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In a case widely compared to the Pelicot trial in France, Patrick Frei is accused of repeatedly drugging and raping a woman and her Irish teenage daughter, and filming the alleged attacks
In a case widely compared to the Pelicot trial in France, Patrick Frei is accused of repeatedly drugging and raping a woman and her Irish teenage daughter, and filming the alleged attackshe village of Untersiggenthal, which sits in a picturesque river valley about 30km north of Zurich, typically attracts little attention, even within Aside from scenic hiking trails and a museum dedicated to farm machinery, there is little to mark it out from other rural communities in the north of the country, near the German border.
The local public prosecutor’s office announced, following a three-year investigation, that a 57-year-old Swiss man had been charged with repeatedly drugging and raping a woman and her teenage daughter.
‘It invalidated me as their mother’: Irish woman told to return daughter’s passport The man, a Swiss politician named Patrick Frei, had videoed the alleged attacks and the videos form much of the evidence against him, prosecutors said. The alleged administration of powerful “date rape” drugs to knock out the victims during the incidents led prosecutors to charge him with attempted murder and seek a life sentence against him. The Swiss case made headlines for other reasons.
At the time of his arrest Frei was a member of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party , the largest party in the country. Iwona and Paula near their home in Untersiggenthal, Switzerland. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times He sat on the Grand Council of the canton of Aargau which, under Switzerland’s federal system, has wide powers to create laws, levy taxes and run local services.
Frei was known for both his opposition to immigration and for calling for tougher punishments for paedophiles. According to prosecutors, he raped the victims, Iwona and her daughter, Paula, dozens of times while they lived with him following their move from Ireland to Switzerland in July 2022. Frei is still awaiting trial so he is presumed innocent until a Swiss court reaches its decision in his prosecution. The case generated more public attention when it emerged that, a year after Frei was arrested, authorities in Aargau had moved to deport Iwona and Paula, who was then 15 years old, even while the case against Frei was pending.
Iwona and Paula share a small flat in Untersiggenthal, which is less than five minutes’ walk from a larger property previously owned by Frei where the alleged abuse took place. The apartment swelters in the August sun. It hasn’t rained in the area in almost two weeks. The local administration office in Untersiggenthal, Switzerland.
Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times The heat is made worse by the presence of a Swiss documentary crew who are making a programme, due to air next year, about the women’s search for justice. The only relief is a portable air conditioner. Paula, now 18, is becoming used to the media attention. She played with her two cats as she and Iwona described how she arrived in this small Swiss town.
Iwona came to Ireland from Poland in early 2007 with her then partner and Paula was born a few months later. The mother supported the family by working various jobs, including as a summons server and a live-in care assistant for an elderly man. They lived in various parts of Ireland, dictated by Iwona’s work. Their first home was in Ennis, Co Clare.
They then moved to Galway, later Leitrim and finally, Coolaney in Co Sligo. Paula fondly recalls chicken fillet rolls, prawn cocktail crisps and other Irish food not available in Switzerland. Most of all she misses swimming off the beaches in Sligo. Their life changed forever in October 2021 when, during a holiday at a Spanish resort, Iwona first met Frei.
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“I got weirded out a bit so I went to the arcade,” Paula recalls. They struck up a relationship, which continued after she returned home.
“He was pretty often coming to Ireland, like every two three weeks,” she says, explaining how their relationship became closer. Frei had a high-paying job in Switzerland as an IT specialist; if the relationship was to continue, it made sense for Iwona and Paula to leave Ireland and move in with him in Untersiggenthal. Iwona and Paula in their apartment in Untersiggenthal, Switzerland.
Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times He arranged a work visa for Iwona and the authorities were told she would work as his live-in housekeeper on a salary of €2,140 a month, court documents show. In later court proceedings, Iwona said she never received any salary from Frei. Paula, then 14, had mixed feelings about leaving Ireland.
“First, I liked the idea because I was getting a lot of bullying. Then I hated the idea and didn’t want to leave at all. But by then it was already decided. ”Iwona and Paula arrived in Untersiggenthal in July 2022.
The relationship between Paula and Frei was strained from the start, the teenager recalls.
“Like you couldn’t really get along with the person, so that was just very weird for me, and it was just very awkward,” she says. But it wasn’t until April the next year that she began to suspect something else was going on. She describes having a “lucid dream” about Frei coming into her room and climbing on top of her. Paula told Iwona about the dream.
Iwona by then had formed her own suspicions about Frei. Paula started locking her bedroom door at night and Iwona began checking on Frei whenever she noticed he was not in bed.
“Very quietly, I went from the bedroom and I spotted him in Paula’s room with the GoPro camera,” she says. Iwona immediately began peppering a visibly sweaty Frei with questions but he was evasive and initially refused to hand over the camera, she says. The police arrived and after viewing the most recent recording on the camera, they immediately arrested Frei.
He remains in custody to this day and has since resigned from his position on the Aargau Grand Council and from the SVP, his political party. Paula slept through all of this. When she awoke the next morning, Iwona told her she would not be going to school that day. It took weeks for the full extent of Frei’s alleged offending to emerge.
Police found dozens of video files on various devices and hard drives, all of which had to be forensically examined. Eventually, it became clear they were investigating what they allege to be one of the worst sexual abuse cases in recent Swiss history. According to prosecutors, the videos showed Frei entering Paula’s room on a regular basis and raping her while she lay unconscious.
In a later statement, the public prosecutor’s office alleged Frei administered “date rape drugs” to put Paula into “a state of deep unconsciousness” before the assaults. Analysis of Frei’s computers showed he had been searching online for GHB as far back as 2012, prosecutors say. Paula says she believes Frei may have administered the drugs in her food.
The volume of evidence to be processed meant that it was only in October 2023 that Iwona learned she was also a victim of Frei. Investigators told her they had found videos of her being raped by Frei while she was also seemingly unconscious. She describes the guilt she feels at bringing Paula to Switzerland. Paula: ‘I’m only realising now that everything I lived through was basically a lie.
’ Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times “You can imagine a mother’s feelings when she brings her daughter to a foreign country. She made the move and then came the pain,” she says. Investigators advised Iwona not to attend the court proceedings where the videos would be shown to Frei. She insisted on being present.
Paula, who did not attend the viewings, says she is still coming to terms with the extent of the alleged abuse. Prosecutors charged Frei with multiple counts of aggravated rape, aggravated sexual assault, sexual acts with children, aggravated assaults, drug offences, sexual harassment and violation of privacy. The first recorded incident occurred on July 12th, 2022, just 12 days after Paula first arrived with her mother.
Prosecutors estimated the alleged abuse of Paula went on for almost 40 hours across the various recorded incidents. Due to the alleged administration of knock-out drugs to Paula and Iwona, the prosecutor’s office also took the unusual step of bringing attempted murder charges against Frei. It said the victims were repeatedly placed in an acutely life-threatening condition by the administration of the substances, “a condition that could have led to death by suffocation at any time”.
The prosecution is seeking a life sentence if Frei is convicted. It said he is presumed innocent “until a legally binding decision is reached. ” Obersiggenthal in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland. Patrick Frei will stand trial before a panel of judges in February.
Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times During one interrogation session last year, Frei said he did not remember certain details of how the first incident happened. He said he noticed the girl was unresponsive and that he touched her. He also said he took photos of Paula. Frei’s lawyer, David Zollinger, told The Irish Times his client “disputes substantial parts of the allegations and, in particular, the legal characterisation of several of the charges”.
“The defence will address the medical, forensic and psychiatric evidence, as well as its proper interpretation, during the trial,” the lawyer said. “We do not consider it appropriate to comment selectively on individual pieces of evidence or allegations outside the judicial process. ” Frei will stand trial before a panel of judges in February. Three days have been set aside for the case.
Depending on the verdict, there is almost certain to be at least two appeals, which will likely take years to resolve. After the extent of the alleged abuse emerged, Paula and her mother began the long process of coming to terms with what happened to them while trying to rebuild their lives in a new country. In September 2024, they received more difficult news.
Swiss immigration authorities revoked Iwona’s residence visa and ordered their deportation, despite the then ongoing investigation against Frei. The immigration officials argued that Iwona’s visa to work as Frei’s housekeeper was fraudulent as she was in a relationship with him at the time. Authorities also refused to pay the women the normal rate of social welfare. Instead they received the much lower rate available to asylum seekers.
The women were forced to travel across the border to Germany to buy food. Frei had alleged she had stolen items from his house when she moved out after his arrest. Iwona, who denied any theft, recalls police searching her home and car. Faced with the prospect of being deported before her alleged abuser’s trial, Iwona began researching Swiss immigration law while also contacting anyone who might help her and her daughter.
In her apartment, Iwona pulls out thick binders of documents as she explains how she contacted the Polish embassy in the Swiss capital of Bern and advised them of their plight. In response, the Polish ambassador sent a diplomatic note to Swiss officials seeking more information. They were less impressed with the Irish response.
On March 2nd, 2026, Paula, with the help of her mother, wrote registered letters to the Irish embassy in Bern and the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin. The letters, copies of which have been seen by The Irish Times, asked Irish officials to monitor the various legal cases formally and issue a diplomatic note to Switzerland regarding its obligation under the Lanzarote Convention on child sexual exploitation.
Paula also asked for information on available consular assistance for victims of serious crime. The response from the Bern mission came three weeks later and consisted of three sentences. Paula was told the embassy cannot interfere in legal proceedings or offer legal advice. She was invited to keep the embassy informed of further developments.
Paula responded the next day pointing out they were not seeking legal advice or intervention in their case. They were requesting consular monitoring, which is a “standard function” of embassies under international law. Iwona says further correspondence followed, including advice from the embassy about potentially submitting a complaint about Switzerland’s alleged breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“The Polish ambassador cared more than the Irish ambassador. That broke my heart a little bit,” says Paula. Asked for comment, a Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman said it was aware of the case and had provided consular assistance but said it cannot comment further. These days Iwona channels much of her energy into reading up on Swiss and international law concerning the rights of victims and immigrants.
Paula struggles to reconcile the extent of the alleged abuse she experienced with her almost complete lack of memory of the incidents. She did not have to experience sexual abuse in real time in the same way as other victims, she says.
Nevertheless, the after-effects are real.
“My brain was still forming. I was a child, so my brain didn’t form in the right way it should have. That leaves big impacts,” she says.
“When you are cornered, you have nothing to lose. At this stage I know the authorities can’t take anything more from us,” says Iwona. Recently, Paula and Iwona have received some good news. Last month, Switzerland’s main German language newspaper, Tages Anzeiger, published a two-part investigation into the case and subsequent attempts by Swiss authorities to deport the women.
Within hours of publication, the local canton indicated it would reverse the deportation decision and grant Iwona and Paula full social welfare payments. The canton denied the decision was related to the media coverage. The decision was confirmed in a judgment on August 12th by the local administrative court, which found the immigration authorities had wrongly revoked Iwona’s residence permit.
The judgment notes comments by Paula’s lawyer that handling of the women’s case by officials was “unacceptable and unworthy of Switzerland”. In response to queries, a spokeswoman for Aargau’s immigration office stated new information had come to its attention confirming Iwona was not in Switzerland on a false employment contract. For Paula and Iwona, there are still many challenges ahead, including Frei’s trial in February.
Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish TimesOn July 27th, a large crowd gathered for a vigil in Untersiggenthal’s village square in support of Iwona and Paula. Swiss authorities have now announced an independent investigation of the handling of the deportation case by officials. The ruling by the administrative court regarding their deportation is not final. It still has to be approved by Switzerland’s federal authorities.
“I would run away from here straight away but I wouldn’t be able to consciously live knowing that he could be released,” says Iwona. Paula worries about her future. She wants to be a beautician but cannot afford the training. She also fears Frei may have sold the videos he took on the internet.
This has happened in similar cases and authorities found evidence of cryptocurrency accounts on Frei’s computers, she notes. Eventually, once the various legal issues are dealt with, Paula would like to return to Ireland for education and work. Boston Scientific lays groundwork to shift $15bn from Irish operationWalking past the decaying industrial plant, I swore I heard a Soviet ghostEducation matters: ‘Committing to something for four years, I needed to think about it’
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