For 50 years, Gisèle believed that the man she shared her life with was a “great guy”, a “great guy”. Then, one day in 2020, her world collapsed. Dominique Pelicot, this “great guy” she thought she would lie down next to every night, is in fact one of the biggest sexual aggressors in France, the police told her. For a decade, he drugged her without her knowledge to rape her and have her raped by dozens of men recruited online. This is evidenced by thousands of photos and videos of scenes of barbarity that investigators recovered from his computer.
It is extremely hard to follow the trial of the Mazan rapists that is currently taking place in France. The testimonies are nauseating. Faced with this trial that continues until December, the temptation is great to look away. To classify this sordid story in the category of horrible news items that do not concern us.
And yet, alas, it concerns us. Because despite the hopes forged by the #metoo movement, we must face the facts: despite the progress made here and elsewhere in the fight against sexual violence, shame has still not changed sides.
It is in this context that Gisèle, 71, courageously insisted on testifying at the trial that opened last week in Avignon. She decided not to go behind closed doors for this very specific reason: so that the shame could change sides. Because she knows that her story is not just a news story. She knows that it still concerns too many women like her, treated like rag dolls and who don’t even know it.
I held on for four years for this. So that if one day a woman wakes up without remembering the day before, she will remember my testimony.
Gisele Pelicot
His trial shatters a persistent and comforting myth that rapists are monsters or madmen. The far more terrifying reality is that there is no typical profile. We are generally talking about ordinary people. Not sexual predators with long criminal records, but “everyman” with perfectly ordinary lives.
Among the accused, in addition to Dominique Pelicot, 71, a rapist by night and an attentive grandfather by day, as we learn from the trial, there are 50 men from all social classes with varied profiles and dozens of others who could not be identified.
The accused are aged between 26 and 74. They are firefighters, computer scientists, drivers, craftsmen, soldiers, journalists, executives, students, nurses, unemployed people, retirees, etc. Many are described by those around them as good guys, caring and helpful.
Most of them are fathers. One of them justified his delay in the trial by saying that he had to accompany his child to school for the start of the school year.1.
Another defendant, who liked to discuss cycling with Pelicot, sometimes ran into Gisèle at the village bakery. He was the only one she recognized, having already greeted her. “I said hello, I didn’t imagine that he had come to rape me,” she said.
There is indeed something unimaginable here, something frighteningly banal.
What is extremely shocking is that the majority of the accused deny the facts they are accused of, despite the photos and videos seized where they are seen assaulting a comatose woman. While Dominique Pelicot admitted to orchestrating the serial rapes of his ex-wife, most of the accused did not see fit to make their mea culpa. They preferred to find all sorts of excuses, ranging from misunderstood libertinism to the good old myth of the woman who lies or who asked for it. She pretended to be asleep, right? What, a sleeping woman cannot consent? Really? And if her husband gave his consent in her place, what is the problem?
These abject excuses perfectly illustrate the rape culture, so well described and denounced by the feminist author Martine Delvaux.2. We are talking here about a misogynistic culture that does not say its name. A culture that sees women as serial dolls.
A culture that encourages and trivializes sexual assault and then accuses victims of asking for it, lying, and enjoying it.
While the aggressors remain primarily responsible for their crimes, society must continue to question what remains to be done to better combat sexual violence and put an end to impunity.
Of course, in the wake of #metoo, some attackers have had to face justice or paid in one way or another for their actions. But how many have never been reported? How many are protected by their entourage? If there had been no photos and videos of Mazan’s attackers, who would have believed that all these ordinary men, “nice guys” and “good fathers” by day, turned into rapists by night? How is it that these rapes, for which recruitment was done on the internet, could have been committed for ten years without anyone thinking of alerting the police?
“The problem with the impunity of attackers is not that women do not report, but that the rapists’ entourage protects them,” writes lawyer Suzanne Zaccour in The making of rape (Leméac), an excellent book that invites us to reflect on the ways in which, without even realizing it, society contributes to the creation of banal rapists.
Seven years after the #moiaussi movements in Quebec and #balancetonporc in France, the Mazan trial invites us to this painful and essential examination of conscience. Hence the importance of not looking away. Until the shame changes sides.
1. Read “Mazan Rapists’ Defense Is a Chemically Pure Sample of Patriarchal Violence” (subscription required)
2. Read “The boys club and the sleeping ones »