By Joel Gunter, Rebecca Henschke and Astudestra Ajengrastri
BBC Eye Investigations

Warning: This article contains disturbing content

One night last May, unable to sleep, Lucy Kapetanich opened her laptop in the early hours. The screen lit up her tired face in the dark. She typed, “Report a crime to the FBI”, into the search bar and clicked through to the agency’s online tip form. “I have made a complaint before,” she wrote in the little box on the screen. “The monkey hate community is growing.”

Kapetanich was 55 then, a former adult dancer with big green eyes and dyed-black hair that fell in curtains around her face. For the past six months, from her small bedroom in a rundown shared house in Los Angeles, she had been slowly uncovering a global underworld of monkey torture. Her journey had begun in the pandemic, when she was doing daily webcam shows to make ends meet. The long hours on camera were taking a toll on her, so when she clicked off the webcam at night she often opened YouTube, seeking solace in cute animal videos. Her favourites were a chimpanzee family in a zoo in Japan. She could watch them for hours as she drifted towards sleep.

Kapetanich didn’t know it then, but as she watched, YouTube’s algorithm was at work on her, following her every click, saving her every preference, presenting her with new content it hoped she would watch next. Soon, when Kapetanich looked at YouTube at night, monkeys were everywhere. “All it takes is like, one click and bam, it’s all over your feed,” she said.

Kapetanich saw monkeys dressed up in baby clothes, monkeys being bathed, forced to walk upright or do other unnatural tasks. Then the algorithm served her videos of monkeys being slapped and sprayed with water. These videos violated YouTube’s terms of service, so she reported them, but the platform didn’t seem to take any action. The videos kept appearing. Kapetanich kept clicking. 

Soon enough, a torture video turned up in her feed.

A little over a year ago, the BBC World Service began investigating the emergence of these monkey torture videos too. The videos appeared to be mostly coming out of Indonesia, and being uploaded to YouTube purely for the entertainment of sadists abroad. In the comments under the videos, we found a twisted community of monkey haters who seemed to be getting off on watching baby long-tailed macaques being abused.

Our investigation would lead us to Lucy Kapetanich, to Indonesia and across America and into a hidden world that was darker and more extreme than we could have imagined. The worst of the torture we found there was too depraved to describe in detail in this story, but in her quest to bring it to light, Kapetanich saw it all. 

So did Dave Gooptar.

Gooptar lived 4,000 miles away from Kapetanich, in Port of Spain on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. A freelance transcriber by day, he spent some of his free time making video horror movie reviews for his small YouTube channel, called “Yardfish”. He also sometimes watched videos of baby capuchin monkeys on a farm in South Africa, and YouTube’s algorithm went to work on him too.

Gooptar wound up spending four months working on a one-hour video expose, titled “The YouTube Monkey Torture Ring: Part 1”, and in August 2021 he set it live. It didn’t garner a huge number of views. But one of them was Lucy Kapetanich.

Kapetanich had already started her own channel, “Mad Monkey Mayhem”, to try and draw attention to the abuse. When she found Gooptar’s film, she messaged him, and the pair formed a kind of alliance. For now, Kapetanich knew Gooptar only as “Yardfish” and he knew her only as “Mayhem”. Together, they began to dig.

One day, Kapetanich asked Gooptar about a monkey she had seen in video after video — a baby female. The monkey’s name was listed in the video titles, as though she was some sort of star.

Gooptar already knew who she was, he said.

“Everybody knew who Mini was.”

The first Mini video that Kapetanich saw was tame compared to what came later, but it burrowed into her brain. Mini and two other babies darted frantically around a small bathroom as the man behind the camera grabbed them by their tails and slammed them against the wall. When he did, he let out a high-pitched laugh that haunted Kapetanich. Each slam sickened her more. “The baby monkeys were exhausted and confused,” she said. “And just terrified. They had nowhere to hide.”

Kapetanich found half a dozen other monkeys on the YouTube like Mini. There was Monkey Ji, Baby Ciko, Chiro, Sweetpea, Mona — all baby long-tailed macaques being tortured on film. Some of the monkeys had developed physical tics from the stress. Monkey Ji was known for holding her head in her hands and rocking back and forth. Mini would grip her sides. The monkey haters in the comments loved it. “Abused multiple times a week since a baby. She has lived a TERRIBLE life,” someone wrote, approvingly, under a video of Mini. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a monkey more broken.”

By that point, hundreds of different YouTube channels were posting videos of baby macaques being abused. In some, the monkeys appeared to die on screen. “Watch them try to breathe while their idiotic brains shut down,” wrote one commenter. Lucy Kapetanich was horrified by what she saw. It hurt to watch as Mini’s owner cooed an Indonesian endearment — “sayang” — to her and then smacked her in the face. It all brought Kapetanich to tears more than once. But the monkey haters loved it.

“He sayang-ed Mini and then immediately smacked her!” wrote one, screen name “Grace”. 

“Man I love those videos.”

Jackel, Kapetanich and Gooptar knew Ape’s Cage existed, but they couldn’t see inside.

Then, on 22 January 2022, an email landed in Lucy Kapetanich’s inbox, from a stranger who called himself “Ronald McDonald”.

“Please keep this between us,” he wrote. “I’m not a bad guy. I’m 48, married to my high school sweetheart, 19 year old daughter, 1 cat and my German shepherd passed away sadly of cancer.”

In the monkey hate community, “Ronald McDonald” was known by his screen name, the “Torture King”. A few months after he first wrote to her, the Torture King sent Kapetanich an email with instructions on how to download Telegram and a link to join Ape’s Cage, and when she did he vouched for her among all the monkey haters inside.

The level of abuse on YouTube, as bad as it had been, had not prepared Kapetanich for the private world of Telegram, where monkeys were known as “tree rats” and no idea for torturing them was too extreme.

Ape’s Cage contained about 400 people. The cast of characters was a mixture of the strange and — even stranger — the seemingly normal, all known to one another by their screen names. There was the Torture King, who had invited Kapetanich in; there was “Sadistic”, a gas station attendant and grandmother in rural Alabama; there was “Bones”, a former US Air Force airman from Texas with a big collection of guns; and “Champei”, who caused chaos and infighting in every group he joined. There was “Trevor”, who couldn’t contribute during daytime hours because, “no phone at work, nuclear stuff”.

And it wasn’t just Americans, there were dedicated members in Europe and Australia. Among the cruellest contributors to the group was “The Immolator”, a 35-year-old woman who loved birds and lived with her parents in the English midlands.

Kapetanich — screen name “Jane Doe” — could hardly comprehend the level of sadism she saw. At the same time, she began messaging privately with the Torture King. She was confused about why he would invite her into this world. He told her that he was ashamed of what he was doing, that he wanted to help her burn the house down from inside. He would be her mole, he said. Soon, they were messaging every day. The Torture King began to reveal his real life to her.

In real life, he was Mike McCartney, a 48-year-old former motorcycle gang member in Norfolk, Virginia, with a swastika tattoo and a “man cave” in his home decorated with Nazi symbols and Confederate flags. McCartney was well-built, heavily tattooed, and toothless from years of heroin addiction. He had spent two decades in one of America’s most dangerous outlaw motorcycle gangs, before going to prison and dropping out of that life. When the pandemic hit, he started spending a lot of time on YouTube. At some point, he saw his first monkey torture video. It was a video of Mini.

Mini’s owner was “teasing, taking the bottle out of reach”, McCartney said. The video gave him a “good chuckle”. He started watching more, leaving comments. It wasn't long before he got an invitation to a Telegram group.

“They had a poll set up,” McCartney recalled. “Do you want a hammer involved? Do you want pliers involved? Do you want a screwdriver?” He voted and came back to the app later. “And sure as heck there’s a new video with everything that was voted on,” he said. “And it was the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen.”

McCartney saw a money-making opportunity — downloading torture videos from YouTube and selling them in Ape’s Cage. And as he sold and traded videos he became a trusted member of the monkey hate community, and rose high up in the informal pecking order.

But not to the very top. At the very top of the tree there was only one man. Screen name “Mr Ape”. The Founder and CEO of Ape’s Cage.

Mr Ape spent hours every day on Telegram talking to other monkey haters and distributing new monkey torture videos to his followers. Alongside Ape’s Cage, he ran a host of other side groups — “Ape’s Chimps”; “Mr Ape’s Alpha Chimps”; “The Secret Monkey Disciplinary Academy” — and he policed the groups aggressively, trying to root out anyone he thought was an undercover animal activist.

“I’m building an empire,” he bragged one day, in one of the groups.

Mr Ape’s priority was finding himself a trusted “VO”. In the groups, VO stood for “video operator”, and referred to the people — primarily in Indonesia — who actually tortured the monkeys on camera. Mr Ape and the Torture King had both messaged Mini’s owner, via YouTube, but he refused to carry out extreme torture ideas. One member of Ape’s Cage, however, did establish access to a reliable VO, and unlike Mini’s owner, this VO seemed to be willing to do anything she asked.

And that gave Stacey Michelle Storey a lot of cache in Ape’s Cage.

Stacey Storey was a 46-year-old grandmother who worked at a gas station and lived with her son in a solitary trailer set back from the road in a rural part of Alabama. Her screen name was “Sadistic”, and she was among the most prolific contributors to Ape’s Cage. She shared endless torture videos, as well as fantasies involving forced feeding, power tools and jars of acid.

Storey’s VO charged $200 (£150) per video, she told Mr Ape. “He’s brutal and if what you want done is able to be done, he’ll do it,” she said. What Mr Ape wanted was a video that would make him famous. He and Storey ran through various ideas before Mr Ape threw out what would become his big one: baby monkey in a blender.

The members of Ape’s Cage couldn’t get enough of the blender idea. They debated how much they should send for the blender, which model would be up to the job. In April 2022, Mr Ape went to Storey with a nine-point plan for how it should be done.

The blender video was a big hit in the monkey hate community and Mr Ape basked in the fame that came from it. He and Storey commissioned more videos, including another fatal video involving a red power drill that was even harder to watch. At the same time, Storey and Mr Ape spent hours chatting privately via Telegram, mostly talking torture, but increasingly they talked security too. Hundreds of new members were joining the groups, and Storey was becoming more paranoid. “Be careful who you trust,” she warned Mr Ape one day.

What Storey didn’t know was that it was Mr Ape she couldn’t trust. A month before the blender video was made, Mr Ape had reached out to Nina Jackel, the animal rights activist, and Dave Gooptar in Trinidad, and told them he was really a kind of undercover informant. Just like the Torture King, he said he planned to bring down the monkey haters from within.

“Save the monkeys, stop the monkey torture”, he signed off his email to Jackel.

Jackel didn’t believe him — she thought he was trying to create a fake cover story for himself. Besides, she was busy trying to sue YouTube for hosting the videos, a David v Goliath case that was slowly progressing through the courts. But Dave Gooptar began talking to Mr Ape regularly.

And we contacted him too. 

It turned out Mr Ape was running his empire from his mother’s house in Florida, in a nice neighbourhood with broad streets lined by picket fences and neatly-kept lawns. He was a college graduate in his mid-twenties, tall — basketball player tall — with a beard, baggy clothes and glasses. In the backyard of his house, a large oak tree shaded a cat graveyard where six cats were buried under six miniature cat headstones. Upstairs, his bedroom was a time-capsule of childhood: toys, a single bed with patterned bedspread, a framed photograph of his late father. 

We decided not to name Mr Ape in this story, because of specific concerns over his safety. When we visited him, he told us he was a lonely child who had become a lonely adult. At some point, he said, his pain had morphed into hate. “What was so appealing was to see something else suffer, essentially, that looked human,” he said. “Because I was suffering.”

The world of bespoke monkey torture was new to Dr Cecchet, but the elements were familiar, she said. It reminded her, like it reminded Agent Wolpert, of child abuse gangs. It was a world where sadists could “access what is most exciting to them, and not only access it but have it custom made,” she said. As for Mr Ape’s claim that he was an undercover agent, it was just an example of the “detail rich fantasy life” often lived by sadists. “They learn to live in this fantasy world,” she said.

Special Agent Wolpert didn’t believe in the fantasy either. So all that was left for Mr Ape was to wait for the federal agents to arrive.

As he waited, he was still thinking about Mini. He had once obsessed over her. Now he was wondering if she might still be alive.

“She probably couldn’t go back into the wild now, given the hierarchy of the troops, she would probably just starve,” he said.

“But there’s nothing I wouldn't give to see her in a good home.”

In the hills outside of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia, where strawberries and avocados and chilli plants grow on terraces of fields carved into the hillsides, there is a road that leads up past groves of bamboo trees to a shaded sanctuary about the size of a football pitch. There, a team of vets rehabilitates rescued animals and animals who cannot live in the wild. There are leopard cats, pangolins and peacocks, and a sick sea eagle who can’t fly. There is a crocodile who attacked too many people. In one corner of the sanctuary, there is a large cage filled with foliage, tree branches and a tyre swing, and in it is Mini.

When Mini arrived at the sanctuary, after the police rescued her, she had fractures in her tail and jaw and her baby teeth were all broken or missing. She was deeply stressed, the vet, Ilham Maulana, said. And yet, after just four months, when we visited her, there had already been a change in Mini. She had become braver, more curious. She had begun to swing around the cage, leaping over other monkeys and play fighting with them.

When Mini has recovered a little more, and learned a little more, the team will be able to return her to the wild, said Femke de Haas, the co-founder of the sanctuary. “We have a beautiful area that we can use as a release site for this species,” De Haas said. “And it is a pristine forested island in a protected reserve, so people are not allowed to go there,” she said. “So it is safe.”

As Mini was settling into her sanctuary home, her former owner, Ajis Rasajana, was sentenced to eight months in prison — the maximum penalty available. It was significantly less than the three years that Stacey Storey’s VO Asep would get, simply because Asep was also selling protected species. Eight months for Mini’s owner was not enough, the judge in his case said, as he handed the sentence down.

In the US, things were moving more slowly. But Agent Wolpert was hopeful of convictions for Mr Ape, Stacey Storey and Mike McCartney. “I just don’t think the judges are going to take kindly to this one,” he said, shaking his head.

In LA, Nina Jackel was still trying to sue YouTube for hosting the videos, but a judge had already ruled in YouTube’s favour and she was facing a long and uncertain fight ahead.

In a statement, YouTube told us that animal abuse had “no place” on the platform and the company was “working hard to quickly remove violative content”. “Just this year alone, we’ve removed hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels for violating our violent and graphic policies,” the statement said. Telegram told us it was committed to protecting privacy and freedom of speech and its moderators could not “proactively patrol private groups”. But users could report content from those groups to Telegram moderators, it said.

It is still possible, with a simple search, to find troubling monkey videos on YouTube, but the worst of the torture appears to have gone. On Telegram, it is alive and kicking. And Facebook is now home to at least dozens of monkey torture groups, some with with thousands of members. Facebook told the BBC it had removed the groups we brought to the company’s attention recently. “We don’t allow the promotion of animal abuse on our platforms and we remove this content when we become aware of it, like we did in this case,” a spokesperson said.

In Trinidad, Dave Gooptar is still tracking the groups — exporting membership lists, identifying buyers and VOs. He is finding it hard to let go. He called Kapetanich recently, while we were visiting her, and found her sitting smoking on the patio under a vivid, orange LA sky. The two of them fell right into it, Mayhem and Yardfish, the two most famous amateur sleuths in the monkey torture world. Kapetanich told Gooptar the good news about Mini. Earlier that day, she had seen footage from the sanctuary, and stared intently at the screen as Mini swung from branch to branch. “I thought Mini had died,” she had said afterwards, trying to hold back tears. “Wow, that was really emotional.”

Kapetanich joked with Gooptar about what the hell they were going to do when it was all over. “I dunno, go to monkey torture anonymous?” she said. 

She did have a plan, she said, for the day when there were no more groups, no images or videos. She was going to take her pink hard drive, which she had carried around for more than a year, which was filled with all the worst of it all, and pour tequila on it and smash it up. 

“Baby, that’s so stupid,” she said, laughing. Then, looking serious again, she said: “But no, honestly, I really want to destroy that thing.”

It was late. Kapetanich settled into her patio chair, took a drag of her cigarette and blew smoke up into the sky. She looked happier than usual, more at peace.

On the other side of the world, Mini was nearly free.

You can watch the documentary, The Monkey Haters, on BBC iPlayer, and listen to the radio version on BBC Sounds.

Investigation
Astudestra Ajengrastri, Joel Gunter, Rebecca Henschke, Sam Piranty, Kelvin Brown

Online production
James Percy

Graphics
Asher Isbrucker, Manuella Bonomi, Dwiki Marta

Published 20 June 2023