Of course, there is the horror. The horror of the events suffered by Gisèle Pelicot, raped for more than ten years by dozens of men with the complicity of the man who was still her husband. Rapes committed in the marital home while she was in a state of chemical submission, filmed and stored on the computer of her husband, Dominique Pelicot. Rapes discovered only in 2020 and which created an electroshock in this peaceful Provençal family. But the first days of the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants, opened since September 2 before the criminal court of Vaucluse, show that the aftershocks of the “Mazan rape affair” go well beyond the intimate sphere of the Pelicot family. They shake French society as a whole. For at least five reasons.
The case reveals the banality of “rape culture”
Dominique Pelicot and his co-accused look like ordinary people, our neighbors, our companions, our brothers. Ordinary men – they are firefighters, craftsmen or ex-police officers, are 20 or 60 years old – capable of going to a site, agreeing to have sexual relations with another man’s wife and raping her while she is visibly unconscious. Mazan shows that rape is not the preserve of perverts or twisted people, the story of a slip-up or a misunderstanding, as our popular imaginations still hear too often, but that anyone can commit this crime.
It reveals the extent of chemical submission
For a long time, chemical submission was treated lightly because it was linked to the party scene and to stories about nightclubs. Individual cases – that of Laurent Bigorgne, the general director of the Montaigne Institute, the accusation against senator Joël Guerriau – had already shown that its use had spread to all circles.
With Mazan, chemical submission makes a violent irruption into the banal daily life of a French family. The words of a lawyer for the accused, blurting out “there is rape and rape”, implying that, because he thought the victim was asleep but consenting, his client had not raped, resonate like a provocation.
She questions the dark side of the Internet
For years, these gang rapes could have been thought out, decided and premeditated on the Internet: all Gisèle Pélicot’s attackers had to do was register for free on the online platform “Coco.gg”, identify themselves under an anonymous pseudonym, then exchange ephemeral messages, without any archiving, moderation or filtering. While the platform was not definitively closed until June 2023 in France – despite requests for its deletion since 2017 – the accused were thus able to take advantage of Dominique Pélicot’s “announcement” without fear of being arrested or found.
It frightens with its element of chance.
It was by a thread that we knew nothing. Dominique Pelicot was not arrested for the rape he is now accused of. But for having filmed under the skirts of three women in a supermarket in Vaucluse. It took the vigilance of the security guards, then the complaint of the women concerned for the police investigation to discover the photos, videos and elements stored on the husband’s computer.
Ten years earlier, in 2010, he had been arrested for similar acts of voyeurism, but his wife had not been informed. In the first days of the trial, she regretted not having been alerted.
It obliges us because of the dignity of the victim
From the first day, Gisèle Pelicot, who wanted “complete, total publicity, right to the end”, refused to have her trial held behind closed doors. Later, she asked the media, which had until then used an initial to refer to her, to write and say her name. Her dignity, perceptible every day in the images and in her remarks before the Court, contrasts with the evasions of the 51 accused, some of whom appeared masked. Only a minority admitted the facts, the majority of them defended themselves by evoking a libertine scenario imagined by their husbands. But Gisèle Pelicot is not a submissive woman and is keen to make it known. She was drugged and raped. She remains a victim but does not lock herself into a victim stance.
The trial is scheduled to last four months until December 20. Long days and weeks that will no doubt sometimes be unbearable due to the facts invoked or the defenses put forward by the accused. But days and weeks that we can hope will contribute to raising awareness of the horror of considering that one can be all-powerful over a woman’s body. Already, the first days have shown that the “Gisèle Pelicot affair” concerns us all. We have a little over three months left to learn the lessons from it.
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