A Thousand Men Are Drugging Their Wives. Millions of Us Are Covering for Them.
Motherless, Epstein, Pelicot, and the consciousness that keeps it all running.
**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
In late March 2026, CNN published a months-long investigation into a pornography site called Motherless and a Telegram group named “Zzz” connected to it. The Telegram group had close to a thousand men in it. They were from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, and elsewhere. They were trading doses. They were trading techniques for drugging unconscious women, usually their own wives and partners. They were trading footage of the assaults. One seller was dispatching “tasteless and odorless” sleeping liquids worldwide from a Spanish exclave on the North African coast, 150 euros a bottle. Others were running paid livestreams of assaults, twenty dollars a viewer.
Social media then took the CNN reporting and collapsed it into a single viral claim. “62 million men attended an online rape academy.” That figure came from the site’s total monthly traffic. It is not what the reporting said. The organized operation documented by CNN was roughly a thousand men. The 62 million was a site visit count.
And here is where the honest part gets hard. The argument over the number has itself become a kind of cover. A thousand men, organized, coordinated, and filming, is not small. A thousand is a catastrophe. But the moment the conversation becomes “well actually, it is not 62 million, it is only”... the consciousness running all of it is safe.
This essay is not about a thousand monsters. It is about the consciousness that protects them, and the ordinary men whose silence keeps that consciousness in power.
Stop counting the men. Start counting the cover.
A note on why this piece exists
If you came to Next Level Human through my writing on identity work, personal transformation, metabolism, healing, or personal growth, pieces like this may feel like a departure. They’re not. They are the work.
Next Level Human has always been about three things, in sequence. Grow yourself. Enrich others. Evolve the world. If there was a slogan here it woud be “change the world one purpose at a time.” The identity, healing and coaching work is the first. Relationships and leadership are the second. This piece is the third. They are not separate subjects. They are the same project at different scales.
The reason I sometimes write about culture is not that I have gotten distracted from the real work. It is that culture is nothing more than the individual consciousness of all of us, visible at scale. Whatever we are unwilling to look at inside ourselves shows up, magnified and collective, in the systems we build and tolerate. You cannot write honestly about the inside and stay quiet about the outside. They are the same territory.
A body that cannot metabolize what it takes in gets sick. A relationship that cannot metabolize what it contains gets toxic. A culture that cannot metabolize its own shadow gets what we are looking at right now. Motherless, Epstein, Pelicot, the protection rackets. Undigested material expressing itself as pathology. The mechanism is the same at every scale. Consciousness shapes physiology. Identity shapes relationships. Collective consciousness shapes culture. You cannot fix the downstream without addressing the upstream, and the upstream is always the same thing. What is this system willing to look at, and what is it still avoiding?
I write about metabolism because I believe biology and consciousness are not separate. I write this piece for the same reason. The consciousness that lets a man drug his wife is the same consciousness that lets a body poison itself. The refusal to look is the refusal to look, whether the thing you are refusing to look at is your own midnight eating or a thousand men in a Telegram group. The work is the work.
If that reframes this essay for you, good. That is what it is supposed to do.
This is not isolated. This is the pattern.
Epstein. A trafficking operation that ran for decades, protected by men across parties, intelligence services, elite finance, academia. Victims silenced. Files sealed, unsealed, resealed. Accomplices uncharged. Promises of transparency broken, then rebroken.
The Pelicot case. Gisèle Pelicot, drugged for nearly a decade by her husband, who invited more than fifty ordinary men to rape her while she was unconscious. The banality of the participants was the point. Neighbors. Coworkers. Husbands themselves. Not monsters in caves.
Weinstein. R. Kelly. Cosby. The Catholic Church. Gymnastics USA. Every Silicon Valley NDA. Every college campus that protected its star athlete. Every rape kit that mysteriously never got tested.
The political layer. A substantial portion of the electorate voted for disruption of the power structures that protected all of this. What they got instead was a figure who has defended named associates of Epstein, who has absorbed the architecture of impunity into the official register of governance, who has made misogyny part of the brand. That is not a partisan point. It is a structural one. The machinery of protection swallows disruption energy and reuses it.
And now the Motherless/Telegram operation, which is the same consciousness again, only with a keyboard.
The through-line is not a coincidence. Individual predators, organized groups, institutional protection, political cover. These are not four problems. They are one problem, expressing at four scales.
What the framework actually says
At Next Level Human, I teach that human behavior organizes along three levels. These are not personality types. They are not a ranking of people. They are the motivational drive running underneath behavior at any given moment. Everyone can access all three. The question is which one is organizing the choices.
Base Level is survival and power. Its healthy expression is standards, boundaries, and the capacity to protect yourself and the people you love. Without a functional base level, you cannot say no, you cannot defend your territory, you cannot keep yourself alive in a hard world. Healthy base level is not the problem.
The problem is its dysfunctional expression. Exploitation. Using other people as objects to satisfy appetite, ego, or control. When base level is not integrated, it becomes predatory. It treats other human beings as material. The men drugging partners, the Telegram group, Epstein, his protectors, are dysfunctional base-level operators. They are not aberrations. They are the predictable output of an unexamined base drive in a culture that has quietly agreed not to examine it.
Culture Level is belonging. Status. Fitting in. Most people live here, most of the time. Roughly eighty percent of any population is organized, primarily, around being accepted by the group. This is not a moral failing. It is a default. The social brain evolved to keep us inside the tribe because being outside the tribe used to mean death.
Culture level rarely commits the atrocities. Its role is quieter, and in aggregate, worse. It tolerates. It minimizes. It looks away. It says “not all men” before it has said anything at all about the men who actually did it. It is where the sealed file lives. It is where “let’s not make this political” lives. It is where private concern becomes public vote for the guy protecting the predators, because the local social cost of breaking ranks is higher than the abstract moral cost of staying silent.
Culture level is where most of the damage gets done, because culture level is what gives dysfunctional base level its cover. Every predator is counting on roughly eighty percent of the people around him to prefer their own comfort over the protection of the people he is hurting. Most of the time, the math works for him.
Next Level is growth and contribution. Post-conformist. Has done the individuation work. Has met its own shadow and stopped pretending it was not there. Is no longer primarily organized around being liked. Small in number. Not because next-level humans are special, but because the work required to get there is uncomfortable, unglamorous, and rarely rewarded by the culture they are being asked to stop conforming to.
Here is the hard sentence. The piece you are reading requires next-level humans. Culture level cannot do this. Culture level is what the predators are counting on.
We are not heading toward hell. We are already in it.
Heaven and hell are not locations we get sorted into later. I am not speaking metaphorically and I am not speaking religiously. I mean this structurally. Heaven and hell are conditions the collective consciousness produces, right now, by the quality of what it is willing to tolerate.
When enough humans operate from dysfunctional base level, and enough humans at culture level provide the cover, the reality that emerges is hellish by definition. Not because a god sends it. Because human beings build it, moment by moment, choice by choice, silence by silence.
Look at what we have built.
A world where women cannot sleep safely next to their partners. A world where children are trafficked by networks of the wealthy and powerful, and the files documenting it get sealed and unsealed and resealed on a political timetable. A world where the machinery built to protect the vulnerable is quietly staffed by people whose first loyalty is to the predators. A world where ordinary culture-level people whisper their concerns in private and vote their conformity in public. A world where a man can film his unconscious wife, upload it to a site with tens of millions of visits, and find a thousand other men ready to coach him through the next dose.
That is hell. We built it. We are still building it, every day, with every ordinary act of going along.
The exit is not belief. The exit is not a better candidate. The exit is not waiting for the institutions to fix themselves, because the institutions are made of the same consciousness that produced the hell. The exit is a shift in the consciousness we run, at scale, expressed as refusal to keep feeding the machine.
The shadow is visible now. That is the hinge.
Systems of abuse survive on secrecy, compartmentalization, and people staying asleep. For most of human history, the pieces stayed separate. You heard about one bad coach. One bad priest. One bad producer. The pattern stayed blurred.
What is happening now is different. Epstein’s network, the Pelicot case, the Motherless Telegram operation, the protection rackets in finance and politics, the decades of institutional cover-ups, are all visible in the same news cycle. You can hold them all in one hand. The connective tissue between the chat room and the boardroom and the oval office is, for the first time, visible to anyone willing to look.
Once that happens, denial stops being free. The system loses its ability to operate invisibly. That is leverage. That is the hinge.
This is not only a crisis. It is also an opportunity. The question is whether enough of us can bear to keep looking.
The collective reckoning is the individual reckoning at scale
If you have ever done real shadow work on yourself, you know the arc. It is not theoretical for me. I have watched hundreds of clients walk through it, and I have walked through it more times than I can count in my own life.
The arc looks like this.
You notice something. A pattern. A moment where you hurt someone and the usual story you tell yourself about it has stopped working. The first response is not insight. The first response is denial. You push it away. You explain it. You find the context that makes it not count.
Then, usually, you defend. You get angry at whoever is pointing at it. You diagnose them. You find the flaw in their argument, or their delivery, or their motives. You make the problem about the person holding up the mirror rather than the thing the mirror is showing you.
Eventually, if you are lucky, and honest, and have enough support around you that you are not entirely alone with it, you stop fighting. You put the defense down. You actually look. And what you see in that moment is the thing shadow work is designed to reveal. You see what you did. You see who you hurt. You see the shape of the self that did it. You do not enjoy any of this. You take responsibility. You integrate it. And on the other side of that integration, you become someone different. Not because you performed an apology. Because the structure inside you that produced the harm has actually changed.
That arc, at the level of one person, is structurally identical to what the culture is being asked to do right now.
The collective shadow is surfacing. Epstein, Pelicot, Motherless, the protection rackets, the political cover, all of it, in the same news cycle. The mature move, at scale, is the same as the mature move inside one human life. Look. Name it. Take responsibility. Integrate. Change.
The immature move, at scale, is the same as the immature move inside one human life. Deny. Deflect. Attack the messenger. Call it a hoax. Make the story about bias, or timing, or who benefits from the reporting, rather than about the thing the reporting is showing us. Go back to sleep.
Most of our cultural institutions are currently executing the immature move on your behalf. The media does it when it buries the story on page four. Politicians do it when they pivot to a different outrage. Platforms do it when they ban a hashtag and call it policy. Ordinary people do it when they say the reporting is overblown without having read it.
The individual move and the collective move are not two different things. They are the same move at different scales. Which is why the work starts inside you, with you. The culture does not do shadow integration. Only people do. And a culture gets as much integration as its people actually do.
Why “not all men” is a consciousness failure
I want to be precise here. Of course it is not all men. That has never been the point, and everyone making the argument knows it has never been the point.
The phrase is not a statement of fact. It is a reflex. It is a culture-level move designed to protect the speaker’s sense of himself. When a woman says she is afraid, “not all men” translates to “please do not make me feel implicated.” It is a request for emotional cover dressed up as a correction.
A next-level man does not need the cover. He can hold two things at once. He can know that he is not Piotr from the Telegram group, and he can also know that men he has laughed with, men he has worked with, men he has lived with, are somewhere on the spectrum that ends at Piotr. He can know that his silence in rooms women cannot enter is part of what keeps the spectrum intact.
Culture-level asks: am I one of the bad ones? Next level asks: what am I doing with my presence in this culture?
The first question is about status. The second is about essentia.
What essentia actually is
I have used this word several times now, and if you have not read my other work, it has probably landed as an abstraction. Let me slow down and tell you what it actually means, because this word is the target the entire piece is aimed at. Without it, the whole argument floats.
Essentia is the deepest layer of who a human being actually is. It has three components, and all three have to be present, or it collapses back into conditioning.
The first component is essential nature. The irreducible core of who you are underneath everything that was installed on top of you. Not the self your parents trained. Not the self your culture rewarded. Not the self your wounds built to keep you safe. The one underneath all of that. The one that was there before the MUD, the misguided unconscious decisions, got poured into you. Everyone has one. Most people have never met theirs.
The second component is earned wisdom. The understanding that can only come from having actually lived. From having been wounded, having failed, having made the misguided decisions, and having done the work of seeing through them honestly. You cannot borrow earned wisdom. You cannot read it into yourself. You cannot inherit it from a teacher. It is the specific understanding forged when a human being metabolizes their own suffering instead of running from it. The men we are talking about in this piece, from the Telegram group to the protection networks to the political class, share one thing in common. They have refused this. They are carrying the wounds without doing the work. Which is how the wounds become weapons pointed outward.
The third component is free will. A freely chosen, consciously created purpose. Not a job title. Not a brand. The direction in which your essential nature and your earned wisdom get aimed once you actually have both. The contribution only you can make, because the specific combination of who you are and what you have learned does not exist anywhere else in the species.
Here is what that looks like in real life, not on a page.
Picture two men at a work dinner. Someone tells a joke about a colleague who just reported a coworker for harassment. The joke is not directly about her. It is about how “everything is a problem now” and “you can’t say anything anymore.” The table laughs. Man one laughs along. He will tell himself later it was polite, or that he did not want to make it weird, or that everyone else was laughing. Inside, a tiny part of him knows. He files it away. He goes home. He tells himself he is a good guy. Man two does not laugh. He does not lecture. He just does not laugh. He lets the silence sit. Maybe he says, “I actually know her. She is solid.” Maybe he says nothing and lets his stillness be the whole statement. The room adjusts around him. The joke does not land the same way the next time. Man two has essentia. Man one has a very well-rehearsed performance of being a good man, which is not the same thing.
Essentia is not a pose. It is the structural capacity to not perform your way through moments that matter. If you remember nothing else about it, remember this. Essentia is what is left of you after you have stopped lying to yourself about your own capacity for harm.
Essentia is not given at birth and waited for. It is forged. Through experience. Through wound integration. Through the willingness to use what happened to you as curriculum instead of evidence that you are broken. If essentia were a star, it would be the force and pressure that produces the light, not the light itself.
This matters for the argument of this piece in one direct way. When I say that a man who stays a bystander forfeits his essentia, I am not using a motivational phrase. I mean it structurally. A man whose base-level capacity for harm has never been faced, whose earned wisdom about his own shadow has never been generated, whose purpose has never been chosen consciously because he has never been conscious enough to choose, is not a full human being yet. He is a man-shaped arrangement of conditioning. He is exactly the material the predators and their protection networks are made of. The only way out of that material is the work. The work is essentia.
This is why I keep saying that the price of culture-level silence in this moment is your essentia itself. Because culture level will never produce the shadow integration the work requires. Culture level is designed to avoid it. You cannot be next-level and complicit, because the complicity is precisely what the next-level work requires you to dissolve.
Essentia is the target. Everything else in this piece is in service of helping you aim at it.
The call to women
I am not going to tell women anything they already know, and I am not going to perform solidarity. Women are exhausted enough without watching men narrate their own allyship.
I will say this. The fear is legitimate. The anger is legitimate. The refusal to minimize is legitimate. Many of you have spent your lives being told to make it smaller, to consider his career, to not ruin Thanksgiving. The pressure to downgrade your own reality has not only come from men. It has come from mothers and sisters and friends who were themselves protecting their own nervous systems. That is a real thing. It can be named without being excused.
The work for women inside this frame is the same work as everyone else. Shadow integration. Standards. Vetting. Honor code. The refusal to defend, minimize, or enable men whose behavior is indefensible, regardless of whether they are your brother, your father, your husband, your son, or your pastor.
The call to men
This part is not soft. If you are a man reading this and you are still here, I am going to ask you to stop using any of the following as an exit:
“I would never do that.”
“Most men are not like that.”
“This is being blown out of proportion.”
“I don’t want to make it political.”
“My wife feels safe with me.”
Every one of those is culture-level cover. Every one of them protects your self-image at the cost of your integrity. You cannot be a bystander anymore. Not because I am shaming you into something. Because the price of staying a bystander is the forfeiture of your own essentia. You cannot be next-level and complicit at the same time. The architecture does not allow it.
The grown-up move, in no particular order, looks like this. Break the silence in rooms women cannot enter. Stop laughing at the joke. Stop protecting the friend who “didn’t really mean it.” Look at the parts of your own history you have quietly hoped no one would ever ask about. Do the work. Integrate what you find. Become someone your twelve-year-old self would recognize as a real man.
You were not the one in the Telegram group. I know. This is not about that... this is about whether you are willing to stop being the ambient cover the Telegram group depends on.
Radical Non-Tolerance
This is the frame I want to introduce, and it will need its own full piece to do justice to, but I will state it here cleanly.
Radical Non-Tolerance is the conscious, principled, nonviolent refusal to participate in, validate, or rationalize systems and behaviors that violate essentia. Behaviors that are non-inclusive, non-integrative, non-holistic. Behaviors that violate the free will and autonomy of other human beings.
It is not cancellation. It is not performative outrage. It is not violence. It is older than those. It lives in the tradition of Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Mandela. Nonviolent noncompliance with systems of harm.
What it adds to that tradition is four things, and each one matters.
First, internal consciousness work as the foundation. You cannot practice Radical Non-Tolerance sustainably from a fragmented place. If you are running on your own unexamined rage, your own unintegrated shadow, your own culture-level need to be seen as the good one, the refusal collapses within weeks. It becomes performance. It becomes another version of the thing it claims to oppose. The work starts inside. Before you refuse to participate in the systems out there, you refuse to participate in the systems in you. That is the foundation. Without it, everything built on top is scaffolding.
Second, the restoration of a very old evolutionary mechanism. This one requires slowing down, because it is the part that separates Radical Non-Tolerance from cancel culture, and the distinction is critical.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings lived in bands. Inside those bands, when a person did something that threatened the group, the group used a specific mechanism. Not execution, most of the time. Not lifetime exile. Ostracism with a pathway back. You were removed from the center. You were not spoken to. You were not fed by the collective. You sat at the edge of the fire, if you were allowed near the fire at all. And you knew, and everyone around you knew, that there was a way back in. You had to face what you did. You had to integrate it. You had to demonstrate, over time, that the behavior had actually changed. And then, slowly, the group let you back.
This worked. It worked for a very long time, across a huge range of human cultures, because it did two things at once. It protected the group from the behavior, and it held open the possibility that the person could grow. The consequence was real, and the door was real.
What we call cancel culture is half of that mechanism with the other half ripped out. The ostracism, without the door. The consequence, without the pathway. Destruction as the goal rather than transformation. Which is why so many people, even people who agree with the moral claim underneath a cancellation, feel something is off about it. Something is off. Half the mechanism is missing.
Radical Non-Tolerance restores both halves. You face what you did. You integrate it. You demonstrate different behavior over time. You earn reintegration. Or you refuse, and the ostracism remains. The door stays open because transformation is possible. The door is real because transformation is also, finally, what we are actually after. This is not cancel culture. Cancel culture wants destruction. Radical Non-Tolerance wants transformation, and accepts removal only when transformation is refused.
The essentia we keep talking about is forged precisely through this process. A person who faces what they did, integrates it honestly, and demonstrates the change, comes out the other side with earned wisdom they could not have generated any other way. The mechanism is not just a tool of accountability. It is a tool of human development. We have forgotten that. It is time to remember.
Third, the research supports it. Erica Chenoweth’s work on nonviolent resistance found, across roughly a century of data, that movements refusing violent means succeeded at roughly twice the rate of violent ones. She identified a rough threshold around 3.5 percent of a population sustained in active nonviolent resistance as a point at which regimes historically failed to hold. [Inference. The 3.5 percent figure is a shorthand drawn from her data, not a universal law, and it remains debated in the academic literature.] The specific number matters less than the pattern. Coordinated nonviolent refusal, done by even a small fraction of a population, has repeatedly produced structural change that violent movements could not. This is not idealism. It is historical pattern recognition.
Fourth, essentia-based alignment. The refusal is not ideological. It is not about being on the right team or signaling the right values. It is structural. It is rooted in what actually produces human flourishing at the individual and collective level. Behaviors and systems that violate inclusivity, integration, and holism produce hell. Behaviors and systems that honor them produce something closer to heaven. Radical, nonviolent Non-Tolerance is the practical refusal to keep feeding the first category, regardless of what team is asking you to feed it.
In practice, it looks like this. You stop engaging with rationalizations. You stop debating the humanity of victims. You stop accepting “it’s complicated” as analysis. You do not associate with institutions that protect abusers. You name hypocrisy out loud. You leave the door open to anyone who genuinely does the work. And you build something different in the meantime.
How you would treat a toxic person is how you treat a toxic system. You would not stay silent while someone lied to your face, year after year, and call it politeness. You would name it. You would stop participating in the lie. You would create distance. You would leave the door open if they did the work. You would not be their enabler. The same logic, applied to media outlets, politicians, institutions, and leaders dehumanizing people or protecting abusers, is Radical Non-Tolerance in action.
What actually disrupts this
For those of you who voted for disruption, I want to speak to you directly.
I understand why you made that choice. You could see that the old system protected Epstein. That it built institutions designed to hide what it was hiding. You wanted someone who would actually challenge that. The logic made sense at the time.
What you got is not disruption. It is the same consciousness without the mask. In some ways it is worse, because the old system at least pretended. The new version protects the same people, enables the same violence, and calls it strength.
You can be forgiven for making the original mistake. You cannot be forgiven for continuing once you can see it. You did not know until you knew. Now you know.
Real disruption is consciousness work at scale, expressed as Radical Non-Tolerance. Four practical expressions.
One. Withdraw consent from the system itself. Every time you stay silent to fit in, to belong, to protect your status, you are choosing the system over the women the system hurts. That choice ends. Not performatively. Actually.
Two. Build next-level community. You cannot do this alone. You need people around you who have done their own shadow work, who have integrated their fragmentation, who operate from essentia rather than from fear or conditioning. Those people cannot be co-opted. They will not stay silent. This is what NLH is building.
Three. Demand accountability with teeth, and with a door to redemption. The hypocrisy gets named. The lies get documented. The door stays open if the person chooses to grow. Or it does not, and the ostracism remains.
Four. Redefine strength. The old story, especially for men, says strength is dominance. Strength is getting away with it. Next level says strength is integration. It is the ability to see yourself clearly, own your capacity for harm, face your own fragmentation, and choose differently anyway. That is harder than dominating anyone. A man who can look at his own shadow and choose not to act on it is stronger than a thousand men operating from dissociation.
The choice
This is the hinge. The exposure is not the crisis. The exposure is the opening. The shadow is visible. You can either look or look away.
Going back to sleep will look ordinary. The news cycle will move on. A few tags will get banned. A few platforms will issue statements. The files will stay mostly sealed. The next election will absorb the energy. Women will be told, one more time, to be careful, instead of men being told, finally, to be accountable.
Waking up will look like the work. The man looking at his own complicity, his own jokes, his own friends, his own silence. The woman looking at her own minimization, her own defense of the men in her life, her own pressure on other women to be quiet so things do not get worse. Institutions forced, by the refusal of ordinary participation, to stop protecting perpetrators.
The willingness to name evil as evil, without flinching, without softening, and without mistaking that clarity for cruelty.
Next-level humans are rare. This is what they are for. Not a lifestyle brand. Not a self-actualization loop. Self-actualization as the prerequisite for telling the truth in rooms where telling the truth costs something. If you have done your work, or are willing to, step forward. We need you now.
Every person reading this has had moments they were asleep to their own harm-doing. Every person reading this has had a moment of waking up. That is not an abstract process. It is the only process.... and it is always, always a choice.
The house is on fire. You know it is.
What you do next is the piece that matters.
PS: If you are ready to move from culture-level silence to next-level presence in the rooms you are already in, explore my Next Level Human coaching program. This is the work that makes Radical Non-Tolerance sustainable. Spots are limited... don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching
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Thank you for this well articulated post. After reading this I have spoken to my husband and sons about having the courage to be the one in the room that creates the change!