When Anna Ackerman met Dino Maglio, the man who was to host her in Italy, at Padua’s bus station, her first feeling was unease. Her body registered a faint alarm. “It was such a strange feeling, but it’s such a concrete memory,” says Ackerman. Maglio had arrived late to collect Ackerman and her friend. He was fast talking, a little frantic. “There was something about his movements,” she says, “erratic, all over the place. I remember feeling that there was something off about him, which I tried to reason in my mind. Maybe it’s traveller nerves.”
This was March 2013 when Ackerman was just 20, travelling independently for the first time. Padua was her first stop, and she had found Maglio through couchsurfing.com, a platform that connects travellers who need a free place to stay with hosts around the world. In 2013, the website was growing fast, with new private investment and 11 million members. It was, according to its founder, a “trust network” - a community of like-minded people.
Ackerman and her friend Amelie had judged Maglio safe when they viewed his profile and arranged their stay. “I come from a small town in Minnesota, and I did have this rose-coloured view of the world,” says Ackerman, who is now 31 and managing a restaurant in Berlin. “Dino had several good reviews and he was also a policeman. Where I grew up, I associated police officers with safety. I thought he was ideal.”
On that first night, he took them to a restaurant and bought them dinner. He became, says Ackerman, quite “touchy”, and “physical”, wrapping his arms around her as she stood at the bar. “It was my first time in Italy and I didn’t understand what was cultural and what was OTT [over the top]. I didn’t want to appear rude, which I think unfortunately is the typical mindset of many women, but especially younger women. You think, ‘I don’t want to make this situation uncomfortable. I don’t want to be the one who ruins the mood.’”
In fact, all Ackerman’s instincts had been right. Maglio was a serial predator, a rapist who used couchsurfing.com to prey on young, inexperienced female travellers from across the world. He hosted 230 women in just two years. His modus operandi was to drug them with wine or tea laced with benzodiazepines, which incapacitated them and wiped out their memories.
In the Sky documentary Bad Host: Hunting the Couchsurfing Predator (which follows the 2020 podcast Verified) several of his victims, including Ackerman, share horrifyingly similar accounts. Equally horrifying, though, is how hard it was to raise the alarm. Many victims reported his actions – to couchsurfing.com, to police, to prosecutors – but Maglio continued unabated. It was only when some of these women found each other and began to apply collective pressure that some justice was won.
Ten years on, Ackerman still isn’t sure what happened to her in Maglio’s apartment. “I think not remembering is, in a way, kind of easier,” she says. She does know that she was drugged on their third and final night. By then, Maglio was hosting several more women – despite only having one spare futon. He cooked the group dinner and offered homemade wine. Ackerman wasn’t feeling well and had an early flight to Rome the next morning. Amelie didn’t have the wine but Ackerman agreed to just one glass. Maglio then gave her some medicine for her cold.
“That’s when the memories start to get a little foggy,” says Ackerman. She does remember laying her sleeping bag in the hallway and Maglio urging her to sleep in his bed instead. She refused, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the bedroom. “I don’t know if my intuition was finally saying, ‘Enough,’ but I pulled back and said, ‘No!’. I was sleeping on the floor. I got into the sleeping bag. The next thing I concretely remember is being sick into a bin – but that was in Rome.”
Though Ackerman has no recollection, Amelie had woken her next morning and shepherded her to the taxi, through Padua airport, and on to the plane. To Amelie, Ackerman just seemed “extremely exhausted” – she’d even had to smack her face to rouse her. “For the rest of the trip, I was trying to figure out what happened,” says Ackerman. Of course, she wondered if she had been assaulted. “I wasn’t completely naive, but I didn’t feel any soreness. I was also still on the floor in the hallway.” In the end, she put it all down to exhaustion, sickness, the medicine, the one glass of wine. When Maglio pestered them to write a review, they did. He’d bought them dinner, cooked for them, collected them. That free hospitality makes it hard to write a bad one. Their review was positive.
It was not until the following October, back at university in Minnesota, that Ackerman heard from a woman in Porto, Portugal, referred to in the documentary as Maria. She had seen their review and was asking if anything strange had happened during their stay with Maglio – as it had to her. Soon, Maria invited Ackerman to join a private Facebook group she’d formed by contacting other women who had been his guest.
At that point, there were 14 of them. Several had experienced flashbacks of Maglio in bed with them, but had blanks where most of their memories should have been. (In the documentary, Maria describes that as “the worst feeling ever, like not being alive”.) Others claimed they were raped by him, but had been unable to move, speak or stop him. Some had reported Maglio to the police in their home countries and felt dismissed. (“You’re 21 and sleep in someone’s house for free? You get drunk in his house and blame the host?”). More than one had reported Maglio to couchsurfing.com. His profile had been removed but he’d simply created a new one.
“For me, that Facebook group caused a whirlwind of emotions,” says Ackerman, who has chosen to believe she wasn’t assaulted. “Knowing what did happen to the other women, I decided to stick with what I remember. Trying to remember more would probably bring me to a worse place, mentally.”
Still, her trust was shattered. “To realise Dino had intentionally drugged me, that there were evil and cruel people – it shifted my paradigm of the world. On top of that, was seeing all these systems failing on so many different levels. Until then, I’d always put my faith in the system. I’d put my faith in the police system, which is why I decided to stay with Dino in the first place.
“There was this disbelief and immense pain,” she continues. “But at the same time, this group was hope, support and community. There was also this fierceness.”
Kate, a writer and artist from Montana, was another member of the group. She had stayed with Maglio just one month after Ackerman – aged 20, travelling alone. She had woken to find herself in his bed, unable to move her body. (She says Maglio kept repeating, “I can’t resist you,” while he raped her.) Though she had reported him first to police in the UK, where she’d been studying – and endured a brutal sexual assault forensic examination – and then to the Italian consulate back in the US, the allegations went nowhere. Emails were wrongly addressed, departments and countries passed the buck, the medical kit used to collect evidence of rape was lost.
“Joining the Facebook group was bittersweet,” she says. “It wasn’t necessarily empowering immediately. Knowing that if my case had moved forward, potentially most of these other cases wouldn’t have occurred, I felt a strange kind of guilt, but having those women and being able to lean a little bit on that collective power was important. It invigorated me to push for justice.”
It took years. In that time, Maria contacted journalists at the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), who took each woman’s testimony and enlisted the support of a criminal lawyer. Meanwhile, in March 2014, Maglio was finally arrested, for another attack. An Australian woman with two daughters had been staying with him, and woken in the early hours to find her 16-year-old in bed with Maglio. She’d been drugged and was non-responsive for five hours. Incredibly, while Maglio was under house arrest for this incident, the police visited and found two new suitcases in his hallway, and two couch surfers in his living room – one with benzodiazepines in her system.
Maglio was awaiting trial when the women from the Facebook group (called Let’s Stop Leonardo Girls – Leonardo was Maglio’s alias at the time) were finally able to go public with their own allegations and submit them to prosecutors in Padua. In April 2015, Maglio was convicted of raping the 16 year old and sentenced to six and half years. In October 2018, while Magilo was serving that sentence, 14 of the women flew to Padua to testify in a second case.
For Ackerman, the presence of the others gave her courage. “It would have been so much more difficult if they weren’t with me. I remember looking at some of their faces and there was so much fear.”
Maglio had denied everything. (He claimed that the women were lying and that the trial was a “sham they’ve orchestrated”.) Ackerman was one of the last to give evidence. “When he saw me, his face was one of confusion,” she says. “I don’t think he recognised me. That brought out this deep-seated anger. I’d spent so many years replaying what happened in my mind. How dare he do this and think he can get away with it? And how dare he not even remember me? In that moment, I felt done being scared.”
In June 2019, Maglio was found guilty of five counts of aggravated assault, 15 counts of drugging and four counts of abusing his power as a carabiniere (police officer). He was sentenced to 12 years, eight months – later reduced to nine years, eight months on appeal.
The name of the Facebook group was changed to “We did it!”. “It was such an incredible feeling,” says Ackerman. “Not only justice for myself and the other women but it felt like a bigger step in the right direction. If this group from all over the world with zero legal ties and criminal knowledge could find each other, then find journalists who believe us, lawyers to represent us, there was hope for other people.”
The women are still in touch intermittently but it’s a strange connection, says Kate. “When we came together to testify, we knew each other, but we didn’t. We were connected by this dark story. The core thing unifying us was this crime. It’s complicated. I do check in with some of the women. Some prefer to be very much done with this and I totally respect that.” This isn’t a story of women coming together by choice. They found one another only in the total absence of anything else.
How has the experience changed them? “I really didn’t want this to change my view of people in general,” says Ackerman, who has continued to travel – through South America and south-east Asia, though not using couchsurfing.com. In the documentary, we learn that the platform had 20 employees to manage more than 10 million users. In a statement, couchsurfing.com said that member safety was a top priority, allegations of misconduct were rare and that its millions of members were not all active at the same time.
“I have overwhelmingly found there’s so much more good in the world than evil, but I’ve learned to trust my gut,” says Ackerman. “When I get a similar feeling to the one I got when I first met Dino, I listen. I’ve learned to stand up for myself and set healthier boundaries.”
Though Maglio was a predator who deliberately targeted young women who he may have assumed lacked the experience, resources, credibility and confidence to fight back from a foreign country in another language, they proved him wrong. They navigated an almost impossible process.
“I’m so much more aware of my resilience now,” says Kate. “At 31, I know myself so much better, but I have a lot of compassion for my younger self. She had to carry so much and what she navigated was extraordinary. I didn’t really think I had that ability at 20, but it was there. It was just very fledgling.”
• This article was amended on 22 December 2023. A reference to Anna Ackerman as having met Dino Maglio at Padua airport was corrected to Padua bus station; Padua has no international airport.
Bad Host: Hunting the Couchsurfing Predator is available on Sky Documentaries and Now TV
