Reynhard Sinaga’s luck ran out shortly before 6am on June 2nd 2017. For at least two-and-a-half years, the Indonesian student had honed his tactic of inviting men back to his flat in central Manchester and handing them a spiked drink on arrival.
But that morning, the drugs failed. Or perhaps he had become so complacent that he did not use any.
Either way, his final victim, an 18-year-old he had met outside Factory nightclub, woke up face down with his jeans and boxer shorts around his knees. He realised Sinaga was sexually assaulting him and pushed his shorter and slighter attacker off, beating him up so badly he thought he might have killed him.
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The teenager called 999 and an ambulance soon arrived at Montana House, where Sinaga had lived for five years, around the corner from the clubs where he found many of his victims. Sinaga was stretchered out and taken to hospital with a suspected bleed on the brain, while police arrested the teenager on suspicion of grievous bodily harm.
Detectives from Greater Manchester police soon realised they had detained the wrong person. They went to Manchester Royal Infirmary to question Sinaga and noticed he was behaving oddly.
He was obsessed with being given his phone and repeatedly gave police the wrong password, trying to grab it from an officer when he reluctantly revealed the correct pin. After unlocking the phone, they discovered films showing Sinaga raping a series of apparently sleeping young men.
Another iPhone contained more films of more men. Months of analysis identified more than 195 different victims, who were all unconscious while Sinaga abused them.
DI Zed Ali, the senior investigating officer, said it was “like trying to put together a million-piece jigsaw without the jigsaw cover”.
Investigators did not find any of the drugs Sinaga is believed to have used to knock his victims out. Police waited two days to interview the final complainant, by which time any drugs would have disappeared from his system. But the prosecution insisted the men must have been drugged, probably with gamma-hydroxybutyric acid - commonly known as GHB - or something with very similar effects.
Liquid ecstasy
Sometimes known as liquid ecstasy, Gina or G, the drug is popular in the gay chemsex scene. It can cause the levels of sedation, unconsciousness and incapacity seen on the videos Sinaga recorded as he abused his victims. Regular users call it “G-ing out”. On one of the clips, a mobile phone could be heard ringing at full volume but the victim did not stir; in many others, the men could be heard snoring loudly while Sinaga repeatedly raped them.
Many of Sinaga’s victims remembered him giving them a drink when they went to his flat. Some recalled being promised a “party” or simply somewhere to sleep for the night, but then had a total blackout until the following day. Only one, a 21-year-old man raped four times by Sinaga in the early hours of May 21st, 2017, told the jury there was something odd about the drink he was handed.
“It looked like water but there was a solution in it, almost like salt. It wasn’t as transparent as water,” the man said, giving evidence via video link. “I think I said to him, ‘What’s this? This isn’t water’, and he said, ‘It’s water, you need to drink water’.”
The heterosexual man said he remembered nothing after that point until he woke up the next day in Sinaga’s flat with what he thought was “the worst hangover ever”. He noticed a used condom underneath a set of drawers - one of the rare times Sinaga is believed to have used protection - and asked him what had happened. “He said he had saved me, that I was passed out on the sidewalk next to Factory, and I said ‘OK, thank you for giving me a place to stay’. It was plausible: I was really drunk,” the man said.
‘Secret poison’
In a WhatsApp group where he would boast of his sexual conquests, Sinaga once made reference to a “secret poison” he used to make heterosexual men fall in love with him. He sent the message after raping a 21-year-old man he had spotted trying to walk home after losing his bank card and running out of phone battery on a night out. Asked for his “formula” for seducing these men, Sinaga responded with: “Black magic yeah! Rey makes drink potion of gay love haha? Take a sip of my secret poison, I’ll make you fall in love.”
The drugs were so effective that only Sinaga’s final victim knew with any certainty that he had been assaulted. Until police knocked on their doors several years later, some remembered Sinaga only as the “good samaritan” who gave them a place to stay when they lost their friends or bank card, or their phone had run out of battery.
They thanked him for looking after them and felt guilty for imposing on him. Some even agreed to be his friend on Facebook. One returned with his girlfriend the following day to prove he had innocently spent the night at Sinaga's, rather than with another woman.
Forty-eight of Sinaga’s victims agreed to give evidence against him at Manchester crown court, which meant the case had to be split into four separate trials, the first beginning in May 2018 and the final one finishing just before Christmas 2019. Some of the victims were shielded from Sinaga by screens or appeared via video link. Others were in open court.
Media blackout
A media blackout was imposed, banning any reporting so as not to prejudice the next jury, with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) keeping open the possibility of charging Sinaga with more of the hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults he had filmed.
He kept souvenirs to remember his crimes - passports, watches, bank cards and driving licences - and often took screenshots of his victims’ Facebook profiles to create what the prosecutor, Iain Simkin QC, likened to a “Top Trumps” collection.
Giving evidence in the first and last of his four trials, Sinaga described himself as an “effeminate gay man” and claimed he was perceived as a “ladyboy” by his “sexually curious” victims. He said each of the 48 men approached him on the street near his flat and propositioned himbefore agreeing to go to his flat to take part in sexual role play that involved them pretending to be asleep while he penetrated them, sometimes for hours.
They were lying in court, Sinaga suggested, because “it is not an easy thing to come out as gay”, and “internalised homophobia” remains widespread.
Sentencing him after the first trial, the judge, Suzanne Goddard QC, dismissed his defence as “ludicrous” that each of the males had asked you for oral sex or anal sex and had agreed to take part in your sexual fantasy by lying completely still throughout and not speaking or making any sounds, and had agreed to be filmed in the most intimate ways imaginable.”
Many of the victims could be heard snoring throughout the abuse. One rape took place as a mobile phone rang continuously at full volume, yet the victim did not stir. A number of them vomited and still did not wake up. The films showed Sinaga carefully checking the younger men were unconscious, putting his finger in their belly buttons to see if they would react, before raping them.
Sinaga rarely wore a condom, meaning all of the victims had to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases, though he tested negative after his arrest.
The earliest rape to come to court took place in the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2015.
Covered in vomit
A 22-year-old man who, like the vast majority of Sinaga’s targets, was heterosexual, could remember nothing after going to the Ritz club in Manchester until he woke up on Sinaga’s floor covered in vomit. After the victim left the flat, embarrassed at imposing on a stranger, Sinaga texted a friend to boast that he had had his first sexual intercourse of the year with a man who was not gay. “He was straight in 2014. 2015 is his breakthrough to the gay world hahaha. Well, he was straight until we woke up naked,” he wrote.
Sinaga would typically leave his flat at about midnight and go looking for men, most often outside Factory, which was almost next door. Sometimes, he walked for a few minutes and loitered outside 5th Avenue, another club popular with students now known as Fifth Manchester.
On one occasion, he was filmed on CCTV leaving Montana House and returning within a minute with his next victim.
On one weekend in September 2016, Sinaga raped two men in the space of 24 hours, one in the early hours of Saturday and the other on Sunday. The second man, a 19-year-old who had been out with his mother on Canal Street, remembered Sinaga helping him up from the pavement after he had been kicked out of a taxi.
He recalled going back to Montana House but then nothing until he woke up naked in Sinaga’s bedroom the next morning. He asked Sinaga why he was not wearing clothes and was told he had been sick, so Sinaga had undressed him.
They ended up having a drink together before Sinaga asked if he would have sex. The man refused, saying he had a girlfriend.
“Tellingly, you may think, there was never any conversation concerning the eight instances of sexual activity which had already taken place that morning, nor was there any mention of the defendant recording any sexual acts,” Simkin told the jury in the second trial.
Incredulity
When word began to spread in Manchester’s Gay Village that Sinaga had been arrested, there was widespread incredulity that the slight, cheerful man they often saw out dancing and giggling could be capable of such acts. In the early 2010s, he was a fixture on Canal Street, out most nights of the week at the Thompson Arms, G-A-Y or the club night Poptastic.
He had a large circle of friends, but few were close. “He was very flamboyant, had highlighted hair and was very camp,” said one man who went out regularly with Sinaga until 2013. “He was always out, always going on holiday. We wondered where he got his money because he never seemed to work.” Others thought he was a sex worker, or involved with a well-off man who funded his lifestyle.
One of his female friends remembered Sinaga had a couple of boyfriends: one who worked at the Ibis hotel opposite his flat, and another who left him distraught. “He left Rey and Rey threatened to drink bleach. He had an extreme behaviour [IN RESPONSE]to rejection, if that’s the right term for it,” she said.
Sinaga was constantly chatting to men on the gay dating apps Grindr and Hornet, and was very active on Facebook and Instagram. His final Facebook post was the day before his arrest. When the updates stopped, some of his friends wondered where he had gone.
In the end, it was Sinaga’s compulsion to document his crimes that caused his downfall. During sentencing after the second trial, Goddard told him: “It is ironic that were it not for the films that you took of your evil crimes, it seems that most of these offences would not have even been discovered, let alone prosecuted.” – Guardian News and Media 2020