Alleged ‘cannibal cop’ Gilberto Valle didn’t take the stand in his own defense on Tuesday. Instead, the creator of the website on which he allegedly played out his fantasies, Darkfetishnet.com [NSFW obviously], explained to the jury that the site was basically a Facebook for fetishists, not a place for actual conspiracies. Speaking in a recorded Skype conversation from Moscow, Sergey Merenkov said Darkfetishnet “does everything that Facebook does,” according to Reuters, including chats, groups, and photo sharing. He said he would kick users off whenever, “let’s say that it seemed not to be fantasy anymore.” Of course he doesn’t know every single one of them, he scoffed. “That’s like asking [Facebook creator Mark] Zuckerberg if he knows each and every member of Facebook.”
So despite a judge banning the “more ghastly images,” the jurors got a little tour of Darkfetishnet, whose members’ interests include “sexual asphyxiation, sex with dead bodies and cannibalism,” per the AP. They saw “graphic pictures of mutilation, hanging corpses and profile pages for members with names like Vicious Vixen,” according to Reuters. Only two other witnesses testified on Valle’s behalf, including a paralegal who read from some of Vixen’s writing on Darkfetishnet. “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.’” And after that one day of testimony, the defense rested its case.
