Trigger warning: This story involves humiliation, psychological abuse, and real-world death. I rarely issue warnings, but this one deserves your full attention. What you’re about to read is disturbing. It’s hardcore. You’ve been warned.
It’s early morning. The livestream has been running for 280 straight hours. The camera shows a dark, windowless room. Four men are asleep under dim lighting, their faces half-hidden under makeshift blankets. Above them, a glowing progress bar displays the money left to unlock the “next round.”
In the chat, a viewer casually types: “Check on the guy who’s not moving.”
Moments later, a bottle is thrown at one of the bodies. No reaction. Chat continues scrolling. Donations queue up. No safe word is spoken.
If you’re familiar with internet subcultures you may have heard of “red rooms:” infamous, phantom livestreams supposedly buried in the dark web, where pay-per-view torture sessions unfold for the gratification of anonymous, depraved spectators. In reality, the technical limitations of the dark web make this kind of “entertainment” nearly impossible. But the story we’re about to tell is a true story, arguably the first real “red room.” How was this able to work around all the dark web limitations? Simple—it wasn’t on the dark web at all. It took place on the popular Twitch-competitor Kick.com, livestreamed publicly over the clear web for everyone to see. The man not moving under a makeshift blanket? His name was Jean Pormanove (JP), real name Raphaël Graven:one of the most (in)famous French streamers. And unlike the urban legends, in this story there is no dark web. No Bitcoin and Monero crypto payments. No hidden onion links. Just regular credit cards, banks, and in the full HD that only Big Tech can offer.
The story begins in 2020 when JP began streaming. He started out in his mother’s apartment. His big break came when TheKairi78 (TK), real name Jaoued Daouki, a much more prominent streamer, gave him a boost, briefly turning JP into a local celebrity. But when their partnership fell apart, so did JP’s career. His views dwindled, the money dried up, and the fame he had tasted slipped out of reach. And yet, fame is a hell of a drug, driving him to hold on to the dream no matter how distant it seemed.
That’s when Owen Cenazandotti stepped in. Known to his followers as “NarutoVie,” Owen approached JP with promises of salvation. A fellow streamer with grand ideas, Owen painted a vision of a way back to the fame JP had so desperately craved. He wasn’t just offering advice; he was offering hope, the chance to rekindle JP’s rising star and reclaim everything he’d lost. And JP, vulnerable and blinded by the dream of celebrity, fell for the bait.
In interviews from that period, JP comes across as a man adrift in an endlessly shifting world. Beneath the chaos and fleeting glamour of his streaming career, he longed for something simpler, something stable. All he ever truly wanted was a wife, a small house, and the quiet dignity of starting a family.
But Owen was no savior. At the time, he was a far smaller streamer, his viewership a fraction of JP’s, even in decline. There was nothing altruistic about his plans. Behind the promises, Owen was only biding his time, setting the stage for the next act of JP’s spiral: a descent darker than anything JP could have imagined.
Slowly, Owen began to weave his influence into JP’s life. Introducing the collective known as “The Lokal,” he positioned himself as JP’s guide and benefactor, managing every detail of his existence with humiliation and control. Owen relentlessly pushed JP toward darker depths, demanding ever more extreme content from his vulnerable protégé. Thus began a disgusting cocktail of publicly exposing JP’s private messages with his love interest, mocking his exchanges with his mother, and weaponizing his personal data, his finance, and his life.
Then the marathons (yes, plural) of humiliation began stretching over days (yes, days), nonstop, under the unblinking eye of the camera. Viewers, emboldened by apparent anonymity and feeding off spectacle, pushed for ever more extreme content. The stream ran on Kick.com, a platform launched by a gambling company frustrated by restrictions on marketing to younger audiences. It is infamous for its deliberately lax terms of service and remains quite popular: hitting 50 million users in early 2025.
I rarely break the fourth wall with you, the reader, but after spending hours immersed in this content while researching, I have to admit, I kind of regret watching some of this. It left a profound impact on me. Please don’t follow in my footsteps and instead take my word for what I’m about to describe.
Earlier last month, the humiliation livestream began one last time. At first like any typical gaming show, a group of friends—JP, Owen and Safine (real name Safine Hamadi) and another torturer—began by playing popular titles such as Grand Theft Auto Online. The atmosphere was lighthearted at first, filled with casual banter and inside jokes. But the jokes always seemed to come at JP’s expense. And before long, the tone shifted. The humor faded. As I watched the clip of what was happening the lights of the room in the video seemed to get dimmer—I know it wasn’t actually happening—as if some unnameable entity was manipulating the lens of the camera.
The abuse escalated systematically: electric shocks from dog collars, explosive cigarettes detonated near his face, deliberate sleep deprivation through random, violent awakenings during the night. JP was referred to as a “dog” and forced into acts of submission and obedience. One particularly unsettling detail stood out: at times, local celebrities such as soccer players Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Bradley Barcola, as well as other influencers and wives and girlfriends of other streamers would join in, taking turns to mock and humiliate JP on camera. Each appearance chipped away at him a little more, digitally flaying his body in front of a cheering crowd.
The humiliation included forced cross-dressing with wigs and women’s clothing, followed by gay and anti-gay slurs and insults. He was compelled to walk public streets carrying sexually explicit signs, exposing him to public degradation. Viewers could donate money to influence or escalate this abuse in real-time.
On the night of Monday, August 18th, after more than 10 days of torture, JP pulled a makeshift blanket over himself. His breathing grew faint, then still. The ever-watchful, malevolent viewers couldn’t let this stand.
In the chat, a viewer casually types: “Check on the guy who’s not moving.”
No response. Panic replaced laughter. The stream was finally cut. After years of control, humiliation, and pain, JP finally had total privacy.
And so it happened, the first real “red room:” not hidden in some encrypted corner of the dark web, but out in the open on a public, regulated platform. Enabled by credit card companies, streamed on a popular website, and adorned with merchandise deals and sponsorship directly from the platform itself.
Put yourself in the shoes of a regulator for a moment. What would be your easiest crime to solve? Presumably it would occur on a regulated platform, with every user identified with real world identity, and all money mapped through legitimate payment processors, credit cards, and bank statements timestamped to the second. No encryption to crack. No anonymity to pierce. No cryptocurrencies to track. Just real names, real faces, and verified accounts: all perfectly preserved in corporate databases. The crime unfolds in full HD, archived automatically, backed up to the cloud. Thousands of witnesses logged in with their real emails, real phone numbers, digital fingerprints. A report button sits right there on screen, one click away. The perpetrators? They’re not hiding behind seven proxies or buried in some Tor exit node. They’re streaming from their apartments, their IP addresses bare for all to see.
This is the “safe world” they promise us when pushing Chat Control, when demanding backdoors, when drafting Digital PATRIOT Acts. “We need to access all the data,” they tell us. “Any privacy is potential danger. Encryption enables criminals. Follow our guidelines and you will have SECURITY.” The regulators had everything they’ve ever asked for in the case of JP. Total transparency. Perfect documentation. The crime gift-wrapped. And still, it happened. Still, it continued for weeks. Still, nobody stopped it. The platform collected its fees and generated taxable revenue. The payment processors took their cut. The founders of Kick are publicly known and Kick even sponsored and created merchandise with JP’slikeness.He was the 4th biggest streamer on the platform, not just something you can ignore. Hundreds of reports flooded in. An entire documentary, 1 hour and 40 minutes of evidence, was created by YouTuber TheLastJudgementx. Journalists from Mediapart pounded the alarm.
The authorities looked the other way. They called it “content creation” and “performance art.” It became “consensual streaming.” The victim signed a contract, didn’t he? He could leave anytime, couldn’t he? (Our investigation makes clear he couldn’t.) As long as there’s a veneer of consent, authorities can pretend it’s just entertainment gone too far, not systematic torture. More significantly, when the powerful abuse the powerless in plain sight, the system suddenly develops selective blindness and an inability to label a perpetrator. It seems it’s far easier to perform military-style raids on phantom enemies such as privacy software developers than to go after real abusers, real enablors, and real perpetrators right under their very noses.
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