Hunting The Monkey Torturers
By Joel Gunter, Rebecca Henschke, and Astudestra Ajengrastri
BBC Eye Investigations
WARNING: This article contains disturbing content.
A BBC investigation has uncovered a global monkey torture ring This is the story of the torturers, the amateur sleuths who hunted them, and the fate of Mini, the baby monkey who became a celebrity in their twisted world.
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 on-line 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 clipped off the webcam at night she often opened YouTube, seeking solace in cute animal videos. Her favorites were a chimpanzee family in a zoo in Japan. She could watch them for hours as she drifted towards sleep.
More:
https://bbc.co.uk/news/extra/Iot1dIWVS5/hunting-the-monkey-torturers