Inside the sick monkey torture Facebook network and the people helping bring it down

Sarah Kite’s Action for Primates group helped expose Dovecot man Peter Stanley who was jailed this week for posting monkey torture videos

A woman who has helped expose the extent of a monkey torture ring hopes the severe sentence of a Merseyside man can be a watershed moment to shut down the vile practice. This week Dovecot man Peter Stanley was sentenced to 20 months’ immediate imprisonment after he admitted posting three videos of baby macaque monkeys being abused in a private Facebook group.

The sentencing of Stanley marks a first in not just the north west, but perhaps in the whole of the UK. Sarah Kite, founder of Action for Primates – the group that passed information to the police about Stanley’s sickening video distribution – told the ECHO the practice has escalated in recent years with a global reach.

However, with Stanley’s immediate incarceration, the upcoming sentencings of two women in Worcester and the arrests of a number of people both in Asia and the US, Ms Kite hopes this can be a wakeup call to both the public and social media tech giants. Ms Kite’s Action for Primates group started in 2021 when it and American group Lady Freethinker were first alerted of the formation of a US-based ‘monkey haters’ private online group called “Milliontears”.

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The group’s members, many of whom had met on monkey cruelty YouTube channels, were paying to have baby monkeys tortured and killed on camera in Indonesia. After the group moved onto Telegram, its US organisers started a monkey adoption programme where members could pay for the animal to be filmed while being tortured in their chosen method.

Action For Primates and Lady Freethinker’s volunteers gained access to the Telegram accounts and obtained evidence including videos and screenshots of conversations which were all handed over to law enforcement. After the two groups went public with their sickening discoveries, the US’s fish and wildlife federal agency stepped in and arrested a number of figures, including the Telegram account’s founder, a former teacher.

But with the global reach of the torture ring stretching to tens of thousands of members around the world, Action for Primates’ work made another significant breakthrough last year. A BBC investigation, supported by Ms Kite and her volunteers, uncovered a network where hundreds of people gathered to come up with extreme torture ideas and commission people in Indonesia and Thailand to carry them out.

The BBC investigation revealed a key video distributor in the network was Mike Macartney, who went by his screen name ‘The Torture King’, who has since pleaded guilty to offences. Closer to home, two women in Worcester – Adriana Orme and Holly Le Gresley – were convicted of their various involvement in the global torturing ring.

However, Ms Kite told the ECHO that more worrying the videos have made their way from encrypted platforms onto social media. She said: “Shockingly there are also monkey torture groups on the world’s top social media platforms, and many of these graphic videos – depicting mutilation, burning, beating and more – have also been posted on Facebook, making them easily available for others including children to access and view.

“By allowing these people to operate and post monkey torture content, social media platforms have enabled and continue to enable animal cruelty fetishists to connect. The frightening thing is people can reach out and find others they would never engage with or meet in real life.”

It’s within one of these private Facebook groups, called ‘Monkey Sauce’, that Stanley, 42 and of Dovecot Avenue, shared three videos. The videos, which varied between seven and 15 minutes in length, showed the baby monkeys being horrifically tortured by people believed to be in either Thailand or Indonesia.

The extreme videos included monkeys being mutilated and tortured with instruments including pliers, a hatchet and a machete. Liverpool Crown Court heard the defendant also commented on the videos he shared. On one he said “now do as you are told”, while on another he said “a fav of mine this one”. On his third video he commented “this rat has nailed it”.

When asked why monkeys are tortured and what the aims of the videos were, Ms Kite alleged: “I can’t explain their behaviour but we think it’s because of how similar monkeys are to humans. We also think there is a sexual sadism element because of the fixation on the animal’s genitals.”

When Stanley’s home was raided in March this year, police seized a phone which, as well as containing images of monkeys, had searches including “how to tell if a baby monkey is distressed” and beastiality pornography involving horses. During his police interview he told officers he had begun by watching videos of monkeys in the wild and questioned how bad they could be hurt.

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Stanley said he viewed about 70 videos in the private Facebook group between June and October last year. The court heard that he was encouraged to share videos in the group by other members to ensure he would not report what was going on. Ms Kite said some of the groups have tens of thousands of members in.

While not all participate by actively requesting, sourcing or distributing the images, Ms Kite said they still engage with the material. However, these people who have joined the group also pass information to organisations like Action for Primates which helps the group collate evidence of the ongoing crimes.

The group also has volunteers who go inside the various Facebook accounts to expose the identities of those involved. Without giving too much detail about the group’s practices to ensure the safety of her volunteers, Ms Kite said: “We are very much involved in investigating and exposing the identities of people. It can be difficult to track people down. The groups are secretive, some only allow people in who have been referred by someone else.”

In recent years – particularly since the BBC investigation – law enforcement agencies, both in the UK and around the world – have begun to take the concerns of the animal rights’ groups seriously. Ms Kite has received support from both the National Crime Agency and National Wildlife Crime Unit in recent months, while Merseyside Police’s rural, wildlife and heritage team led the investigation into Stanley after Action for Primates passed information onto them.

Ms Kite told the ECHO the group would continue its work to expose the extent of the global ring in the future, working in partnership with not only Lady Freethinker, but a number of other organisations as part of the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition. The coalition aims to shine a light on the hidden world of animal cruelty content in all its forms.

Ms Kite said she hopes the case of Stanley, as bizarre as it is horrific, will be a catalyst for those involved in the sickening trade. It is expected that in the coming months more arrests and potentially convictions will materialise as efforts continue to expose those involved.

During the sentencing of Stanley, it was heard that both the prosecuting and defence counsels that this case did not even have a sentencing guideline for the judge to refer to, such was the recent nature of this type of offence in the UK. Ms Kite said: “The whole area has just escalated in recent years.

“I hope Stanley is a watershed moment and a wakeup call. People can see Stanley was hit with a severe sentence and I hope that can be a deterrent.”