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France has charged the founder of a chat website called Coco, used by Dominique Pelicot to recruit dozens of men to rape and sexually abuse his ex-wife, Gisèle.
Isaac Steidl has been charged with a number of offences including administering an online platform to facilitate an illegal transaction by an organised gang.
The free site, which let users communicate anonymously, was launched in 2003 and shut down by French authorities last year. By that time it had been implicated in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity involving 480 victims.
Steidl is not the first tech boss to face the prospect of accountability in France for activity on his platform. Last August Pavel Durov, the Telegram CEO, was charged for failing to prevent illicit activity on the app.
France passed a law in 2023 criminalising tech owners whose platforms facilitate illegal actions.
