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The creepy new Netflix documentary every woman should watch.

Voyeur is the kind of documentary that will make your skin crawl.

It will force you to think back to all the possible times you could have been a victim of this kind of behaviour.

And then it will make you mad.

The creepy new Netflix documentary follows the story of Gerald Foos, an American man who purchased a motel in the 1960s with the sole purpose of perving on people.

Foos installed special vents above each room in the Manor House Motel in Colorado so he could spy on each of his guests.

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“They couldn’t hear me, they couldn’t see me, it was exactly what I wanted,” he explains in the documentary.

Over the almost 30 year period that Foos, and then his friend, owned and operated the Manor House Motel he witnessed the private moments of thousands of people.

Foos kept meticulous records of each “viewing session” and during that time he saw sex, fights, and supposedly, even a murder. He logged the intimate details of his guests – how old they were, what their kinks were and how many times they had sex.

But Foos said during that time he also witnessed a lot of the mundanity of human life – people watching TV, eating dinner, clipping their toe nails.

By the 1980s Foos could no longer keep his dirty little habit a secret. He contacted journalist and author Gay Talese and told him about his “research”.

Talese followed Foos’ story and kept his secret for several decades before finally publishing a piece about him in The New Yorker, followed by a book called Voyeur in 2016.

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The documentary follows the story of these two men and the murky waters they crossed together.

Foos is now 79 years old and he maintains he did nothing wrong. He considers himself to be an Alfred Kinsey–type researcher, an artist, someone who studies the human experience.

Talese is 85 years old and has benefited immensely from Foos’ story. He even visited the Manor House Motel in the 1980s and accompanied Foos on one of his voyeur sessions. There he witnessed a woman giving a man oral sex.

But neither man has really considered the victims in this story – the thousands of innocent people, mostly women, who had their most intimate moments exploited without their knowledge.

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Foos downplays his behaviour by saying he never filmed anyone, and Talese says he was just reporting on the story.

The documentary couldn’t have been released at a better time, with the slew of Hollywood sexual assault and harassment stories finally coming to the surface, and with the ‘dirty old man’ narrative at the forefront of our minds.

Voyeur isn’t an easy watch but it is fascinating.

The documentary gives you a glimpse into the lies people tell themselves to be able to justify their own creepy behaviour and continue to sleep at night.

It’ll creep you out, make you mad, and make you look twice at every motel room vent for the rest of your life.

Voyeur is streaming on Netflix now.

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