His favorite kind of pornography shows women having sex while they are asleep, according to a Chinese PhD student who is accused of raping a string of unconscious women.
The 27-year-old Zhenhao Zou is accused of giving victims alcohol and drugs prior to the attacks and of filming the rapes to preserve as “memorabilia.”
According to reports, the rapes happened both in his home country of China and in London, where Zou was pursuing a doctorate in mechanical engineering.
Zou, a PhD candidate at University College London, disputes the rape accusations and maintains that every sexual interaction he captured on camera was consenting.
Zou began his testimony on Monday, telling the Inner London crown court that he began using drugs while studying in London because friends described them as “nice.” When he returned to China during a pandemic lockdown, he developed an interest in online pornography.
Zou claimed to have struggled with sleep issues since he was a young boy, occasionally spending entire days on the internet, and to have begun viewing “role playing” and so-called “timestop” pornography.
He described his interest in pornography by saying, “I like for the girls to be still and quiet when they are having sex.”
He said, “That is my favorite type, but I could not find that,” in response to a question concerning videos of women having sex while they are asleep.
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police discovered Xanax, MDMA, and ketamine in Zou’s dorm room when he was taken into custody.
Between September 2019 and May 2023, he is charged with carrying out 11 rapes and possessing drugs with the intention of using them to carry out the attacks.
Two of the alleged victims have testified in court that they were either unconscious or semi-conscious during Zou’s sexual encounter with them in London, and they deny any involvement in the incident.
Police have not yet identified the other eight alleged victims, who are thought to have been raped in China. Videos of Zou having sex with them while they were allegedly unconscious or asleep were shown during the trial.
Zou told the court that in order to “look better” as a student, he wore makeup and had a number of cosmetic surgery procedures done in his early 20s.
He underwent eyelid surgery and hair transplants before having “fat fillings” put into his chin and having his teeth adjusted.
He responded to the jurors’ question about what “fat fillings” entailed by saying, “They took some fat from other areas of my body, changed them, and put the fat into my chin.”
He went on to say that ever since he arrived in London to study, he has worn makeup “all the time.”
He said that he wore it because “I looked better,” but he also said, “It was all kinds of things – do you need me to list them?”
When asked if his male classmates frequently wore makeup, Zou said, “I am not sure.” Two other male students who lived in my home at the time also used makeup, but not as much.
According to Zou, who is from the Chinese province of Guangdong, his mother is a teacher and his father works for a state-owned business.
He admitted to jurors that he attended secondary school for long days, from 7.30 am to 10 pm, and that he never received any sex education despite taking political classes.
Zou claimed that during his time in high school, which lasted from 15 to 18, he was under pressure to study for long hours and only spend one weekend at home each month.
Proficient in mathematics and physics, he relocated to Belfast in 2017 to pursue a mechanical engineering degree.
Zou claimed that after winning a spot at UCL in 2019, he began interacting with illegal substances, such as ecstasy.
“I visited nightclubs.” He said, “I tried, and some of my friends said they were nice.”
“I later came into contact with white powder, which was cocaine. Next, I came into contact with ketamine powder, and finally, e-liquid.
Someone was snorting while we were drinking at the party I attended. Regarding his first taste of cocaine, he said, “This person said it was nice and asked me to try, so I tried.”
During the pandemic in 2020, Zou claimed that his parents pressured him to return to China, and he lived alone in lockdown on one of the family’s properties for months.
“Sometimes I would not fall asleep at all for a whole night, sometimes I would have a bit of rest for a short period of time,” he told the court after spending hours online.
He claimed to have looked at “all kinds of stuff” on the internet, including pornography that featured “role play, especially the timestop genre.”
During the trial, jurors were given agreed facts that explained “time stop” pornography, which depicts sex “where the females are passive and unresponsive.”
Jurors have also been informed about a magazine profile of the genre, and Zou signed a statement explaining how he watched videos on free websites.
According to the article, “(it is) a genre where one person has the ability to completely freeze everyone else in the scene (usually via a large wristwatch or stopwatch that makes a cartoonish twinkling sound effect, though it is also been portrayed as an app or a ray gun)”).
Naturally, the body of a frozen person is then prodded, poked, stripped, and touched in every manner conceivable.
The majority of timestop porn, the article continued, has a lighthearted tone rather than a sinister one. The woman is simply frozen; she is not resisting or fighting back, nor is she dozing off or under the influence of drugs.
“A persistent sexual predator, voyeur, and rapist,” according to the prosecution, Zou “would meet women and stupefy them, either with drugs or with alcohol, and, once they were significantly under the influence of drink or drugs, he would rape them.”
Zou claimed in court that no one else used the Xanax that the police had found, saying it was for his personal use when “I could not fall asleep and I was anxious.”
Eight counts of drug possession—of committing an offense with intent to commit a sexual offense—three counts of voyeurism, twelve counts of possessing an extreme pornographic image, and eleven counts of rape are all denied by Zou, of Churchyard Row in Southwark.