“I know I did something terrible and that it has had terrible consequences,” 27-year-old Chinese student Zhongyi J* told a Munich court in February. On sentencing day the court found him guilty of two counts of attempted murder and seven counts of aggravated rape, and imposed a prison term of 11 years and three months. The judge described the offenses as “monstrous acts,” saying the case had taken the law into “uncharted legal territory.”
Prosecutors said Zhongyi J* drugged and raped his neighbour at least seven times between February and December 2024, administering life-threatening doses of sedatives and anaesthetics. The case has been likened to the long-term abuse of Gisele Pelicot in France because of the pattern of repeated, secret drugging and sexual violence.
Zhongyi J*’s trial is part of a wider probe into eight men who belonged to a Telegram chat group called the “German Driving School.” All but one of the men are Chinese and all but one live in Germany. The victims identified so far are overwhelmingly Chinese women who were partners, colleagues, friends or acquaintances of the suspects; many only learned what had happened when police contacted them.
In the chat group, members used coded language to arrange attacks and share details: discussing which medications to use, dosages, how to assault women once they were unconscious, and what tools to employ. They exchanged photographs and recordings of assaults. Terms such as “looking for a car” meant seeking a new victim, “oil” or “fuel” referred to sedatives, a “luxury car” meant an especially attractive woman, and sedated women were called “dead pigs.”
Authorities first arrested Dapeng Z*, the group’s alleged ringleader who lives in Frankfurt, after several victims filed complaints in Hesse. Prosecutors say that in January 2021 he laced a female friend’s meal with a sedative, raped her and documented the assault with a phone, a digital camera and a GoPro mounted on his head. He is accused of drugging and raping multiple female colleagues thereafter.
Another member, Tong Z*, a student in Berlin, was convicted of rape in August 2025. He allegedly drugged and raped a woman on a date and filmed the attack, and also secretly recorded eight other women with hidden cameras he had installed in bathrooms. His chat alias was “God by Day, Devil by Night.”
The network began to unravel after Dapeng Z* targeted women offering apartments for sublet in January 2024. At viewings he allegedly covered the women’s mouths and noses with cloths soaked in anesthetic, raped them and recorded the assaults. Four women later recalled and reported the incidents; Dapeng Z* was arrested in November 2024.
Charlotte Hirz, a psychologist at LARA, a Berlin resource centre for victims of sexualised violence, said the striking element of the cases is the dehumanisation of victims. She pointed to how perpetrators compared women to cars or called them “dead pigs,” and warned that online groups can reinforce misogynistic fantasies when there is no outside social corrective to challenge members’ behaviour.
Investigative reporters at NDR’s STRG_F spent more than a year exposing similar Telegram networks. They found chat groups with hundreds to tens of thousands of members where participants discussed how to drug and rape women and shared recordings. In those chats some users wrote things like “It’s not rape if she doesn’t know it happened.” The groups also included links to online stores selling substances with sedative effects.
Under current German law, possession and viewing of real-life sexual assault footage is not automatically a criminal offence, and mere membership of a group where such material is shared is not sufficient for prosecution. Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig of the SPD has proposed reforms that would criminalise the distribution of such images as part of a broader package to tighten rules around online sexual abuse and abuse involving AI.
Germany’s rape laws have faced intensified scrutiny recently after protests connected to allegations made by TV personality Collien Fernandes, who says her ex-husband distributed hundreds of AI-generated pornographic images of her and ran fake social media accounts impersonating her; he denies the claims.
At Zhongyi J*’s sentencing the judge said the problem was not confined to any single country: “this is not a Chinese or French phenomenon, but also a German one. A global one.” The judge added that Zhongyi J* was “lucky” not to receive a life sentence, noting that life imprisonment had been a legal possibility. The 11-year term was described as lenient given the seriousness of the crimes, but the judge cited the defendant’s remorse, a partial confession, his young age and the fact that a victim-offender mediation process had taken place.
*Editor’s note: Deutsche Welle follows the German press code and withholds full names of suspected criminals or victims to protect privacy.*
Edited by Rina Goldenberg