At Beria's trial after his June 1953 arrest, a significant number of rape and sexual assault allegations were brought to light.[33] The 2003 unsealing of the Soviet archives of his case revealed large amounts of evidence from "dozens" of victims of his sexual assaults that Stalin had been collecting for years prior to his death. Prior to 2002, available historical accounts noted that Beria had a notorious reputation that "almost certainly had some foundation",[34] but was ultimately inconclusive. Once released, the full body of official evidence against Beria, in the words of Stalin biographer Simon Sebag-Montefiore, "reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity."[35]

During the war, Beria was commonly seen on warm nights slowly driving in his armored Packard limousine through the streets of Moscow. According to the official 1955 testimony of his NKVD bodyguards, colonels R.S. Sarkisov and V. Nadaraia, Beria would point out young women to be detained and escorted to his mansion, where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them. Beria's bodyguards reported that their orders included handing each girl a flower bouquet as she left Beria's house, with the implication being that to accept his parting gift made her his consensual mistress; those who refused risked being arrested. In one incident reported by Colonel Sarkisov, a woman who had been brought to Beria refused his advances and ran out of his office; Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway, prompting the enraged Beria to declare "Now it's not a bouquet, it's a wreath! May it rot on your grave!" The woman was arrested by the NKVD the next day.[35] Many women reportedly submitted to Beria's advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up a well-known actress under the pretense of bringing her to perform for the Politburo; instead, he took her to his dacha, promised to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted, and then raped her, telling her "Scream or not, doesn't matter."[36] Beria knew her relatives had already been executed months before. She was arrested shortly afterward and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, which she survived.
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Recent evidence suggests that Beria not only abducted and raped women but that he also murdered those who resisted. His villa in Moscow is now the Tunisian Embassy and routine work on the grounds have turned up a number of bodies of young girls buried in the gardens.[citation needed] According to Martin Sixsmith, in a BBC documentary, "Beria spent his nights having teenagers abducted from the streets and brought here for him to rape. Those who resisted were strangled and buried in his wife's rose garden".[39]