Rape culture is real. So real, in fact, anyone who wants to learn “how to rape” can. Not via a YouTube video, mind you, but via an online community, with real word practicum and field trips. The community are “pickup” artists. These men “pick up” women—meet them and attempt to sleep with them. Some are real suave and debonair and understand that “no means no.” But there are others who specialize in getting around that technicality. They wait for bars to close and they “pick up” women they think may be too intoxicated to deny consent or give it—which of course means rape—and later, they “blog” about their experience. That’s how one rape victim was able to get the details and names of her three rapists: she read about it on the internet.
The woman was raped in 2013 and her rapists were charged in 2015. Two of the men pled guilty; Jonas Dick has been sentenced to eight years in prison and the other, Jason Berlin, is awaiting sentencing. A third man, Alex Smith who maintained that the sex was consensual, was found guilty earlier this month and will be sentenced in October.
The woman in this case, given the name of “Claire” to protect her identity, took matters into her own hands several weeks after the assault when it became clear that the police weren’t making any headway. Police and prosecutors say it is harder to investigate and prosecute rape cases involving intoxication or unconsciousness. Lots of people have unreliable memories; an incident as trauma-inducing as sexual assault may be crystal clear in the minds of some victims while in others it may be suppressed. Intoxication or unconsciousness during the actual incident added to the equation sometimes means a victim’s account may not be seen as reliable. But in Claire’s case, it appears the good old “college try” had not even been done. The police hadn’t been to the apartment where the rape occurred to investigate; they had no search warrant for the premises; no attempt at finding any evidence was undertaken; they hadn’t interviewed any of the neighbors or the alleged perpetrators.
A month following her rape, Claire did what the police seemingly hadn’t bothered to do: she sat at her computer and Googled “Jonas Dick,”—a name so unique, Laura had asked to see his license when they met. Claire immediately found Jonas’s profile on the online forum of Real Social Dynamics (RSD)—a Los Angeles-based company that since 2002 has brought in millions of dollars by selling pickup to lonely, socially awkward men.
RSD has long been the most important player in the underground pickup industry, and it attracted a popular media firestorm in 2014 after a video emerged showing one of its instructors pulling the heads of Tokyo women into his lap and forcing kisses on a cashier. “If you’re a white male, you can do what you want,” Julien Blanc tells a room full of his students in the video. Just “yell ‘Pikachu.’”
“Claire was raped a year before #TakeDownJulienBlanc would go viral as a trend, successfully getting Blanc banned from several countries and putting RSD and the pickup industry in the crosshairs of women’s-rights groups and the public at large. When Claire stumbled upon RSD’s forum in 2013, she was among the few people outside the community who knew it existed. Today, RSD’s forum contains 850,000 posts—contributed by instructors, students, and those men RSD hopes to make into paying clients—as well as 11,000 “field reports,” blogs where RSD members obsessively document their interactions with women.”
“It was on that forum Claire first learned about Jonas, who had for the last two years been blogging on RSD’s board using the unimaginative handle, DICK.”
Two of Claire’s rapists—Smith and Dick—were “instructors” in the online world of ”pickup artists.” Jason Berlin, Claire’s third rapist was a “student” of the two men. The company they worked for was not Real Social Dynamics but you can view a video below put out by that company on “Consent and Social Calibration” … if you can stand it. The man speaking in the video is Julien Blanc, who has been banned from several countries because his work is seen as nothing more than misogyny.
Fast forward through the sordid details of the investigation and the peek into this sordid and grimy corner of the internet with its real-world counterpart: Claire’s work may have also uncovered other victims of this particular trio. One of Claire’s rapists rented the apartment where she was raped for the express purpose of allowing the other two men to bring women there, since it was close several neighborhood bars. The property manager turned over surveillance tapes of the lobby and the building the night Claire was raped. The lobby tape showed Claire entering an elevator which ended the surveillance. That’s when the manager, Linda Boisvert, got an idea:
With her co-op board’s approval, Linda set up another security camera in the hallway of the third floor, and pointed it at Alex and Jonas’s apartment. She would watch the footage periodically, and over the next two months, Linda began sending Detective Garrick Nugent still photos of what she had seen.
“They would come in with women who were happy and relaxed, and the women would come out—woman after woman—would looked stunned and upset with the same tense body language,” Linda told me.
“I don’t know if they were raped, but if there is a body language to rape, what I saw would have been it.
“One lady went in with two friends and came out covering her face, crying. When they got down to the lobby and the elevator door opened, I could see she was balled up on the elevator floor. It was heartbreaking. I just wanted to scream.”
Thus far, none of these women in the surveillance footage have been identified.