Eight arrested in international crackdown on drug-facilitated sexual assault

Eight people were arrested after the National Crime Agency identified more than 270 individuals linked to one online forum and its successors used to facilitate drug-facilitated sexual assault.

The abuse involves victims being sedated with drugs or alcohol before rape or sexual assault, with videos and photos sometimes shared online. Since October 2025, investigators have sent more than 210 intelligence packages to partners in the UK and overseas, and those packages have led to at least 14 separate investigations. The true scale of the offending is under-detected and under-reported because victims may not remember what happened after being drugged.

Project Medusa brings together law enforcement from the UK, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain, alongside Europol. Europol's separate work on drug-facilitated sexual assault has identified 156 victims and perpetrators. Investigators linked the current case to the high-profile French prosecution of Gisèle Pelicot, after her husband Dominique Pelicot was convicted in 2025, and similar cases have since emerged across Europe.

Nigel Leary, the NCA deputy director, said the offending was "no longer isolated behaviour" but an "increasingly organised" and "truly international" network with group members identified in dozens of countries spanning every continent. Helen Millichap, director of the UK’s National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, called it a "serious and evolving threat" rooted in domestic abuse.

The response now runs through police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service, health services, Sexual Assault Referral Centres and specialist organisations, in an effort to identify offending, safeguard victims and disrupt the networks behind it. A 2025 tip-off from German journalists about a platform used to facilitate the offences helped expose the scale of the operation.