A Chinese PhD student accused of raping a series of unconscious women told a court his favourite type of pornography depicts women having sex when they are asleep.
Zhenhao Zou, 27, faces claims he plied victims with drink and drugs before carrying out the attacks, and allegedly filmed the rapes to keep as “souvenirs“.
The rapes are said to have taken place in London – where Zou was studying for a doctorate in mechanical engineering – and back in his native China.
Zou, who was enrolled for PhD studies at University College London, denies the charges of rape, and insists all the sexual encounters he caught on camera were consensual.
Starting his evidence on Monday, Zou told Inner London crown court he started taking drugs when studying in London because friends said they were “nice“, and he became interested in online pornography when he returned to China during a pandemic lockdown.
Zou said he had battled sleeping problems since his youth, sometimes spending whole days online, and he started looking at ‘role playing’ and so-called ‘timestop’ pornography.
“I like for the girls to be still and quiet when they are having sex“, he said, describing his pornography interests.
Asked about videos of women having sex while asleep, he replied: “That’s my favourite type, but I couldn’t find that.“
When Zou was arrested, Metropolitan Police detectives found drugs including MDMA, Ketamine, and Xanax at his student accommodation.
He is accused of carrying out 11 rapes between September 2019 and May 2023, as well as possessing drugs with intent to use them to carry out the attacks.
Two of the alleged victims have told the court they were unconscious or semi-conscious when Zou had sex with them in London, and say they did not consent to what happened.
The other eight alleged victims have not been identified by police, and are believed to have been raped in China. Videos showing Zou have sex with them as they were allegedly asleep or unconscious have been played to the trial.
Zou told the court he underwent a series of cosmetic surgery procedures in his early 20s, and also wore make-up as a student to “look better“.
He had hair transplants and operations on his eye lids, before having “fat fillings“ inserted into his chin and adjustments on his teeth.
Asked to explain what “fat fillings“ involved, he told jurors: “They extracted some fat from other parts of my body, modified them, and injected the fat into my chin.“
He added that he wore make-up “all the time“ from the time he came to study in London.
“It was all kinds of things - do you need me to list them“, he asked, before adding that he wore it because “I looked better“.
Asked if wearing make-up was common among his fellow male students, Zou replied: “I’m not sure. In my house at that time, two other male students also used make-up but they used less.“
Zou, who comes from the Guangdong province in China, said his father works for a State-owned company and his mother is a teacher.
He told jurors he spent long days at secondary school, from 7.30am to 10pm, and received classes in politics but never any sex education.
At high school from the ages of 15 to 18, Zou said he was put under pressure to study long hours, with just one weekend a month spent at home.
He excelled at maths and physics, and moved to Belfast in 2017 to study for a degree in mechanical engineering.
Zou said he won a place at UCL in 2019, and then started to come into contact with controlled drugs including ecstasy.
“I went to nightclubs. Some of my friends said they were nice and I tried“, he said.
“Later I came into contact with white powder – that was cocaine – then ketamine powder and then e-liquid.
“I went to a party, we were drinking, someone was snorting. This person said it was nice and asked me to try, so I tried“, he said, of his first taste of cocaine.
Zou said he was put under pressure by his parents to return to China in 2020 during the pandemic, and spent months living alone in lockdown in one of the family’s properties.
He spent hours online, and told the court: “Sometimes I wouldn’t fall asleep at all for a whole night, sometimes I would have a bit of rest for a short period of time.“
He said he went online to look at “all kinds of stuff“, and would browse pornography involving “role play, especially the timestop genre“.
Jurors have been handed agreed facts in the trial which explain ‘time stop’ pornography, showing sex ”where the females are passive and unresponsive”.
Zou signed a statement detailing how he visited free-to-use websites to watch videos, and jurors have also been told about a magazine profile of the genre.
”(It is) a genre where one person has the ability to completely freeze everyone else in the scene (usually via a large wristwatch or stopwatch that makes a cartoonish twinkling sound effect, though it's also been portrayed as an app or a ray gun)”, read the article.
”After which, of course, a frozen person's body is poked, prodded, stripped and touched in every way imaginable.”
The article added: ”The tone of most timestop porn is usually playful rather than ominous. The woman isn't fighting back or resisting; nor is she sleeping or drugged, she's just frozen.”
Prosecutors say Zou is “a persistent sexual predator, a voyeur and a rapist“ who “would meet women and stupefy them, either with drugs or with alcohol, and, once they were significantly under the influence of drink or drugs, he would rape them.“
Zou told the court that Xanax which was recovered by police was for his own use when “I couldn’t fall asleep and I was anxious“, and he insisted no one else used the drug.
He told police when he was first arrested that he used the drug Butanediol, which was found in his wardrobe, for moisturising his face and body.
Zou told the court this was a lie, as he “didn’t want to be considered as a drug users“.
Giving evidence, he said he used a pipette to administer the drug to himself, in his drinks, to “get high“, and said he shipped the bottles from China to the UK as it is cheaper.
Zou said Viagra tablets in his bedroom were his, also bought in China.
Zou, of Churchyard Row in Southwark, denies 11 counts of rape, 12 charges of possessing an extreme pornographic image, three counts of voyeurism, false imprisonment, and eight counts involving drug possession - of committing an offence with intent to commit a sexual offence.
The trial continues.
