A high-profile criminal trial got underway on Friday at a district court in Härnösand, a quiet coastal town in eastern Sweden, where a 61-year-old local man faces severe charges including multiple counts of rape, assault, and coercion for allegedly forcing his ex-wife to provide paid sexual services to more than 120 men over three years.
Prosecutors lay out a disturbing account of systematic abuse that exploited the isolation of the couple’s remote farm near Kramfors, in northern Sweden, to maintain control over the victim. According to official charging documents, the abuse began in 2022, when the defendant first coerced his then-wife into engaging in sexual encounters with men he sourced and communicated with online, who traveled to the couple’s property from across Sweden to pay for the services. The violence and coercion only ended in October 2025, when the victim gathered the courage to file an official report with police. She has since divorced her abuser, and both she and the defendant have had their full identities withheld from public records to protect the victim’s privacy.
Prosecutors allege the defendant used multiple tools to break his wife’s resistance and maintain his control: he plied her with drugs to lower her ability to resist, installed surveillance cameras throughout the family home to monitor her every move (including recording the non-consensual sexual encounters, footage that will be entered as evidence in the trial), and exploited her limited social network to cut her off from outside support. He also carried out repeated violent threats against her, including threats to kill her, burn her with petrol, and sever her fingers, according to the indictment cited by Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
Lead prosecutor Ida Annerstedt told Swedish national daily Expressen ahead of the opening of the trial that the defendant intentionally “exploited her particularly vulnerable situation” and her deep-seated fear of him to gradually normalize his pattern of coercive abuse.
The defendant has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. He claims all sexual encounters were consensual, and argues he only acted as an organizer to facilitate arrangements between his ex-wife and the men who contacted her. His defense lawyer, Martina Michaelsdotter Olsson, confirmed to SVT on the first day of the trial that her client rejects the entire narrative presented by prosecutors, saying he does not recognize the version of events outlined in the indictment.
Swedish law enforcement has to date identified 120 men who are alleged to have participated in the encounters at the farm. However, only 28 of these men have so far been formally charged in connection with the case. Most of the co-accused have denied the allegations against them, claiming either they never engaged in sexual activity with the victim or that no payment was exchanged. Prosecutors plan to corroborate their case with a range of evidence including online chat logs between the defendant and the accused men, financial transaction records of payments, and calendar entries the defendant kept to schedule encounters.
The case has drawn widespread international attention, with many observers drawing comparisons to the high-profile 2024 Pelicot trial in France, where Dominique Pelicot was convicted of drugging his own wife and allowing dozens of men to rape her over a nine-year period. To protect the victim’s privacy, the Swedish trial moved into a closed session immediately after the charges were read in court. The entire proceeding is scheduled to run for 14 days, with a verdict expected at the conclusion of proceedings.