A Russian man who operates a fetish Web site where prosecutors say a New York police officer met others interested in killing and cooking women told a jury on Tuesday that users enjoy talking about gruesome topics, including sexual asphyxiation, sex with dead bodies and cannibalism.
Authorities say many of Officer Gilberto Valle’s alleged online kidnapping plots were hatched on DarkFetishNet.
However, Sergey Merenkov said members like Valle also know how to draw the line between fantasy and reality. The chats, he said, are role play and photographs of women being tortured are the work of “models, not real women.”
“It’s a social media network very similar to Facebook,” Merenkov, 34, said in describing how the site works.
“It does everything that Facebook does,” he said.
Merenkov testified his site is “just like [Facebook] but ... oriented to people with fetishes that are not considered to be standard.”
Asked whether he knows all of the 37,000 members of his Web site, Merenkov scoffed at a prosecutor.
“No,” he said, drawing muted smiles from weary jurors. “That’s like asking [Facebook creator Mark] Zuckerberg if he knows each and every member of Facebook.’’
The videotaped testimony came on a day Valle opted not to take the witness stand at his kidnapping conspiracy trial in federal court in Manhattan. Lawyers were due back in court yesterday to discuss jury instructions before closing arguments set for today in a case that has made Valle a tabloid sensation.
The evidence shows “this is all fantasy role play,” defense attorney Robert Baum said outside court.
Valle, 28, was arrested in October last year after his wife discovered the chats on his computer and fled their home, turning a computer over to the FBI in Reno, Nevada.
The government has conceded that Valle never met the purported Internet co-conspirators and that no women were harmed, but they argue he took concrete steps to carry out abductions of his wife and former college and high school classmates, including researching potential victims on a restricted law enforcement database.
The defense rested in the trial’s second week after playing the Merenkov video and calling only two other witnesses, including a paralegal who offered examples of profiles from Merenkov’s Web site. A woman who called herself Vicious-Vixen said she fantasized about “being executed with a gun and eaten as a meat girl,” but added: “I will never meet you in real life.”
The testimony of Merenkov was recorded using Skype from Moscow after he refused to travel to New York for the trial. Sitting in a leather chair, wearing a black T-shirt and speaking in Russian, he sipped from an “I Love Tea” mug as he explained how he and partners started a Web site in 2010 to create a Facebook-like environment for people with kinky fantasies.
Merenkov called sexual asphyxiation the “main fetish,” but said cannibalism and sex with dead people also were popular on the Web site, which is “oriented to people with fetishes that are not considered to be standard.”
He testified of the 38,000 members, about 4,500 are active users who commonly engage in role-play on the site, such as when a woman poses as a witch and a mob of angry villagers prepares to hang her.
“The girl could write: ‘I’m shivering from fright. They’re pulling me to the noose. I can feel the rope already on my neck,’” he testified.
On cross examination by Assistant US Attorney Randall Jackson, Merenkov said he did not know anything about Valle when the FBI contacted him last fall.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in