Everyone has a similar reaction when they see Reynhard Sinaga for the first time. It was the same whenever a new reporter came into the Manchester crown courtroom and stared into the dock. Sitting there, smiling, between three hulking security guards, was a small man with thick-rimmed hipster glasses, playing with the shiny, shoulder-length hair he had not cut since his arrest in June 2017. Him? That’s Britain’s worst rapist? Predators come in all shapes and sizes, but Sinaga’s “worst ever” billing was hard to square with the boyish figure in the lumberjack shirt, scribbling notes behind the bulletproof glass as a stream of nervous young men went into the witness box to testify against him.

Reynhard Sinaga may have been raping men as far back as 2005 Read more

The Guardian was present at three out of Sinaga’s four trials, and Sinaga often seemed to be enjoying himself. He would cock his head to one side, as if studying a nature documentary, as he watched videos of himself raping dozens of men who had made the mistake of going back to his flat after a drunken night out. The prosecution tried to persuade the judge, Suzanne Goddard QC, that Sinaga didn’t need to see the films he had recorded on two iPhones, one perched on a dresser for long shots and another handheld for closeups. But Goddard reluctantly ruled that he should be allowed to see the evidence in order to mount what seemed to be a hopeless defence: that he wasn’t a sexual predator, but a harmless deviant. He just happened to be irresistible to young, usually straight men, who would pretend to be asleep as part of a sexual fantasy in which Sinaga would penetrate them on camera, sometimes for hours on end.

There was no remorse. Were we in the presence of a psychopath? By the time the 36-year-old gave evidence in his fourth and final trial, before Christmas, he seemed to have persuaded himself that he was innocent. It was a “50 Shades Of Grey” thing, he said; the sort of sex people have “underground”.

When Sinaga first stood trial in May 2018, charged with drugging and raping 12 men, no journalist knew; Greater Manchester police were trying to keep it quiet. They had already gathered enough evidence to suggest that Sinaga might have abused 195 men between 2005 and 2017, including before he even arrived in the UK on a student visa from Indonesia in 2007. More trials were inevitable. They had identified about 120 of the victims and 48 were eventually willing to testify, far too many for one jury to cope with. On one level, the jurors’ task was simple: they just had to decide whether the men in the videos were awake. But to do that, they had to watch hours and hours of explicit footage, much of it so traumatising that they were offered counselling once their trials were over.

Many victims didn’t remember meeting Sinaga – until, years later, police showed them stills from the videos

Sitting on the press benches, journalists could hear but not see the videos: snoring and sleep-talking, with occasional sirens. The Guardian got wind of the second trial in April last year, and attended the third and fourth in September and December. Reporting restrictions banned all media coverage to avoid prejudicing future juries, and we were barred from telling friends what we had seen and heard. It was hard in a case that felt very close to home. The locations where Sinaga preyed on his targets were horribly familiar, outside Manchester clubs where we’d had our own drunken nights out: Factory, Fifth Avenue, the Ritz, Gorilla. Crown court cases often seem distant when you’re a reporter: gang violence, domestic dramas, stupid decisions you feel quite sure you would never make yourself. But what happened to Sinaga’s victims could have happened to anyone who had been out and had too much to drink; who had lost their phones and mates. If Reynhard Sinaga had invited you back to his flat, you might well calculate you’d be able to tackle him if he tried anything silly. He was only 5ft 7in. And anyway: he doesn’t look the type. Right?

Some of Sinaga’s victims gave evidence in open court, shunning the offer of screens. They seemed to want to get a good look at him. Many said they didn’t remember meeting him, even when police knocked on their door several years later. They were adamant that detectives were barking up the wrong tree, until they were shown stills from the videos. The investigation team arranged to visit them at home with crisis counsellors from Saint Mary’s sexual assault referral centre. A police officer would begin by telling the men why they were there, and counsellors would start the therapy that continues today with 60 of Sinaga’s victims.

“There were many different reactions but a lot of men felt completely overwhelmed,” says Lisa Waters, the centre’s deputy directorate manager. “Some were very distressed. Some were very confused. Some were very angry and wondered why we’d come and told them this, which you can understand.”

Not one of the victims wanted to see the films, but some were glad to get back watches and phones they hadn’t seen since a drunken night out many moons ago; Sinaga had stolen them, along with passports and bank cards, as souvenirs. A couple of men immediately went online and deleted him as a Facebook friend. They were horrified to realise the friendly man who had added them after they had woken up in his flat in a pile of vomit (“He said he saved me, that I was passed out on the sidewalk next to Factory,” said one man, giving evidence via videolink) had in fact drugged and abused them.

In court, the contrast between Sinaga and his victims – tall, stocky, laddish, all but four heterosexual – was striking. Most were students, but there was also a chef, a personal trainer and two members of the armed forces. The youngest were 18, the oldest 36. One was still in sixth form.

Though the trials delivered powerful justice for all 48 men, many questions remained unanswered. How had Sinaga kept his double life a secret from all his friends and lovers? When did he begin his campaign of rape? And had the police missed opportunities to catch him earlier?

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When reporting restrictions were finally lifted earlier this month, Sinaga’s friends told us they could not believe the man they knew as “Rey” was capable of such wickedness. Even his most recent boyfriend, whom we tracked down to a hotel in mainland Europe, struggles to reconcile the predator with the man he was in a relationship with for six months in 2013. George (not his real name) first met Sinaga through a mutual friend over drinks at Sinaga’s flat. “He was kind, always joyful,” George recalls. The pair spent hours at coffee shops, talking about everything from childhood to politics, “from the simplest to the most complicated” topics. George says Sinaga went for straight-looking guys – “I know he liked the ‘hetero’ type and the first time we met he thought I was hetero” – but adds that their sex life was normal: there was no role-play around pretending to be asleep, although Sinaga did like to wake him up by initiating intercourse. “I am confused, puzzled,” George says, during a break from work. “I would never imagine him raping somebody. It is so unlike the Rey I knew.”

News of the case came as less of a surprise to his former flatmate, Andrew (not his real name). We first contacted him in May last year, during the second trial, but he wasn’t ready to talk. He changed his mind on 6 January this year, after Sinaga was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum tariff of 30 years. Whereas Sinaga’s friends all talk about the giggly party animal who was obsessed with Victoria Beckham and the Spice Girls, who recounted every sexual encounter like it was a fairytale or a Hollywood film, Andrew knew Sinaga had a predatory side.

From September 2013 until early 2015, Andrew lived in the spare room of Sinaga’s flat in Montana House, a modern block on Princess Street in central Manchester. Andrew is now 27, but he was 21 when he moved in, and worked at G-A-Y, one of the biggest clubs on Canal Street, the heart of Manchester’s gay village. He paid £400 a month for the box room, sandwiched between the open-plan kitchen and living room, and Sinaga’s large master bedroom. The flat was in a great location, five minutes’ walk from G-A-Y and a 10-minute stroll from Manchester University’s main campus, where Sinaga completed his first master’s after arriving in the UK on a student visa in 2007. For Sinaga, the flat had another significant advantage, being on the same street as two nightclubs, Factory – in a building that once housed Joy Division’s record label – and Fifth Avenue. On a busy night, the Factory queue snaked right under the flat’s window. Across the street, he could see drunk students eating kebabs in the bus shelter. If he had his windows open, he could hear them remonstrating with the bouncers who wouldn’t let them back in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sinaga on Princess Street in Manchester in May 2017, just weeks before he was finally caught. Photograph: Cavendish Press

Andrew moved in after his sister, a longterm friend of Sinaga’s, moved out. But the two men ended up on such bad terms that Sinaga called 999 to ask police for help to evict him in February 2015. Sinaga was advised that it was a civil matter. The police had no evidence then that their time was being wasted by a serial rapist.

Sinaga was hard to live with, Andrew remembers. He hogged the bathroom and spent hours in front of the mirror on his great obsession: his highlighted hair, which he maintained with industrial quantities of hairspray. Andrew was not allowed in Sinaga’s bedroom but would sometimes slip in when he was out, usually to borrow hairspray. “The rest of the flat was quite nice but it was disgusting in there,” he recalls. Sinaga had a double bed, but on the floor there always seemed to be a makeshift bed cobbled together from two grubby duvets.

Sinaga’s narcissism soon began to grate. His PhD thesis said it all, Andrew says. Entitled “Sexuality And Everyday Transnationalism Among South Asian Gay And Bisexual Men In Manchester”, it was basically an autobiography: “He was doing a PhD on himself.” Leeds University failed the thesis in 2016. According to Andrew’s sister, Sinaga seemed convinced that the world would end without him. “I had an argument with him once, because he believed that if he died, all life would cease to exist,” she says. “I tried to explain that we would all still be here. He didn’t get it.”

A few months after moving in, Andrew noticed something odd: Sinaga kept leaving the flat in the middle of the night and coming back a short time later with different men. “I just thought, OK, he’s out to meet a guy: a Grindr hook-up or something,” Andrew says. “Some of the places on Canal Street stay open until 9am, so it’s not that he didn’t have anywhere to go. It just started to seem unusual when it became so frequent.” He kept shtum: “I had a boyfriend who I would bring back to the flat as well, so I wasn’t going to say anything about him bringing people home. I consider myself to be a very unprying person. I didn’t really question it, and I suppose I didn’t really want to know either.”

There was a guy at the door, asking for Rey. 'I was here last night,' he said. 'I just want to know if I was raped'

Then, walking home from G-A-Y one night, Andrew saw Sinaga hanging around outside Factory. Another time he was outside Fifth Avenue. As he recalls the encounters, he shakes his head, unable to comprehend how he failed to understand what he saw.

“He was standing there on his own. That was unusual. That’s when I started to think he was taking advantage, even though I didn’t make the connection I should have. But I thought: fair enough, he goes for drunk guys – maybe he’s got low self-esteem. I could tell he had only just left the flat. He’s a very well-dressed person but he was standing there in sweat pants, flip-flops and a jumper, as if he had literally just left in his pyjamas.”

Pepe (also not his real name) first met Sinaga around 2009, in the Bannatyne gym in Manchester’s gay village. He was in a WhatsApp group with Sinaga where he would discuss his conquests. Some of their messages, from July 2015, were read to the court, with Sinaga announcing that his latest flatmate was going to move out in August and he would be living alone. “You can get in lots of straight boys, darling,” Pepe replied. Sinaga responded with a picture of a 21-year-old he had raped eight times the previous evening, having met the younger man drunkenly trying to walk six miles home to Stockport after losing his bank card. “Hahahahaha,” Pepe wrote. “There’s always a new one.” Earlier, on New Year’s Day 2015, Sinaga had boasted of sleeping with another straight man he had met in Factory, saying he had begun the year with his “breakthrough to the gay world”. He sent some pictures he said he had taken “secretly” that morning. “I always wonder how you manage to get these straight boys,” Pepe mused. “Lol dunno,” replied Sinaga. “Good luck mostly lol. Plus it’s Manchester hun. There’s always a chance here.”

But Pepe, who fell out with Sinaga shortly after this exchange, insists he had no idea any of the men had been raped. And he says he never believed his friend was “turning” straight men in a sinister way: “When we say ‘straight’ guys, many people aren’t comfortable with themselves as being gay, so they call themselves straight.” Pepe says he never slept with Sinaga but remembers a detective asking what role Sinaga took in bed. “I said he was the bottom, in gay slang… Many times he mentioned to us, ‘Oh my God, I went home with a guy last night and my bum is still burning.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Montana House (on left) on Princess Street in Manchester, next to Factory, where Sinaga would target men. Photograph: Joel Goodman/LNP

Despite being “out” in Manchester, Sinaga was in the closet with his parents, Pepe remembers. Every time he went back to Indonesia, he had his hair cut shorter before he got on the plane. “They knew he was different somehow but he never told his family about his sexuality, that’s for sure,” Pepe says. “He shared with us a couple of times before going home that he was nervous. His father would give him a hard time. Once, he mentioned that he wanted him to meet this girl in London, the daughter of some important person from his country. He would send us messages when he was in Indonesia saying his family were horrible and they wanted him to get married.”

George, the ex-boyfriend, says Sinaga had a poor relationship with his father, a palm oil tycoon: “He told me a few times how he was glad that England gave him the opportunity of living in a country where he didn’t need to pretend to be someone else.” Yet Sinaga presented two very different faces in his adopted home. Andrew first got a sense of his dark side in 2014, when one day he heard a knock on the door. “I didn’t think Rey was in, so I answered it,” Andrew says. “There was this guy there, he must have been 18 to 21, and he looked surprised to see me. He said, ‘Oh, sorry, does a Chinese guy live here?’ I said, ‘Yeah – Rey?’ and he said, ‘Yeah – is he in?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ The guy looked really uncomfortable and he said, ‘It’s just that I was here last night’ – or the other night. He said, ‘I woke up here’ and he used the word rape: ‘I just want to know if I was raped or not.’ And at that point I thought: fuck.”

Andrew gave the man Sinaga’s number and shut the door. Almost immediately, he heard ringing from Sinaga’s room. “Rey came through to the living room a few minutes later, laughing, saying: ‘Did you give my number to a boy?’” Andrew remembers the visitor being tall, gym-toned, tanned, with short hair. He was nervous and stuttered slightly. “That’s when I started to worry what was going on.” But he didn’t ask any questions: “I suppose I didn’t want to know.” He also didn’t want to be homeless. “I had nowhere else to go.”

A 19-year-old, who met Sinaga after a night out with his mum, texted him the next day, unaware he'd been raped six times

Not long afterwards, Sinaga brought home another man in his mid-20s, late at night. A fight broke out shortly after they went into Sinaga’s bedroom. “I came out of my room and saw this guy stripped down to his boxers with, like, one sock on or something. And he’s got Rey up against his bedroom door with his hand on his throat. They were shouting at each other,” Andrew recalls. “I then spent about an hour calming this guy down, getting him dressed slowly, and out of my flat, and walking him down to the front door, just trying to reassure him… I can’t remember what he was saying to me because he was very drunk and wasn’t really making a lot of sense. I think he thought Rey had tried to touch him, and he didn’t really know why he was there.”

While many of the victims had no memory of meeting Sinaga, and no clue they had been abused – because, the jury was told, of the “relaxing” effect of GHB, the date rape drug he was suspected of using – others stayed in touch. One 19-year-old, who met Sinaga after a night out on Canal Street with his mum, texted with him the following day, unaware that Sinaga had raped him six times the previous evening. He’d woken up at 10am, naked and confused, and Sinaga said he’d undressed him because he’d been sick. He gave the young man clean clothes to wear – a pink T-shirt with the word “love” on it and some jogging bottoms – and the two started drinking again. Sinaga then asked him for sex and he refused, saying he had a girlfriend.

That afternoon he sent Sinaga an SMS: “Yo man haha literally just got home I’m so pissed we will have to meet up tomorrow Night if your up for it.” Sinaga was enthusiastic about the idea: “Looking forward to another good old drunken night. Bring us the shots till we pass out. Ha!” But the boy got cold feet when Sinaga steered the conversation back towards sex.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It was disgusting in there,’ a former flatmate recalls of Sinaga’s room, with its grubby duvets on the floor. Photograph: PA

In 15 months living with Sinaga, Andrew says he saw no evidence of drug-taking in the flat. He knew from the gay scene what paraphernalia came with taking GHB, and never saw any of it: no pipettes, no syringes, none of the little fish-shaped soy sauce bottles you get with sushi sets that are just the right size for measuring out a dose. “He just drank alcohol, and not even that much,” Andrew says.

Sinaga has always denied drugging anyone. Defending him, Richard Littler QC emphasised that police never found any evidence of GHB use. When measuring out a dose of the drug, “there’s a narrow margin between euphoric high and death,” he told the jury. “[Sinaga] would have had to be a practising anaesthetist to administer these drugs without killing someone.”

***

Listening to the evidence, it was hard not to wonder why the victims did not realise what had happened to them. Perhaps it was the complacency that comes with being a young, straight man. “I thought briefly he might have done something, but I thought: stuff like that doesn’t happen,” one 21-year-old told the jury. Had dozens of young women woken up in Sinaga’s flat with no underwear on, and no memory of the night before, would they have been more likely to suspect the worst and go to the police?

Only two of the men Sinaga attacked were sufficiently worried after waking up to seek medical assistance. One, a 33-year-old, called police and also contacted Saint Mary’s sexual assault referral centre in Manchester city centre, on 25 April 2017. “I just wanted to report a, like, possible sexual assault thing,” he told a 999 operator, explaining that he had woken up with a sore anus in what he thought was a hotel room, with an Asian man next to him being “overly friendly… just like cuddling me, stroking me”. He thought he might have been at the Ibis hotel, across the road from Montana House, the address on his Uber receipt.

Forensic analysis identified a stranger’s semen in the man’s boxer shorts, but there was no match on the DNA database, and the police investigation focused on the hotel and went nowhere. Sinaga was unknown to police as a perpetrator, though he had reported crimes, Andrew says. Once, towards the end of their flat-share, Andrew was on his PlayStation in the living room when Sinaga brought home another stranger. “The door opened and I turned to see this giant, terrifying-looking man. He was clearly on drugs – his eyes were massively dilated – and he looked scary, thuggish, as tall as the door.”

Sinaga took the man into his bedroom, smiling. Within a minute, a fight had started. Sinaga and Andrew managed to get the man out into the communal corridor, where he started smashing things up, barging into a neighbour’s unlocked flat. Sinaga called 999, and the police arrived and took the man away. They asked Sinaga if he wanted to press charges, but he declined. What on earth was he doing with a violent drug dealer who was known to carry knives, they asked. “You’re very lucky that neither of you has been killed,” the police officer said.

In the early hours of 2 June 2017, Sinaga was almost killed by the last young man he brought back to Montana House. The boy, an 18-year-old rugby player, had lost his friends in Factory. Sinaga, then 34, suggested he come back to his flat and try to contact them from there. And that’s as much as the boy could remember until he woke up several hours later, lying face down, with his jeans and boxer shorts around his knees. He was in a bathroom and Sinaga, naked, was sexually assaulting him.

In the ensuing fight, Sinaga bit the boy, who responded with such powerful punches that by the time the paramedics arrived, Sinaga had to be taken to hospital with a suspected bleed on the brain. Police initially arrested the wrong man, suspecting the 18-year-old of grievous bodily harm. That changed when they succeeded in unlocking Sinaga’s phones. Though police believe Sinaga has been abusing men since 2005, the earliest victim to go to court was the man he met on New Year’s Day 2015.

The Sinaga story is unlikely to end there. At least 30 new potential victims have approached the police since he was sentenced, with detectives promising to fully investigate every new case they uncover. The CPS has left open the possibility of future trials, and Andrew now feels ready to go to court and testify for any of the men he met while he was Sinaga’s flatmate – particularly the one who knocked on the door the morning after, asking if he might have been raped. “I really hope he gets in touch with the police. I really want to help,” Andrew says.

Only Sinaga knows how many men ended up comatose and abused in his city centre flat, or why he did it. From his prison cell at Strangeways, he has refused for two and a half years to cooperate with probation officers, detectives or psychologists. According to his mother, he still maintains his innocence. He will be 66 when he is first eligible for release – or even older, following the attorney general’s referral of his sentence to the court of appeal. Perhaps, when the enormity of that dawns on him, he may feel willing to tell all about his horrifying campaign.

• Anyone with information about this case can contact GMP on 101. For anyone who wishes to seek support but does not want to talk to police, St Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre can continue to be reached on 0161 276 6515.

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