prisons

For years, Magaluf has been a go-to party resort for Brits seeking fun in the sun. But a darker side to the tourist spot has emerged, with reports of spiked drinks, sexual assaults, and rape

With the promise of sun, sand, booze, and parties, Magaluf is a major party resort – but beneath it hides a dark underbelly. Popular amongst a younger demographic, it’s been seen to epitomise a typical ‘lads holiday’ or girls’ trip abroad, with tens of thousands of British 18 to 30-year-olds flocking there each summer.

Dubbed ‘Shagaluf’, alcohol-sodden tourists descend on the ‘strip’ in their droves, lured through the promise of cheap accommodation, cheap booze, and no-strings sex. However, it hides a seedier scene where vulnerable young girls are being exploited – duped into drinking too much and pressured into sex acts.

In 2014, viral mobile phone footage showed a British 18-year-old giving oral sex to 24 men on a Carnage Magaluf pub crawl, egged on by a DJ who called her a ‘slag’. The ‘prize’ was a free drink. In the horrifying video obtained by our newspaper, the vile music host is seen shouting: “This is Carnage and this is what we do” as a no-holds-barred sex act takes place in the middle of a bar. When the girl appears to stop, the DJ – who has a Geordie accent – bellows: “You little sl*g, stop f****** about. This is Carnage and this is what we do. We need to see someone get b*nged here don’t we? Who wants to see someone get sh**ged?”

And this week, eight men were jailed after a British teenager was filmed being gang-raped at a hotel in Magaluf. The accused, seven French nationals and one man from Sweden, subjected the 18-year-old to a sickening attack in at the BH Mallorca Resort on August 14, 2023.

The men agreed to plead guilty in exchange for reduced sentences. The five rapists accepted jail terms of nine to 11 years for sexual assault, with three receiving higher prison sentences because they repeated their crimes. The three men who didn’t take part in the sex attack but filmed it were handed prison sentences of two years and three months.

Reports at the time said three of the suspects had met the girl hours earlier while partying in Magaluf. After sexually attacking her, one went out into the hotel corridor to encourage strangers returning from their own night out to have ‘free sex’ with her.

“There, the accused men, during approximately half an hour, aware of the semi-conscious state the young woman was in and at one point seeing she had fallen in a state of unconsciousness, and taking advantage of the closed room she had been taken into, stripped her naked leaving her with only her bra on,” a 14-page indictment laying out the public prosecution case read.

“They then carried out different sexual acts on her, acting by common consent and without her consent.” The indictment further detailed how the woman had been raped, spat on, and “hit and smacked”.

“The accused men, each one with a mobile phone, throughout the actions previously described, recorded several videos focusing on the young woman’s private parts in which they appeared forcing her to to carry out sexual acts,” it added. One of the suspects was accused of filming 14 videos lasting 170 seconds, and another of filming five videos lasting 142 seconds.

Sadly, it’s not an unusual story. The dark underbelly of Magaluf was explored in the 2024 Channel 4 documentary Magaluf Undercover: Predators and Parties. It followed journalists Ellie Flynn and Emily Birtley as they went undercover for three nights, posing as drunk or vulnerable tourists to expose the predatory behaviour on the strip, in clubs, and on the beach.

In one instance, footage saw Ellie pretend to be drunk and slump on a sun lounger before being approached by two men. One asks: “Are you good? Do you want to talk for a little bit?” When she replies, “I’m good”, he continues to bombard her, saying: “You are my last chance, do you want to kiss a little bit?”

Ellie tells him “No”, and secret cameras, hidden around the lounger, show the man walking away. But instead of leaving, he goes to recruit another man. “She’s completely wasted,” he tells him in Spanish, before calling out “Let’s go for it.” A third man then moves in beside Ellie on the sun lounger saying: “If you want, I can keep you company.”

Reflecting on the encounter, Ellie said: “The arrival of the third male ­startled and genuinely scared me. I had seen the first two together, but the sudden appearance of another – and having no idea at the time if they were together – was enough for me to signal security to get me out.

“I leave the beach upset and frightened, feeling like I’ve experienced an orchestrated attempt to target drunk women alone on a night out in Magaluf. Shockingly, this was not an ­isolated incident, but a pattern that emerged across my three nights in the resort town.”

Another young woman, meanwhile, said she ended up alone on the beach after her drink was spiked. “I just started to feel worse and worse. I could barely speak, I could barely walk,” she said.

We spoke to Ellie about the latest arrest of the eight men – and the dangers that women can face abroad. She told the Mirror: “It’s just so horrifying, isn’t it? I guess first impressions are just, I’m so, so sorry for that girl, what she’s been through.

“I think having been on these holidays when I was younger myself – I went to Magaluf when I was younger – and similar places, I think I really understand some of the problematic culture there.

“I think that these holidays, unfortunately, can create a breeding ground for this kind of behaviour, because you have young people who are particularly vulnerable, perhaps away from home for the first time, with their friends, trying to have a good time, drinking, trying to party.

“And unfortunately, there are predatory people there who are looking to take advantage of those vulnerabilities. I think what’s so shocking about this case [is that] it’s not even the first or the only one of these kind of horrific group rapes. It says so much, I think, about this toxic culture that eight people got involved with that.”

Dr Charlotte Proudman, a barrister and academic who specialises in women’s rights, echoes these concerns, and believes the problem has been fuelled by the so-called ‘manosphere’ – an online space that often champions masculinity to the extreme. The online space includes content creators with huge followings, such as HS Tikky Tokky, who promote the ideals of masculinity – and even misogyny – via YouTube videos and podcasts.

“What we are seeing in places like Magaluf is the collision of toxic online misogyny with a holiday culture of excess, where alcohol, group dynamics and anonymity embolden some men to act with shocking entitlement towards women’s bodies,” she tells The Mirror.

“The influence of the ‘manosphere’ has normalised the dehumanisation of women and the idea that sexual aggression is a form of male bonding or status,” Dr Proudman explains. “The fact that some perpetrators even film these attacks is profoundly disturbing; it shows that for some men, sexual violence is not only committed but performed for an audience for entertainment.

“This is not about lowered inhibitions on holiday, it is about a culture that still allows misogyny and sexual violence to be trivialised, excused and, in some cases, celebrated.”

Indeed, an independent survey undertaken as part of the documentary exposed disturbing levels of predatory behaviour and sexual abuse – primarily toward women – on party holidays. The survey, which asked over 500 men and women aged 18 to 35 about their experience on party holidays, revealed:

• Almost of quarter of those surveyed said they’d experienced sexual assault with almost 1 in 10 women reporting experience of a sex act – including rape – without consent
• Nearly 35 percent of women reported unwanted sexual touching whilst on a party holiday
• 1 in 5 of the men surveyed admitting to touching a stranger in an intimate area without their consent
• More than 30 percent of the men surveyed admitted they had kissed someone without their consent during a night out on holiday
• Nearly a quarter of men believed that someone dancing or standing alone indicated they were looking for a sexual partner
• 33 percent of the women reported they had been followed whilst on holiday
• Nearly 40 percent of women surveyed felt that they had been taken advantage of whilst being alone on a party holiday
• More than 1 in 4 of the men believed that someone chatting to them on a night out meant that person wanted to be sexually intimate with them

In an effort to take control back on the streets of Magaluf, the government passed a new law in January 2020 to target “tourism of excesses and for the improvement of quality in tourist zones”.

At the time of the approval of the decree, Balearic tourism minister Iago Negueruela stated that it represented “one more commitment to a sustainable tourism of quality” and that it was part of “the fight against anti-social behaviour caused by excessive consumption of alcohol”.

Key rules include a six-drink limit per day for all-inclusive guests, a ban on shop alcohol sales between 9:30 PM and 8 AM, and prohibitions on pub crawls. There are also fines for being topless and naked in public, and the police presence has increased.

Ellie added that “it’s really hard to imagine and it’s horrifying” that one of the men went into the corridor and offered ‘free sex’ with the teenager, saying: “It’s almost difficult to um comprehend that anybody would respond to that in any way other than calling the police.

“I think it’s really symptomatic of how dangerous these holidays or these kind of environments can be, not just for women but you know mostly for young women.

“What I find the most shocking about it is the fact that they were, it’s such a bleak fact that this group of men who did not know each other, thought that this was something they would get involved in and I think that it shows how pervasive this kind of this culture of abuse of women is because you know in that environment people were willing to get involved in the most horrific crime.

“There’s something about these holidays, I think, where hedonism and abuse, the lines become so blurred and I think that people kind of go in with these attitudes of wanting to have sex, wanting to meet people, and unfortunately what we see in a society where, like, women are systematically abused and often used for kind of male gratification is this blurring of lines between sort of hedonism and trying to have fun and then really really serious abuse.”

When making her own documentary and surveying holidaymakers, Ellie noted, “a huge percentage of the men that we surveyed thought that someone standing near you was an indication that they might be interested in sex”. She added, “it was so shocking and I think there is this assumption that if you are on these holidays, if you’re out with your friends having a good time, having a drink that somehow that that makes you you know constantly available for sex – you know even if you’re unconscious”. Een if someone is “showing no signs at all that is what you want, there are people out there who will take advantage of the fact that you that you were just there”.

She added, “That was what really shocked me about the documentary,” pointing out that some people responded to the documentary in bizarre ways, “there were people who were replying to me on Instagram who were like, ‘Well you know, why would you go somewhere like Magaluf if you weren’t prepared to experience something like that?’ And I think it shows that we have such a long way to go in terms of actually stopping Violence against women and girls.”

Discussing the algorithmic silos that see totally different conversations about gender, sexual violence, and abuse taking place at once, Ellie said: “We’ve never seen a further divide between young men and young women and their views and their experiences.

“And there was a period in time where I think it felt like things were moving in the right direction. You know, we were taking women seriously, and we were listening to their stories and we were, saying all the right things to try and combat violence against women and girls and stop this kind of insidious abuse, but you know at the same time you have the rise of, you know, certain influencers and the manosphere and this kind of narrative that young boys are isolated and don’t know how to treat girls and are scared of kind of making any approaches, and and we have these kind of two conversations happening simultaneously and taking people down in completely different directions and I think that is where things are now particularly concerning.”

She added that “on one side you have young men,” hearing one message and “almost being justified in some cases in the abuse of women and in this mistreatment of women and in degrading women, because there are people, there are high profile figures, who have made them feel like it’s okay to do that.”

Ellie continued, “It’s clear that we need to be having conversations that include both sides of this argument.” She adds, “I have two sons and I don’t want them to grow up feeling like they are inherently bad because they are male, that’s not true, and I think that somewhere along the way that’s a narrative that some young boys have learned to believe, and so things have gone wrong in a sense that things have gone that way, but also ignoring the very real epidemic of violence against women and girls and highlighting those issues isn’t the answer. We should be able to do both at the same time.”

Louis Theroux has spoken to key male influencers on social media in the Manosphere for new Netflix project

As a concerned father-of-three, Louis Theroux has admitted he doesn’t know what his own kids are looking at online half the time. So this might explain why he has got involved with male content creators online, with millions of followers, who are part of what is dubbed “The Manosphere” for his new documentary.

Louis says: “These aren’t figures on the margins – anyone who’s got kids, and especially boys, will know that they are making inroads into the culture. Their influence is being felt in schools, in the workplace and all across the internet.

“Going back to the earliest days of my programmes I’ve always been interested in the taboo and people who believe things which run against the grain of values I’ve grown up with. Those in the manosphere embody a swaggering machismo that is by turns misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic and racist. So there’s a whole bunch of red flags there which I find interesting.”

TV host Louis, 55, starts the Netflix documentary by saying he noticed a few years ago “parts of the internet were being taken over” by a collection of male influencers who claim to give young men “cheat codes to win at life”.

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Asked about his own sons and what they are watching, Louis replies honestly: “I think as a parent you hope that your influence will outweigh whatever they’re being fed online, but truthfully they probably spend more hours looking at their phones than they do talking to us and we don’t always know what they’re looking at.”

In his 90-minute film, Louis explores how key figures, including Harrison Sullivan (known online as HSTikkyTokky), Myron Gaines, Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (AKA Sneako), Justin Waller and Ed Matthews, are helping to reshape young men’s ideas about masculinity and fuelling a resurgent global men’s rights movement.

Louis immerses himself in their world, encountering prominent figures within the movement, each presenting their own interpretations of traditional gender roles and values.

Sullivan, 24, was handed a one-year suspended prison sentence at Staines Magistrates’ Court in November last year after pleading guilty to dangerous driving and driving without insurance.

He has also been disqualified from driving for two years. Asked what his message is, he tells Louis: “I coach boys how to be f**king boys, how to make money, how to be outside the system, how to not have a boss telling you want to do.

“I teach guys to be proper boys and not gimps that walk around in the modern world.”

These men online have similar ideas to those of influencer Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist.

A 2025 YouGov poll suggested one in eight Gen Z men (aged 14-29) had a “favourable view” of Andrew Tate, one of the leading figures of the manosphere, while more than one in three believed misandry – hatred or discrimination against men – was widespread in the UK.

Sounding worried about their impact, Louis said: “It was my kids who first made me aware of Andrew Tate – it would have been around 2022 and they kept referencing him and what he was saying – I had no idea who he was. Four years later, he’s still got cultural influence because he has millions of hours of content sitting out there for people to discover.

“As a parent I’m obviously concerned about the impact that that has, and it would be easy to say; ‘oh well, they don’t take it too seriously’, which a lot of the time I think they don’t, but at a certain point, a joke is no longer a joke – especially when it’s unchallenged and repeated. So we try to stay on top of what they’re watching and try to have conversations with them about it, but it’s hard.”

Louis encounters difficulties in the film which see the male influencers film him for their own social media and subject him to abuse and questions they receive from their followers whilst streaming footage live. It leads to Louis being abused about his previous documentary with the late Jimmy Savile.

He also witnesses homophobic behaviour by HSTikkyTokky whilst Myron Gaines speaks in front of his girlfriend about wanting multiple wives in the future.

Sullivan says he would “disown” his own daughter if he had one and she joined Only Fans, despite claiming to own an agency that represents girls on there. He also says he could not have a son who was gay.

There is also much discussion in the documentary on the notion of ‘red-pilling’ which Louis explains can mean “that men and women are fundamentally different and that women don’t want what they say they want – all they actually care about is big, rich guys with big dicks.”

Asked why he thinks the manosphere is attractive to many teenagers, Louis said: “I think there’s a lot of lonely men out there, and there’s now a whole industry dedicated to them. There are millions of hours of podcasts that talk about the masculinity crisis – how we’ve seen a decline in manufacturing jobs in the west and how there’s been efforts to correct the patriarchal skew in society that has in turn triggered a backlash.”

Louis also defended his decision to make the documentary in the first place, which could be seen as amplifying potentially harmful ideologies and helping the men to get even more followers thanks to them being shown on Netflix.

For him it is a case of trying to understand and challenge the ideas which are being pushed to youngsters.

He said: “My view is always I’m not trying to embarrass them or trick them in any way. I am trying to tell the truth and I will confront them appropriately. I’m not trying to pick a fight. I’m just trying to understand them, get my questions answered and then challenge and push back on the parts that don’t make sense to me or strike me as dangerous. At the end of the day I’m trying to make TV that engages people – so a few fireworks don’t go amiss and some raised voices or a sense of menace is actually quite helpful.”

In the concluding moment of the documentary, after spending weeks with these male influencers, Louis concludes: “In a world that’s changing at dizzying speed with narrowing opportunities, where the old entitlements of manhood have been challenged. It is perhaps not surprising that some have sought the comfort of a simplified world of game hacks and conspiracy theories. It struck me that the matrix they rail against more accurately describes the algorithmic prison they’ve created for their followers, an illusion of endless wealth and power that actually only enriches a few at the top.

“We are in a world where the fringe is no longer fringe. Where we are all increasingly, inside the manosphere, and it’s up to us how we get out.”

* Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere is available on Netflix from March 11.

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When Tom Steyer was running a hedge fund in 2000, he wrote a letter telling some wealthy investors their money would soon flow through an offshore company that would shield their gains from U.S. taxes.

It was routine in finance, but could prove toxic in politics.

Now that the San Francisco billionaire has joined the crowd of Democrats running for president, much of what he did to build his personal fortune, including a stint at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s, could turn off voters. His fund’s investments in coal mining and private prisons are two of the biggest hazards.

Part of Steyer’s challenge is timing. Wall Street’s reputation is in tatters in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Many Democrats are upset about growing income inequality. And billionaires — President Trump first among them — are routinely demonized by the party’s left wing.

Steyer is the founder of Farallon Capital Management, one of America’s largest hedge funds, the high-risk investment pools for big investors. He left Farallon in 2012 after running the San Francisco firm for 26 years.

He did not mention his experience there when asked by The Times what qualified him to serve as president. He focused instead on his work fighting climate change and big corporations over the last decade.

Attacks by Steyer’s opponents have been mild so far, but that will change if he starts gaining support.

“He will have to answer for his involvement in anti-climate-control activities, his relationship to the coal industry, and his relationship to Wall Street, which young people particularly find abhorrent,” said Democratic ad maker Hank Sheinkopf, who is unaligned in the presidential race.

“In a political campaign, there is no past tense and there is no future tense. Everything in your life you’ve ever done, thought of and said is in present tense.”

In written responses to questions sent by email, Steyer expressed remorse over some of Farallon’s investments.

A key liability is Farallon’s 2005 investment of $34 million in Corrections Corp. of America, which runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many of the roughly two dozen Democrats in the presidential race have denounced profits from incarceration as immoral.

“I deeply regret that Farallon made that investment, and I personally ordered the investment in CCA to be sold because it did not accord with my values then or now,” Steyer said.

More troublesome for Steyer’s public image is the fund’s history of investing in fossil fuel projects, including a giant coal mine in Australia that generates vast quantities of carbon emissions.

The owners overcame protests by environmentalists and won permission to clear 3,700 acres of forest that served as a koala habitat and mine 12 million tons of coal per year. Steyer’s critics have long seen his past personal stake in coal mining as hypocritical.

The hedge fund led by Tom Steyer invested in an Australian coal mine that drew protesters in Sydney.

(Saleed Khan / AFP/Getty Images)

“If you’re running as a liberal, idealistic candidate, as Tom Steyer is, it’s a serious problem when the story you’re trying to tell uses words like private prisons and coal,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor. “It just goes directly against the rainbows and sunshine and clean air and better tomorrow narrative he’s trying to paint.”

Steyer said he left Farallon in part because of its holdings in fossil fuels. “I wish I’d made the move away from fossil fuels sooner,” he said.

Steyer, 62, muscled his way onto the public stage by becoming one of the Democratic Party’s top donors over the last decade. He put $74 million into the 2018 midterm election. He has carefully crafted his political profile around his spending to promote liberal causes, most visibly the fight against global warming and the drive to impeach President Trump.

Some of Steyer’s record has yielded bad publicity over the years as he weighed runs for elected office in California. But his entry into the presidential race on Tuesday and his vow to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign will draw fresh scrutiny to the means he used to amass what Forbes estimates to be his net worth of $1.6 billion.

Steyer, who grew up on Manhattan’s East Side, started his career on Wall Street in the late 1970s at Morgan Stanley and worked later on mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs. In 1986, he opened Farallon, which grew from $9 million to $36 billion on his watch, according to Steyer.

Some Democrats say Steyer has atoned for his sins. RL Miller, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, was perplexed by his candidacy and said his money would be better spent advancing other Democrats.

“I do feel he has demonstrated substantial good faith in that yes, he made a lot of money from bad places, but he’s been very, very open about the fact that he’s turned over a new leaf and is no longer taking money from those bad places and is instead spending to do good,” Miller said.

The business records of wealthy candidates are often weaponized by rivals. Former President Obama cast GOP challenger Mitt Romney in 2012 as a ruthless plutocrat who made millions of dollars on corporate takeovers that put thousands of Americans out of work. Romney co-founded Bain Capital, a private equity firm.

Mitt Romney’s career running a private equity firm was criticized by President Obama in the 2012 presidential campaign.

(Erik S. Lesser / EPA-Shutterstock)

Gray Davis won California’s Democratic primary for governor in 1998 after portraying rival Al Checchi as a tycoon who pillaged Northwest Airlines, firing thousands and forcing thousands more to take pay cuts.

“When these wealthy, self-financing first-time candidates want to throw their hat in the ring, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, they have to be prepared for a complete drill-down on how it is they made those millions of dollars,” said Garry South, who was Davis’ chief strategist.

As for Steyer, South said, “It’s pretty hard for me to see a billionaire on the Democratic side credibly take on the whole issue of wealth inequality.”

Tom Steyer joins swarm of Democrats running for president »

Within hours of Steyer’s announcement, two of his opponents took shots at him.

“I’m a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power,” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told MSNBC.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is competing with Sanders for progressive voters, tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding super PACs or funding themselves.”

In an email seeking donations on Thursday, she said, “We need our candidates to compete to have the best ideas — not just to write themselves the biggest checks.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren says the Democratic presidential primary should not be decided by billionaires.

(Brynn Anderson / Associated Press)

Both Sanders and Warren, who frequently rail at what they see as unfair advantages for the super-rich, have declined to take money from Wall Street donors.

Steyer’s wealth will enable him to run more television ads than most of his opponents can afford. He is already spending $1.4 million on advertising over the next two weeks on national cable news networks and in the first four states to hold a primary or caucus.

“Maybe he feels he can overwhelm these questions by spending a lot of money telling his story the way he wants to tell it,” said David Axelrod, the architect of Obama’s campaigns. “The problem is in the presidential race, the coverage is so intense and social media such a big piece of that, these kinds of vulnerabilities get shared virally very readily, and I’m not sure you can overwhelm that, even with hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Steyer could also face questions about spending that much money on himself. “Does all that spending help in the end of the day or does it become an emblem of excess and self-aggrandizement?” Axelrod said.

Asked about his letter to Farallon investors on the British Virgin Islands company that was going to help them avoid federal taxes, Steyer did not address his past actions, but called for new taxes on the rich to reduce inequality.

“I use no offshore tax havens and pay all U.S. taxes in full,” he said. “I believe we should have a much simpler and fairer tax code and get rid of all loopholes.”