Femicide: Robert Aichinger drugs wife, arranges 72 men to rape her to death

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Robert Aichinger, A 51-year-old Austrian man is being held in pre-trial detention after sexually abusing his wife while she was heavily intoxicated and unable to defend herself, leaving her with fatal injuries. Another man is also in custody after investigators found that he had sexually abused the woman in the same state. The woman was found on June 26 with severe bleeding. Emergency responders attempted to save her, but she died at the scene. An autopsy later established that her death was caused by severe injuries to her lower abdomen and blood loss.

Police arrested Robert on July 2, and he remains in pre-trial detention. He initially told investigators that the injuries happened during sex and described them as an accident involving “rough sex.” Investigators are now examining the circumstances surrounding her death as a case of sexual abuse of a defenceless or impaired person resulting in death. The husband’s actions are currently the ones linked to the fatal injuries.

The investigation widened after police found evidence pointing to another 51-year-old man. Austrian prosecutors confirmed that the two men had engaged in sexual acts with the woman while she was heavily intoxicated and unaware of what was happening around her. The second man is also in pre-trial detention and has confessed to two instances of sexual abuse, one involving particular humiliation. 

There are also much bigger questions surrounding what happened to the woman before that night. Investigators are examining whether other men sexually abused her and whether anyone was paid to participate. Austrian media have reported claims that Robert drugged his wife and invited other men to sexually abuse her, with one report saying he received money from some of them and referred to his wife in degrading terms. The Wels Public Prosecutor’s Office has not confirmed those wider claims and says the investigation into possible additional perpetrators and offences is still ongoing.

But these allegations did not begin with his current wife. His former wife has now given investigators an account of violence during their marriage. According to her statement, the abuse became particularly severe after the birth of their youngest son. She described her former husband beating the family dog so severely that she eventually had to give the animal away because it was terrified of him.

She also described an incident in which he attacked her after she refused to participate in sexual activities involving other couples. She told investigators that he sat on her and repeatedly punched her in the face. The following day, a doctor documented a broken nose as well as injuries to her jaw and cheekbone. The violence contributed to the end of their marriage. Her account adds another dimension to the investigation. The man now being investigated over the sexual abuse and death of his wife had previously been described by a former wife as violent towards her. What is being examined today is therefore not only what happened during the final hours of one woman’s life, but whether the violence surrounding this man has a longer history.

That is what makes the case so disturbing: the investigation is not simply about what happened during one sexual encounter; it is examining whether a woman was deliberately rendered incapable of resisting and then treated as a body other men could access. The fact that she ultimately died from the injuries inflicted on her makes this a suspected femicide case, which is part of the wider pattern of male violence against women that feminist organisations in Austria track as femicide. The Association of Autonomous Austrian Women’s Shelters (AÖF) has included her death among 18 suspected femicides recorded in Austria in 2026.

The case has already been compared in Austrian media to that of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman whose husband, Dominique Pelicot, drugged her and recruited dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious. But “Pelicot 2.0” is a convenient label that risks flattening what happened to this woman into somebody else’s story. Gisèle Pelicot became a symbol because she chose to waive her anonymity and publicly confront the men who raped her. This Austrian woman does not need to become a second Gisèle Pelicot for the violence against her to be recognised for what it was.

What connects the two cases is not that one woman is a copy of the other. It is the horrifying possibility that a husband could view his wife’s unconscious or incapacitated body as something he could offer to other men, while the men around her treated her inability to consent as an opportunity rather than a reason to stop.

And that is precisely why the investigation into this death matters beyond one Austrian household. Women do not become less entitled to safety, dignity or bodily autonomy because they are intoxicated, unconscious or unable to fight back. A woman’s inability to resist is not permission. That is why femicide cannot be reported as a series of isolated tragedies. It is male violence, and it is systemic, and women are dying from it.

 In Nigeria, the 2025 Nigeria Femicide Annual Documentation Report documented  182 femicide and gender-related killings of women and girls across at least 30 states and the FCT in 2025. Intimate partners, including husbands, boyfriends, fiancés and former partners, were the largest identifiable category of perpetrators, linked to 60 cases. The report found that intimate partners and other family members together accounted for 47.3 per cent of the documented killings. In the first five months of 2026 alone, DOHS Cares Foundation tracked another 54 cases.

The countries are different, but the pattern is still recognisable: women are being killed by men who have close proximity to them, who believe they are entitled to control and access to their bodies.