of victims published.
He filmed and photographed his assaults, later sharing the footage in Telegram groups where he was called the “master” by other users due to his prolific raping abilities.
Presiding judge Jörn Immerschmitt stated the men shared rape fantasies and provided tips and advice to each other in the chat.
Notably, the group also referred to the infamous Gisèle Pelicot case in n France, which saw her husband organize men to come to his house and rape his drugged wife.
“Haha, I want to take part in this action too,” said the Chinese convicted man, referring to Pelicot.
The victims featured a wide array of different women, including the convicted man’s social circle, coworkers, close friends, lodgers, and neighbors.
The man also used Chinese platforms Xiaohongshu and WeChat to find his victims and even posed as a woman in some cases while offering rentals for prospective tenants. Once he met up with the victims, he drugged them with narcotics, raped them, and often filmed the act.
The woman in the case often had no idea they were even raped until the police approached them since they were sedated during the incident, creating a scenario where the trauma also only began long after the actual incident, according to taz newspaper.
Judge Immerschmitt said the victim experienced “very serious life changes, probably forever,” and many suffer from suicidal thoughts. A number of women have left their jobs and moved cities as a result of what they experienced.
The judge described a “narcissistic personality“ with a profound lack of empathy, with his actions becoming more brazen over the years.
In one case, he raped a colleague in the middle of a livestream and in another instance, he raped a lodger next to an 11-month-old baby.
Despite these shocking details, the judge, Immerschmitt, said that the court was deliberately not sharing certain details of the case with the public because they were too disturbing.
The attempted murder charge was also tied to the sedatives the man used, which could have killed the women he targeted due to the high quantities of the drug. In eight cases, he sedated women with prescription sleeping pills and raped them, with the judge ruling that the fact that he sedated them meant he also accepted their potential deaths. In several cases, he left the women unconscious while he left the apartment.
Investigators seized hard drives that contained 176,755 sexual videos and images, including serious sexual abuse of children.
The trial has been ongoing since October of last year, but it has not been widely reported on, nor has there been any fierce public debate in Germany about the rights of women. There has not been a single major news story on German public television about the case. German public news outlet Taggespiegel provided sparse details of the case, but Taz newspaper provided arguably the most in-depth details of the rapes.
Unlike the Pelicot incident, which sparked a national debate on rape, this case has sparked no type of national debate. There have also been no large-scale protests for the women involved, as there were in France following the Pelicot case.
Remarkably, another Chinese national, 27, is currently on trial for drugging, raping and filming his girlfriend for months. During the trial, he confessed to his actions, saying they were “rash, selfish, dangerous, ugly and uncouth.” He told the court he found sleeping women “very beautiful.”
German police data shows that Chinese nationals are consistently among the groups with the lowest rates of violent and sexual crime in Germany.
