The key facts
- Frank S. was sentenced for the rape of 14 women in 22 incidents to 12 years followed by preventive detention
- Based on video recordings, the police assume 58 victims; 44 more cases are under investigation, and 10 women have not been identified
- The case came to light after the arrest of S.'s chat partner in Lower Saxony
Verdict of the Berlin Regional Court
On Wednesday, the Berlin Regional Court sentenced 69-year-old Frank S. to twelve years in prison for the rape of 14 women in 22 incidents, Euronews reports. In nine of the episodes, the court additionally found him guilty of violating privacy due to video recordings of the crimes. The prison term was accompanied by preventive detention — one of the harshest measures in German justice, applied after the sentence has been served if the court considers the convicted person dangerous. By a possible release, S. will be over 80 years old, and, as the outlet notes, he will apparently never be freed again. The verdict has not yet entered into legal force: the convicted man has the right to appeal.
How the perpetrator operated
From 2016 to 2022, S., an electrician by profession, met women through dating sites and won their trust in a 'particularly insidious way': he introduced himself to one as a police commissioner and to another as a helicopter pilot. He invited the women to his apartment in Berlin's Lichtenberg district, offered them drinks laced with sedatives, and raped them in the bedroom, where a fixed video camera had been installed. The court described his actions as systematic and 'contemptuous of women,' and the recordings, kept 'like a trophy cabinet,' became the main evidence in the three-month trial, in which all 14 women testified, six of them as civil plaintiffs.
Why the victims stayed silent and how the case came to light
Because of the strong sedative effect, many women could not remember what had happened or had suppressed it from their memory, so no one filed complaints against S.; some learned of the crimes only from the police during the investigation. The Berlin police received the lead on the rapist from colleagues in Lower Saxony: they passed on information from a chat correspondence in which S. exchanged details about crimes with an alleged rapist from the town of Verden. After his chat partner's arrest, S. himself was searched and detained — in March 2026, and has been in custody ever since.
What comes next and the reaction
After reviewing the video recordings, the police believe that 58 women were victimized and are investigating 44 more cases; ten women presumably captured on video have not yet been identified, so a new trial may follow this one. The civil plaintiffs' lawyers, Silke Studzinski and Laura Leogrande, emphasized the significance of the preventive detention and the fact that the victims did not want to appear in public — at their request, the closing arguments were held behind closed doors. In front of the courthouse, solidarity was expressed by the organizations Terre des Femmes and the initiative 'Shame Must Change Sides'; Terre des Femmes representative Sina Tonk recalled that, according to available data, only about three percent of rapes are ever reported to the police. Lawyer Leogrande noted that violence after drugging the victim is not a new phenomenon, but something that has 'only now come to the surface' and begun to be thoroughly investigated, partly after the high-profile Pélicot case in France. The outlet also points out that Germany recently tightened its laws on sexual violence, including regarding 'sleeping drops' and the recording of crimes.
