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“Thanks to all of you, I have the strength to fight this battle to the end. I dedicate this fight to the women and men, everywhere in the world, who are victims of sexual violence.” Gisèle P.’s fight has made headlines around the world and has become the trial to combat systemic sexual violence, taking on dimensions that go well beyond the sordid story confined to news headlines, dressed in all its monstrous trappings.
“To all these victims, I want to say today: look around you. You’re not alone.” With these words, Gisèle P. gathered the courage to reject the closed-door trial in which her husband and 51 co-defendants have been appearing since September 2 before the Vaucluse criminal court (Avignon), standing trial for the ordeal they made her endure for some 10 years. Dominique Pélicot is on trial for sedating and raping his wife from 2011 onwards, in addition to offering her inert body as fodder to dozens of men recruited on the Coco.gg website.
An ordinary life marked by the yet-inconceivable
In their sixties, the couple had retired in Mazan, a small town with a population of 6,000, in the region of Vaucluse. It is here, in their home, that the husband carried out his plans. Just as some retirees take up gardening or DIY projects, Pélicot used his wife’s body to occupy his free time, organizing the rapes with great care: when investigators seized his computer equipment, they discovered aberrant content—128 files classified by title, first name, date, type of sexual act. An overall 20,000 photos and videos staging 92 acts of rape, with Gisèle P. completely unconscious as men abused her.
Psychiatric examinations of Dominique Pélicot ruled out mental illness but revealed a man whose personality is cold, a “patriarch,” someone “manipulative” and “perverted” with a voyeuristic sexual deviance. Didn’t he himself confess during the hearings that he took pleasure in seeing his wife have sexual acts performed on her that she had refused him?
And what about his accomplices? Who are they? These “ordinary men,” as the media likes to describe them? Most often with clean criminal records, men of all ages and professions, they represent a cross-section of French society that couldn’t be more ordinary. “They have the banal blandness of ordinary men,” writes Lola Lafon, whose column in Libération has gone viral. “They are the unsuspected neighbors, friends, colleagues, the charming fathers, the senior executives, firemen, teachers, workers, craftsmen, journalists. They’re retired or in their thirties, left-wing, right-wing, they’re friendly, helpful, they pick up their child from school and do the dishes before surfing the internet and registering on a forum offering the rape of a sedated, comatose woman” (1).
Although, according to experts, these men are not psychologically pathological, they nonetheless feel the need to have a sort of omnipotence over the female body, whatever their female partners might have to say about it—women who more often than not describe these men as affectionate beings with no sexual problems.
Sociologist Véronique Goazin adds, “The proportion of rapists who can be diagnosed as having a genuine mental pathology is infinitesimal…” She continues to say that subjugating someone can nonetheless “arouse a tremendous feeling of omnipotence and power over someone who is weaker or is being dominated. It’s a feeling of male domination… a submissive dynamic, a power play, a step into omnipotence, into breaking locks, into self-exultation. You could call it patriarchy.”
The trial against sexual and patriarchal violence
And yet, as the hearings go on, nothing seems to shake the certainty of the accused that there was no intention to rape. Seventeen appeared in custody. About 10 are repeat offenders, having visited the couple’s home on several occasions—one visited them six times—and another defendant appeared for having reproduced Pélicot’s modus operandi on his own wife. But crowded into the cramped courtroom, all the defendants deny their involvement. And as Gisèle stands to witness, over this four-month trial, all the horrors she suffered for over 10 years, the rapists can sometimes be heard sniggering.
It’s safe to say that there will be a pre- and post-Mazan. Only a political and legal response can begin to heal such a wound.
Their line of defense is appallingly weak and cognitively ignorant: they claim the couple allegedly staged these sexual scenes, with Gisèle P. pretending to be asleep. And since the husband was the one who’d invited them, what’s the problem, exactly? “It’s his wife, he can do what he likes with her,” “There’s rape and then there’s rape,” a defense lawyer had the gall to say. The age-old question of consent appears in all its acuteness, under the harsh light of this denial.
“We’re not dealing with habitual rapists,” argued Louis-Alain Lemaire, lawyer for four of the 51 co-defendants. “They didn’t have the impression, they didn’t have the intention of committing rape. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone. That’s obvious.” Guillaume de Palma, lawyer for six other co-defendants, pointed out, “We’re defending people who lead perfectly ordinary lives, whose lives were turned upside down overnight… They surrendered without knowing the trap that had been set out for them. Maybe it’s because they didn’t ask themselves the right questions, but they weren’t aware of anything.”
An argument disputed by the civil parties’ lawyer. “They’re not just anybody,” insisted Antoine Camus. “In reality, we have a fine selection of very problematic people. Just looking at the videos you know that they attacked a dead woman…”
Indeed, the collective denial of rape collapses in the face of thousands of damning pieces of evidence, scrupulously collected by Pélicot himself. His words are just as repugnant as his fetishes—“You’re like me, you like the rape scenario,” he said to one of his accomplices. He calls his wife la salope (the slut), the better to debase and objectify her. In the images he painstakingly catalogued, we see Gisèle P. endure forced fellatio that suffocated her in her drug-induced coma, repeated pelvic and vaginal penetrations. And when his “guest” would leave, Pélicot would rape his wife over and over again.
“Ever since I stepped foot in this courtroom, I’ve felt humiliated,” Gisèle P. blurted out. “I’ve been called an alcoholic, (been suspected) of getting so drunk that I myself am an accomplice of Mr. Pélicot… it’s so humiliating and degrading to listen to this!”
This reversal of roles, which propels the victim into the status of the accused when she denounces sexual violence—and in doing so sees herself violated yet again—has a name: secondary victimization. A concept that cruelly echoes reality: in France, 250,000 women are the victims of rape or attempted rape every year, but only 16,000 make it to a police station. Even fewer see their rapist stand trial—15%, to be exact, since the victim must be able to provide material evidence of her rape (2). Which is why “I believe you” has become a main slogan among feminists.
Justice is denied, but there is also a political denial: the French political world has been deafeningly silent. While much of the French right and far right has recently seized on the tragic story of Philippine, a woman raped and murdered by a man of Maghrebi origin in the Bois de Boulogne, this has been to crusade against the phenomenon of migration. There has been little to no comment on the Mazan trial from the French political class. And yet how much could be gleaned from it?
A historic judgment?
That would be thanks to women! They are making their voices heard and providing Gisèle P. with unwavering support: they are present at the trial, cheer and applaud her at every hearing she attends, organize national and local demonstrations, white marches, (angry) collages on the walls of cities with the words pronounced by Gisèle—“a rape is a rape,” “Shame must change sides”…
It's not just a number of feminist organizations and collectives that are standing by her, it’s all women. In France and beyond. The momentum is reminiscent of another MeToo, made in France, away from the glitz and glamor of the silver screen. It is in the very depths of society.
In the aftermath of Camille Froidevaux-Metterie’s article published in Le Monde on September 19, many people raised their voices against the philosopher. She was criticized for her essentialism, her furious feminism, for lumping all men together. “Yes,” she wrote, “all men are guilty of remaining ordinarily indifferent.”
“To all these victims, I want to say today: look around you. You’re not alone.”
“’Not all men,’ most men say,” Froidevaux-Metterie continued. “Some do so with a forcefulness that is hardly misleading when it comes to their masculinist convictions. But many others are careful to argue the point. The common thread running through their excuses is a categorical rejection of the feeling of shame (which some feel as men), on the grounds that they are in no way ‘responsible’ for the despicable actions of the Mazan defendants. They claim there is a minority of ‘sick,’ degenerate,’ ‘monstrous’ men, while the majority is ‘normal,’ ‘respectful,’ ‘non-violent.’”
The time has come to question rape culture. And the Mazan trial gives us the opportunity to do just that. Yes, it is high time to reconsider the roots of sexist and sexual violence, the continuum between them, in a patriarchal society that tends to make these roots invisible, to exonerate those who commit these crimes, and to make the victims feel guilty. The patriarchal structure is cracking, and things are starting to move on the men’s side, as evidenced by the declaration signed by 200 men against male domination: “All men, without exception, benefit from a system that dominates women. And since we are all part of the problem, we can all be part of the solution,” it reads (3). Also to be mentioned are the appeals of ZéroMacho, the international network of men fighting against prostitution and machismo, with a commitment to equality between men and women.
And now…
Like with the 1972 Bobigny abortion trial, whose defense by Gisèle Halimi led to the legalization of abortion three years later, it’s safe to say that there will be a pre- and post-Mazan. Only a political and legal response can begin to heal such a wound. Some 50 feminist associations have already called for a “comprehensive law” against sexual violence.
But how can this “shattered and devastated” family, to quote Antoine Camus, find any peace? Though the mother and daughter are fighting with exemplary courage, the fact remains that they have been suffering from severe psychological trauma since their world was turned upside down upon learning about the crimes committed by the man they thought was a good husband and loving father. A caring man who accompanied his wife to the neurologist and gynecologist by day so she could try and understand the disorders she was suffering from. A caring man who then orchestrated the rapes by night.
Halfway through the trial, Gisèle P. was invited to speak by the president of the Vaucluse criminal court. She managed to address her ex-husband, from whom she has been divorced since last August. Without looking at him even once, her voice calm, alternating between “you” and “he,” she reminded him of the 50 years they spent together, the unfaltering support she had given him, their three children and seven grandchildren. “Nobody saw a thing. My life has fallen into nothingness. I don’t understand how it could have come to this. I always tried to pull you up, towards the light. But you, you chose the darkest depths of the human soul. Unfortunately, that was your choice” (4).
