#dominique. | profile. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

someone-will-remember-us · 21 days ago

Text

There is no collective noun for rapists but spend a week at the Pelicot trial and you wonder why. As the early morning queue of women who’ve come to support Gisèle Pelicot passes through security at the Palais de Justice, Avignon, you spy men with downturned faces scurrying across the lobby past the press. In court they sit on the left, clustered around a glass box containing more men, those in custody for the gravest crimes. Since there are 50 in total, the alleged rapists have been tried in batches and I’m just here for the final seven: Boris, Philippe, Nicolas, Nizair, Joseph, Christian, Charly.

Plus Dominique Pelicot himself, who invited them all into his marital bedroom, where he had his wife waiting, drugged and naked, and who joined in and filmed it all. Pelicot, 71, crumpled and fat now, but with a residual bulky power, sits sullenly alone with his guard in a separate glass box, protected from the other men who blame and detest him. Often after lunch he appears to doze off.

Such nondescript men. Grizzled, middle-aged (the mean is 47 years old), smart-casual in windcheaters or leather jackets and their best trainers, like minicab drivers waiting for fares. Ordinary men in many respects, not vagrants, junkies or career criminals. This week’s seven includes a fireman, an electrician and a journalist; several are fathers, two were keen weightlifters, one bred dogs. French trials helpfully begin with a personality profile formed from interviews with the men, their friends and colleagues. Poverty, domestic violence and mental breakdowns feature, but also that a man is “kind” or “gentle”, had a lovely childhood, adored his grandparents or is devoted to his mum.

Yet each one had sex with an unconscious woman, that is beyond doubt, thanks to Pelicot’s camera mounted on a tripod beside the bed, and by his own admission. “I am a rapist,” he has declared, “like the others in this room.”

From the Pelicot affair have come demands for reform to French rape law, for sexual violence to be treated more seriously, for an investigation into “chemical submission” — the coercive use of sedatives. But one question overshadows all others. How many men would have done the same? If Pelicot could recruit at least 70 willing participants (a number could not be identified) within a 25-mile radius of Mazan, the Provençal town where the couple retired, how many in the whole of France? As I walk through Avignon with Juliette Campion of radio station France Info, who bears the strain of reporting this case since September, she gestures to a bureau de tabac: “You think, ‘Would a guy in there have raped Gisèle? Or men in the boulangerie or those on the street?’ Women are looking at men differently: they’re asking, ‘Could you or you or you?’ ”

On the right of the court, behind her counsel of three serious, dark-haired young men, is Gisèle Pelicot with her female companion from victim support, leaning on the wall, as far from the men as the room allows, but facing her ex-husband. Her composure is remarkable. Although clearly tired and strained, she retains a quiet vivacity reflected in her clothes. Instead of shrinking away in black, she dresses each day as if meeting friends for drinks on a sunny terrace. A chic scarf, a faux fur bag, patent leather boots. Clothes that say, “I still have a life.” Every evening, when women line up to clap her out of court, she speaks to them warmly, neither reticent nor relishing the attention. Every day she walks through the cobbled streets past graffiti saying, “Gisèle, les femmes te remercient” (Gisèle, women thank you) to lunch at the same excellent brasserie, and people turn to gaze at her in awe.

The extraordinary woman who refused to be silenced

The humiliations of Gisèle Pelicot have a mythic quality. This is a woman who discovered the man she married aged 20, with whom she had three children and seven grandchildren, waited until she was deeply asleep before removing her pyjamas, dressing her in “sexy” underwear or writing on her buttocks, “I am a good submissive bitch,” then he let a stranger penetrate her inert body, filmed it, washed her intimately and replaced her pyjamas. This is a woman who thought she was going insane, had Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour, whose children thought she was dying, who stopped driving and going out alone, who slept all day and once woke puzzled why her hair was shorter. “But madame,” said her hairdresser, “you came in yesterday.” This is a woman who had mysterious gynaecological problems, including a swollen cervix (and still lives with four STDs), who thought her husband wonderful for accompanying her to medical tests, including an MRI.

This is a woman who, when her husband was arrested for “upskirting” in a Leclerc supermarket and police found the contents of his phone, discovered her whole 50-year marriage was a travesty, that he’d raped her in a service station car park, on Valentine’s Day and on her 66th birthday, and may have raped their daughter too. This is a woman who has listened to legal arguments about whether a man put his tongue inside or merely kissed her vagina, who heard another man say he’d only returned to rape her a second time because he couldn’t find anyone better, who sits in a courtroom while three giant TV screens show clips of her body being coldly humped by yet another “ordinary” guy.

Yet this is a woman who gathered up every scrap of her humiliation and with it constructed a mirror that she holds up defiantly to the court and to French society itself. “Shame must change sides,” she said, and in insisting the entire trial be conducted openly, that the worst men can do to women is witnessed by the whole world, she has done exactly that.

I ask many women I meet in Avignon how men in their lives regard the accused. They say they call them losers and freaks, that these are men on the margins, with no relation to themselves. But, along with the testimony I hear, the people I talk to believe this case raises many questions about French sexual mores. Whatever the decision later this month by five judges — there is no jury — Gisèle Pelicot will never be forgotten.

The court turns to Christian L, a fireman with a straggly castaway beard, who speaks from the glass box because after he was arrested, police found 4,000 child sex abuse and zoophilic images on his hard drive. We hear from his girlfriend, Sylvie, a small blonde in a grey hoodie, who says he’s a wonderful man, and is suspected of destroying evidence. Christian L recalls the victims he watched die in fires, the coffins of 11 colleagues he carried, the mental breakdowns that ensued. He was married but after his two daughters were born says he went off sex with his wife and turned to libertinisme. Strange, I think, that the French have coined this noble, philosophical concept, with its whiff of the barricades, to describe what we call swinging or dogging.

Like all the men, Christian met Pelicot through coco.fr — the murky, unmoderated site since closed down and now the focus of many major police investigations — on a forum called À son insu (without her knowledge). Christian L had already enjoyed “Sleeping Beauty” encounters with ten other couples. He spells out the rules: that you only dealt with the husband, sending him photos for approval, and during the sexual encounter he ran the show. Sometimes the wife woke up, other times not. How did he know, asked Gisèle’s lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, that she consented?

“In a libertine encounter,” Christian L explained, “it is the husband’s responsibility to ensure consent.”

But how could you be sure?

“Are we expected to sign a contract?” Christian L spluttered.

“You could ask the woman,” Babonneau suggested.

How the case could change French law

Given the overwhelming video evidence, the defendants can only claim Pelicot deceived or drugged them, or they believed Gisèle was collaborating in a game. If this case were before a British court, rape would be decided by two tests: whether Gisèle had “capacity to consent” (tough to argue given Pelicot admits to drugging her) and whether the men had “reasonable belief” in her consent. Unlike most European countries, French rape law has no concept of consent. Rather, it is defined as penetration “by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. (The prosecution case rests on a convoluted definition of surprise.)

But rather than demand consent be added to the law, French feminists are divided. Some agree with President Macron, who supports change; many others argue that consent would put the onus on the victim to prove her conduct was not an invitation. This seems an odd objection, especially as the whole purpose of the video evidence is to show no one could believe Gisèle capable of consent, given she was so lifeless one man asked Pelicot, “Is your wife dead?”

Alice Géraud is the author of Sambre, an investigation into how, due to the indifference and cruelty of police, a caretaker called Dino Scala in northern France managed to rape 54 women over a period of 30 years. “The Pelicot case with 50 defendants and one victim feels a strange inverse of Sambre.”

Géraud believes the Pelicot affair could provide the same impetus for change as a famous 1974 case of two Belgian tourists, Anne-Marie Tonglet and Aracelli Castellano, who, camping near Marseilles, were brutally raped by three local men. As was normal practice, the crime was downgraded from felony to misdemeanour on the basis the victims eventually stopped resisting. But the women, a lesbian couple, persisted and thanks to their feminist lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, it became the first rape case to be heard in the higher assizes court. Like Gisèle Pelicot, the women waived their anonymity. “We believe that it’s one thing for a man to rape,” said Halimi, “and another to know it’ll get around his village, his work, the papers.” Shame changed sides: the men were jailed and the French criminal code was rewritten defining rape as a serious offence.

For Géraud, the greatest current injustice is that whether a man has raped one women or 50, the maximum sentence is 20 years (here a serial rapist can be jailed for life). “This is law made by men,” she says, “with a grave lack of knowledge of rape culture.” She is scornful too about libertinisme as a universal excuse for male sexual exploitation. “Libertinisme was why Coco existed for so long,” she says. “It is the justification for prostitution, for the porn industry.”

Charly A is the youngest of all the defendants, just 22 when he first entered the Pelicot house. Small, bearded, now 30, we learn his childhood was chaotic, his father an alcoholic, his mother had many sexual partners; there are hints of abuse. “This is a family of secrets,” concludes the personality profiler. A psychiatrist adds he is immature, struggles to sustain relationships and instead consumes porn, “especially the Milf [Mother I’d like to f***] category with mature women”. In 2016, he made contact with Pelicot via Coco: “He said his wife would be lying there pretending to be asleep, he doesn’t tell me more.”

Over time Pelicot asks Charly if he knows anyone they could drug for sex and he proffers the only woman in his life — his own mother. Pelicot gives him pills (which Charly claims to have thrown away), shows him how to crush them, keeps pressing him to use them. “When can I come and we f*** your mother?” he asks in one video, but Charly keeps stalling, saying his brother is at home. Yet he returns to violate Gisèle, always with Pelicot, once with another man, a total of six times. “Did you feel like you were in a porn film?” asks Babonneau. Charly shakes his head.

Until this point, very late in the trial, the influence of internet pornography has barely been explored. The court only notes paedophiliac images, not “normal” usage. Yet Mathieu Lacambre, a psychiatrist who evaluates Charly A, remarks how porn sites not only push users to more extreme content but to enact porn fantasies in real life. “Until now Charly A was behind the screens,” he says. “Now [in Gisèle] he has an object served up on a platter a few miles from home. The sleeping princess Milf, voilà.”

A rented home in a quiet cul-de-sac

I drive out to Mazan, a lovely honey-stoned French village set in the vineyards below Mont Ventoux, where the Pelicots retired from Villiers-sur-Marne, a Paris commuter town where he was electrician and she was a manager at EDF. I imagine Gisèle browsing the little boutique, dropping into the beauty salon, sipping an aperitif outside the bistro. The home they rented for ten years is five minutes away in a quiet cul-de-sac of four houses behind tall cypress trees. It is lemon yellow with blue shutters, a pool, a very prominent alarm system, and new tenants. Given how many men knew her address, Gisèle fled four years ago for her own safety, with just a suitcase and her dog.

Today an immense cloud of migrating starlings swoops over the house like pixels in a photograph. This was where their grandchildren loved to visit in the summer, but also the centre of Dominique Pelicot’s porn operation. For what else was this grotesque man but a pornographic auteur?

We leave our car, just as Pelicot instructed the men, in the sports ground car park, by the bottle bank. I think of them texting their arrival, then creeping down the lane. (One man made his girlfriend wait in the car.) Pelicot would meet them at the door by the light of his phone, tell them to undress in the dark living room and warm their hands on a radiator. (They’d been instructed to be clean, not smell of cigarettes or wear cologne.) Then they were led into a bedroom with a TV, a chest of drawers, a bed with a naked Gisèle motionless on white sheets, and a mounted camera.

Whatever followed next was carefully orchestrated by Pelicot, a director urging on actors in stage whispers, since the objective was to do what they desired without waking Gisèle. Pelicot would tell them how and when to penetrate her, or hold his wife’s gaping mouth to facilitate oral sex. Given four Temesta (lorazepam), a powerful anti-anxiety drug he’d crushed into her wine or ice cream, his wife was like a patient on an operating table. Even so, if her arm gave an involuntary spasm,the men would scuttle from the room. A friend who has sat through many court videos says it was Pelicot ordering the humping men to go doucement — softly — that upset her, since she knew this was not out of tenderness for Gisèle.

All the while the camera rolled. Why did these men agree to have their crimes recorded? They say it was part of the deal, that Pelicot told them Gisèle was shy and liked to watch the sex later. But perhaps also because, in taking part, these men were promoted from porn consumers to creators. Filming was central to their fantasy. When Christian L finally climaxes he turns to give the camera a cheery thumbs-up.

For Pelicot, each film added to his oeuvre. Police discovered a carefully curated archive of 20,000 images and videos on hard drives and memory sticks showing 200 rapes. He gave each film a title like “Squirt on the ass”, “Cock in mouth” or “Jacques fingering”. This man, once caught by his daughter-in-law masturbating at his computer, was now a porn impresario.

The question at the centre of the case

Why did Pelicot do all this to a wife he professed to love, whom he called “a saint”? Was it to punish Gisèle for an affair early in their marriage (although he was serially unfaithful himself)? Or because when he’d asked her to join him in the libertinisme scene she’d refused — so he devised a way to make her. But Gisèle was not his first victim: Pelicot has admitted to the rape of an estate agent, using ether to drug her, in 1999, and will be tried for the rape/murder of another young estate agent, Sophie Narme, in 1991. The French police cold case bureau is investigating his possible links to many other unsolved crimes.

But as the “Without her knowledge” forum suggests, his was not a unique fantasy. The Pelicot case has illuminated the issue of “chemical submission”, not only drinks being spiked by strangers in bars, but drugs used to control partners within relationships. The French health service is noted for being blasé about prescribing heavy-duty medications, which is how Pelicot stockpiled his vast stash of Temesta.

Documentary-maker Linda Bendali has made a film for French TV about chemical submission, featuring seven cases, including a 13-year-old girl drugged by her father with medicine supposedly for her allergies, put in lingerie and raped over two years, and a 60-year-old woman drugged then raped at home by a man she was mentoring at work. “I’ve looked back at 30 years of press reports of rape,” says Bendali, “which includes dozens of women saying they woke up — mainly with men they know— unable to remember what happened.”

The Sleeping Beauty scenario, she says, is not merely a means for a man to get easy sexual access, but a way to enjoy absolute domination. “You are not even giving her the chance to consent,” says Bendali. “You can do anything you want to a drugged woman, for as long as you want. You can dress her how you want. These men want total power.” Pelicot is typical in filming his crimes: “Pictures are trophies. He was driven by a mix of desires for blackmail and voyeurism.”

Gisèle’s daughter, Caroline Darian, who was also drugged and photographed naked by her father, is heading a campaign on chemical submission, demanding police take samples of hair from rape victims, the only way sedation can be proved.

In court, I hear another psychiatrist tasked with assessing whether each of the final seven defendants has the profile of a sexual abuser. One by one, he exonerates the men, saying they are not dangerous or likely to reoffend, to the growing exasperation of Gisèle’s team. Then he reaches Charly A. “He doesn’t search [for victims] systematically,” says the psychiatrist. “He’s not a predator.” Finally, Babonneau explodes: “Six times with a sleeping woman and he’s not a sexual abuser?” The men do not identify as rapists because, like this psychiatrist, they define rape as frenzied sexual violence, not an opportunistic act performed to whispers in a private home. As one defendant put it, “It’s her husband, his house, his room, his bed, his wife.”

Women unite in the town of Mazan

Both in religious and political terms, Mazan is a conservative town: for 500 years it was part of a papal enclave and in the recent French election voted heavily for Marine Le Pen. Villagers regarded the Pelicot case with horror and sympathy which turned quickly to resentment when press named it l’affaire Mazan. Amid longstanding families who’ve known each other for generations, the Pelicots were outsiders who’d brought disgrace into a rural community. Tired of inquiries, the mayor, Louis Bonnet, 74, told the BBC, “It could have been far more serious. There were no kids involved. No women were killed.”

At the Lucky Horse Ranch outside Mazan, women victims of sexual violence receive equine therapy. I’m sceptical at first about how grooming and riding horses could help rape victims, but somehow these large, placid animals are calming and restorative. Here I meet Latika, 33, who at first was too timid to touch a Shetland pony, but now sits high on a saddle for our photograph.

Latika was separating from her husband, the father of her two children, but still sharing a house. He was violent, hitting her daughters, putting her in hospital with cuts and a broken rib. Two years after they’d last had sex, she woke to find him inside her. She believes the sweet tea he often gave her was laced with sedatives, but that night she hadn’t drunk it all. She realised he’d been drugging her for years — her mother recalls finding her deeply unconscious early in her relationship — and, worse, she was pregnant with a third child. She told the police, who addressed the domestic violence but ignored the rape. Her husband fled to Guadeloupe and she was left traumatised, fearful of leaving the house.

“I didn’t feel people really believed what had happened to me until Gisèle Pelicot spoke out,” says Latika, who has since made the police reopen her case. In October, as women across France holding white flowers protested in support of Gisèle, Latika headed the local march into Mazan and the next day Gisèle herself visited the ranch. “She said it is almost unbearable to return to this place where terrible things happened,” says Latika, “but she wanted to thank us. She told me, ‘I didn’t know the meaning of my life before this happened — but I do now.’ ”

Watching Gisèle take such sustenance from her supporters, you wonder how she will cope when the trial finally ends. She is writing a book and could, if she chose, become a global campaigner. “There is something particularly powerful,” says Linda Bendali, “about her being an older woman — she represents all our mothers. All generations identify with her.” But those close to Gisèle say that, at 72, she may just return to a quiet life of friends, grandchildren and her garden, in the secret location where she now lives.

But she is already an icon of courage for the women who come from across France and beyond just to watch the trial on a screen in an overspill room. Some want to witness history, a few enjoy the sensational evidence like tricoteuses at the guillotine, but many have risen at 5am, taking a day off work, to support a woman they deeply admire. Marion Spiteri and Amélie Planche, both 24 and law graduates, feel the case opened their eyes. “How can it be,” Spiteri says, “that so many men did this without her consent?” “It is terrifying,” Planche adds, “that a woman cannot even trust her own husband.” They tell me, astonishingly, that neither they nor their friends ever go to the toilet in a bar or club alone.

But then the nation of libertinisme lags behind in its attitude to violence against women. Until 2021, France did not even have an age of consent, effectively decriminalising even incestuous relations between children and adults, allowing several high-profile child abusers, including firemen who groomed a 13-year-old girl, to evade rape charges. Each time a prominent Frenchman is accused of rape — whether politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn or, currently, actor Gerard Dépardieu — famous French actresses leap to defend him. This is the nation that convicted child rapist Roman Polanski fled to from America, and is still fêted. The #MeToo movement was regarded by many as a wave of Anglosphere prudishness, contrary to the spirit of French seduction. So what can the Pelicot trial achieve?

I meet feminists from Les Amazones d’Avignon, the creators of graffiti across the city supporting Gisèle. (So as not to spoil the city walls, they write slogans on paper that can be removed.) Their latest reads “20 ans pour chacun” — 20 years for each one. I suggest a drink in a café nearby: “Not in there,” says one Amazone, “that’s where all the rapists go.” Blandine Deverlanges, 56, is part of the Coalition Féministe Loi Intégrale putting 130 proposals about sexual violence before the French parliament, including a ban on lawyers harassing victims in court. They are disgusted the defence asked Gisèle why she swam naked in her own swimming pool.

“This is a trial,” says Deverlanges, “of one extraordinary man, the monster Pelicot, and many ordinary men.” And as we talk I see a group of them emerge nervously from their favoured café and head back to the court. A collective noun for rapists? A violation, a banality, a shame.

(archive)

#radblr #radfem #radical feminism #gender critical #gisele pelicot #terfblr

646 notes · View notes

warningsine · 4 months ago

Text

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/02/world/europe/france-husband-rape-drug-trial-mazan.html

For years, she had been losing hair and weight. She had started forgetting whole days, and sometimes appeared to be in dreamlike trances. Her children and friends worried she had Alzheimer’s.

But in late 2020, after she was summoned to a police station in southern France, she learned a far more shattering story.

Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep, the police said, and then raping her. He had ushered dozens of men into her home to film them raping her, too, they said, in abuse that lasted nearly a decade.

Using the man’s photographs, videos and online messages, the police spent the next two years identifying and charging those other suspects.

On Monday, 51 men, including Mr. Pelicot, went on trial in Avignon, in a case that has shocked France and cast a spotlight on the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the broader culture in which such crimes could occur.

The accused men represent a kaleidoscope of working-class and middle-class French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many have children and are in relationships.

Most are charged with raping the woman once. A handful are accused of returning as many as six times to rape her.

The victim, Gisèle, who has divorced her husband and changed her surname since his arrest, is now in her 70s.

Since his arrest, Mr. Pelicot, 71, has “always declared himself guilty,” said Béatrice Zavarro, his lawyer. “He is not at all contesting his role.”

Other defendants have denied the rape charges, with some arguing that they had the husband’s permission and thought that was sufficient, while others claimed they believed the victim had agreed to be drugged.

When the police showed Gisèle some of the photographs they say her husband had carefully classified and stored, she expressed deep shock. She and her husband had been together since they were 18. She had described him to the police as caring and considerate.

She had no memory of being raped, by him or the other men, only one of whom she recognized, she told the police, as a neighbor in town.

The first time she will consciously witness the rapes, her lawyer Antoine Camus says, will be in the courtroom when the video recordings are played as evidence.

The trial comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of the handling of sexual crimes in the country. Rape is defined in French law as an “act of sexual penetration” committed “by violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” A number of feminist lawmakers want to amend that wording to say explicitly that sex without consent is rape, that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and that consent cannot exist if sexual assault is committed “by abusing a state impairing the judgment of another.”

“There is a kind of naïveté on the topic of predators in France, a kind of denial,” said Sandrine Josso, a lawmaker who led a parliamentary commission into what is known in France as “chemical submission” — drugging someone with malicious intent. She started the commission after she says she became the victim of a drugging last year. A senator is being investigated on accusations that he slipped Ecstasy into her Champagne.

Ms. Josso hopes that the Avignon trial will draw attention to the use of drugs to prey on women, and also shed light on the wide profile of predators. “They could be your neighbors, without falling into paranoia,” she said.

Mr. Pelicot seemed like a classic man next door. He was a trained electrician, an entrepreneur and an avid cyclist. His middle child and only daughter, Caroline Darian, her pen name, described him as a warm and present father in a book published in 2022 about the case, “And I Stopped Calling You Papa.” She tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit association, “Don’t Put Me to Sleep,” to publicize the dangers of drug-facilitated crimes.

Her father, she wrote, was the one who drove her to school, picked her up late from parties, encouraged her and consoled her. Her mother was the stable breadwinner, working as a manager in a Paris-area company for 20 years.

When Gisèle retired, they moved to a house with a big garden and pool in Mazan, a small town northeast of Avignon. The couple regularly hosted their three children and grandchildren for summer vacations peppered with late dinners on the terrace, where the family debated, held dance competitions and played Trivial Pursuit.

“I think of us as happy,” his daughter wrote. “I thought my parents were.”

None of them harbored any suspicions. Then, in 2020, three women reported Mr. Pelicot to the police for trying to use his camera to film up their skirts in a grocery store, and he was arrested.

The police seized his two cellphones, two cameras and his electronic devices, including his laptop, before releasing him on bail.

On the devices, the police say they found 300 photographs and a video of an unconscious woman being sexually assaulted by many people. They said they also found Skype messages in which the man boasted of drugging his wife and invited men to join him in having sex with her while she was unconscious.

Over the course of their investigation, the police found more than 20,000 videos and photographs, many of them dated and labeled, in an electronic folder titled “abuse.” The timeline they built began in 2011. The list of suspects grew to 83.

Two months after his initial arrest, Mr. Pelicot was arrested again and charged with aggravated rape, drugging and a list of sexual abuse charges. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at times distributing, intimate photos of them.

If he is found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

During interviews with the police, the details of which were included in an overview of the case by the investigative judge, Mr. Pelicot said he began drugging his wife so he could do things to her, and dress her in things, that she normally refused. Then he started inviting others to participate. He said he never asked for or accepted money.

He met most of the men, the investigating judge’s report stated, in a chat room on a notorious, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France alone from 2021 to 2024. It was finally shut down, and its owner arrested, in June after an 18-month investigation stretching across Europe.

The chat room where most of the men met Mr. Pelicot was called “a son insu,” which means “without their knowledge.”

Over the years, Mr. Pelicot told the police, he developed rules for the visitors to ensure that his wife did not wake: no smoking or cologne; undress in the kitchen; warm hands under hot water or on a radiator, so their cold touch would not jolt her. At the end of each night, according to the investigating judge’s report, he cleaned his wife’s body.

Of the 83 suspects, the police identified and charged 50.

Only one of the men is not charged with rape, assault or attempted rape of Mr. Pelicot’s wife. Instead, that man is accused of following the same model, and drugging his own wife to rape her. Mr. Pelicot is also charged with raping the man’s wife while she was drugged.

Five of the men also face charges for possessing child sexual abuse imagery.

Mr. Pelicot is also being investigated in the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991 and the attempted rape of a 19-year-old in 1999. He admitted to the attempted rape, according to Florence Rault, the lawyer representing the victims in both cases, but denies any involvement in the 1991 homicide.

The story has prompted some soul-searching among doctors, since Gisèle had visited gynecologists and neurologists over a series of mystifying symptoms, but had received no diagnosis, according to her daughter.

“What I found disturbing for us doctors was that no doctor considered this hypothesis,” said Dr. Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, a well known obstetrician-gynecologist and expert in violence against women. She and a pharmacist, Leila Chaouachi, have now developed training for doctors and nurses on the symptoms that victims of drug-facilitated assault can experience.

Contrary to popular belief, most cases occur at home, not at bars, said Ms. Chaouachi, who runs annual surveys on such offenses in France. Most victims are women, the surveys show, and around half of the victims do not remember the attack, because of blackouts, she said.

In the case going to court in Avignon, some of the accused admitted guilt to the police. According to the investigating judge’s report, many claimed that they were tricked into having sex with a drugged woman — lured by a husband for a three-way encounter and told she was pretending to sleep, because she was shy.

Several said they believed that she had consented to being drugged and raped as part of a sex fantasy. Some said they did not believe it was rape, because her husband was there and they believed he could consent for both of them.

“It sends shivers down the spine regarding the state of affairs in French society,” said Mr. Camus, who is also representing Ms. Darian and many other members of the family. “If that’s the conception of consent in sexual matters in 2024, then we have a lot, a lot, a lot of work to do.”

#Gisele Pelicot #france #rape #news tag

410 notes · View notes

fluentmoviequoter · 1 month ago

Text

Smart Enough

Requested Here!

Pairing: Dominique Luca x fem!reader (Street's cousin/LAPD consultant)

Summary: While staying with your cousin Street, you assist the LAPD in catching a serial killer, but discover you fit the victim profile. SWAT agrees to protect you, but Street finds out that you and Luca are closer than you seemed.

Warnings: mostly fluff, r is threatened by a serial killer, the request mentioned High Potential and I love that show so I referenced it a lot

Word Count: 2.3k+ words

“The average rent in Los Angeles is $2,153. The average rent in the US overall is somewhere between $1,326 and $1,616. Even if you consider the higher prices, LA’s rent is 38% higher than the national average. On my analyst salary, I can’t afford rent and food, so you see my dilemma, right?” you ask before unwrapping a lollipop.

“As much as I enjoyed that presentation, I already agreed to let you stay here,” your cousin, Jim Street, replies.

“I thought you were a consultant,” Luca points out.

You twirl the lollipop in your mouth before pointing it toward Luca. “A consultant is a person who professionally provides expert advice, and an analyst conducts analysis. I technically do both.”

“And you do it well,” Luca replies, winking at you from behind Street.

“Thanks for letting me stay here, Luca,” you tell him. “I promise I’m much better behaved than Street.”

“Duke is better behaved than your cousin.”

Street scoffs loudly in argument, and you nod to agree with Luca. You’ve only been here for a night, but you can already tell you will have a good relationship with him.

“Remember that I gave up my bed for you,” Street says. “Sleeping on the couch where you should be.”

Your phone buzzes, and you read the message before standing. “Thank you, dear, sweet cousin,” you tell Street, hugging his shoulders from behind. “You’re the best. I’ll see you later. Bye, Luca!”

“Bye!” Luca calls.

Street turns toward Luca, his eyes narrowed. “Don’t. No Luca charm on my cousin, okay? She’s off limits.”

Luca salutes Street, but he can already tell you’re special. Even without his so-called Luca charm.

“Tell me what you see,” LAPD Lieutenant Melon requests.

“Hey!” Daphne Forrester says, backpedaling to look into the room. “Did you find a place to stay?”

“Do you mind?” Melon snaps as you answer, “I did! Thanks for suggesting that apartment, but I’m actually staying with my cousin until I can find something more permanent.”

“Permanent like murder?” Melon redirects. “Maybe the one you’re supposed to be consulting on?”

“Sorry,” Daphne says. “We’ll talk later,” she whispers to you.

You nod, then look at the case board before you. Your eyes bounce around the board. “They were all killed within a mile of college campuses, right?”

“Yeah,” Melon says before reading, “Two by UCLA, one by LBCC, and three from CIT.”

“Majors?”

“I don’t know. That’s not exactly something they find on autopsies.”

You stand and round the table to point at a picture. “Leslie Carver. This picture is from the crime scene, look!”

“At what?” Melon groans. “Just tell me what you see, that’s the whole point of having you here.”

“There's ink stains and minor paper cuts on her finger tips, plus a callous from holding a pen. These women were killed because they’re academics, because they’re smart. In fact… victim three, the one by LBCC, she wasn’t even in college.”

“And?”

“He’s not done.” You trace the pins on the map and decide, “There’s a pattern, and it’s nowhere near complete.”

“What’s the pattern? Where’s he going next?”

“I… I don’t know yet.”

You walk into SWAT HQ between two officers. They lead you directly into the situation room and pull up the case file on a large monitor screen. You’re instructed to sit on a stool and shift side-to-side as you wait.

“I’m Commander Hicks, this is Sergeant Harrelson, and 20-David squad-“

Street says your name and demands, “What are you doing here?”

“My job,” you answer, swinging your legs.

“She found a pattern in the Collegiate Killers’ victims,” Hicks says. “How do you two know each other?”

“I live with Luca,” you answer, smiling at him as he fights not to laugh.

“She’s my cousin,” Street corrects. “Who didn’t answer my question about why she’s here.”

“She fits the killer’s type,” Melon says.

Street steps toward you and raises his voice to ask, “What?”

“He’s killing smart people,” you explain with a shrug. “So, you’re safe.”

“Wait,” one of the other officers requests as he pulls Street back. “Can we start at the beginning? Without your commentary, Street?”

Melon waves toward you, and you slide from the stool to point to the map. “Six victims, all murdered within a few miles of college campuses. In order, the scenes were CIT, UCLA, CIT, LBCC, UCLA. On a map, that forms a composite triangle – two smaller triangles creating a larger one by sharing a side. The victims all had IQs over 130, which on the IQ scale means they were moderately gifted. But he’s forming these triangles by moving up in IQ. Victim one, IQ of 132, by victim 6, 139. He’s killing intelligent women, though the triangles are still a head scratcher.”

“What’s your IQ?” Hondo asks.

“145,” you answer softly.

“Highly gifted,” one of the detectives adds.

“If he’s only killing women around colleges, why are you considering yourself a target?” Street asks.

You purse your lips, and Melon explains, “We want to set a trap.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Street,” you begin.

“No,” he exclaims, turning toward you. “We’re not waltzing you into a college to catch some crazed killer. It’s out of the question.”

“It’s not your decision, Street.”

Street clenches his hand into a fist and takes a deep breath.

“That’s why they’re here, Street,” Hicks adds. “She’s not going in alone.”

“And how exactly do you expect to lead him to you specifically?” Street asks. “You’re not going to be the only smart woman on USC's campus.”

“No,” you agree. “But I will be the expert giving an unscripted seminar on medieval jousting and wearing a short skirt.”

Street opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He shakes his head and returns to Luca’s side but crosses his arms and glares at you.

“I trust you to keep me safe,” you say. “If that helps at all.”

“A bit,” he grumbles.

“We’ve got two days,” Hicks announces. “The seminar is at one p.m., but we can’t have obvious police presence on campus. So, let’s talk logistics.”

“Street,” you sigh, stopping at the end of the couch. “You know I wouldn’t just do this if I thought it wasn’t necessary.”

Street huffs and turns his face into a pillow. You drop your jacket onto his legs and sit, smiling as he pulls his feet out from under you at the last second.

“What can I say to make this better?” you ask.

“That you’re not going to do it.”

“I can’t say that Street. You know I didn’t get into this job on purpose, but I’m good at it, and I want to help make sure other women aren’t senselessly murdered just because they’re smart.”

“For someone so smart, you’re pretty stupid sometimes,” Street says against the couch cushion.

“I guess you’re wearing off on me.”

You yell dramatically as Street kicks your side, then laugh and fall against him. Luca clears his throat from the doorway, and when you look up, he tips his head toward the kitchen.

“Want something to drink, Street?” you ask.

“Something strong.”

“One water with mint coming up.”

Street continues grumbling as you leave his side and follow Luca. He smiles, asks what you’d like for dinner, and then begins gathering the ingredients.

“I’m nervous,” you admit softly.

Luca takes your hand and promises, “I’ll be with you the whole time. We all will.”

You lean against Luca’s chest, sighing as he holds you close. When Street stands from the couch, you separate quickly. Moving in with them was supposed to be temporary, just a place to sleep, but each moment you spend with Luca makes you more hesitant to leave.

“Are you ready?” Street asks.

You take a deep breath and nod. “Ask me a question about jousting.”

“Why did they use lances?”

“Actually, the lance was only one of three acceptable weapons for jousting,” you answer immediately. “The others were axes and swords. Later in jousting, the sword became more widely used because the cross guard resembled a crucifix.”

“You’ve got this,” Street assures, squeezing your hand once. “And you’re wearing my jacket, so you have to come back.”

“Of course.”

As you walk into the college auditorium, you smile at a few passing students and faculty, then find your place at the podium. Luca smiles from the back row, and several younger officers are scattered throughout the room. A professor introduces you, and the questions begin nearly immediately. Luca watches everyone who speaks but makes sure to catch your gaze every few minutes to give you a reassuring nod.

When your hour and a half is up, you thank everyone, then exit into what appears to be an empty hallway.

“Excuse me,” a man who looks to be in his thirties calls as he steps out of another door. “I had something I wanted to share if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” you agree, pressing your upper arms against your ribs beneath Street’s jacket.

“Some jousters bolted their armor to their saddles.” He steps toward you, and you hold your ground despite the intense urge to keep room between you. “I’ve been known to find more creative ways to keep women where I want them.”

“Do you know who I am?” you ask, tilting your head to the right.

He says your name, IQ, and educational history, and asks, “That sound about right?”

“You’ve done your research. But you forgot LAPD consultant.”

His hand closes around your throat, his fingers digging into the tense muscles along the side of your neck before he pulls you against him. He turns you so your back is against his chest and pulls a knife from his belt to push against your side.

“LAPD SWAT!” Hondo yells from behind you.

The man spins quickly, his arm tightening around your throat. Street tenses behind Hondo, and your heart rate calms when you see almost all of 20 Squad in uniform with guns aimed at the killer against your back. Luca is absent, you notice.

“Drop the weapon!” Street commands.

You gasp as the arm against you tightens, but it suddenly drops. The knife hits the tile floor with a sharp noise, and the man steps back from you as his hands raise.

“Smarter than he looks,” Luca taunts.

You turn on your heel and release a sigh when you see Luca behind the serial killer.

“Not that smart,” you add softly.

“Interlace your fingers behind your head,” Luca instructs.

Street rushes to your side, pulls you into a tight hug, and whispers quickly against your shoulder.

“I didn’t hear any of that,” you admit, patting his back.

“I was telling you I’m glad he didn’t cut my jacket,” Street lies.

“Can I go home now?”

“Paperwork first,” Lieutenant Melon says as he enters the hall. “Welcome to police life.”

“I’ll have dinner ready when you get home,” Luca promises.

“I knew moving in with him was a good idea.”

When you return to Luca and Street’s house, lean against the door, close your eyes, and take a deep breath. Street reluctantly agreed to go out with his friends and blow off some steam after a stressful week, so you expect you’ll have the house to yourself.

“Need anything?” Luca asks.

You shake your head without opening your eyes, and Luca carefully takes your bag from your hand.

“Thanks,” you murmur. “For everything.”

“Anytime.”

“So,” you begin.

After several seconds, Luca asks, “So?”

“You know how Street’s super protective of me?” Luca hums, and you tip your head down and open your eyes. “He hates when I go on dates, of course, but… I really like you, Luca.”

“You’re smart enough to know how I feel about you.”

“Street wouldn’t like it if we did anything.”

“Anything like what? Went on a date?”

You nod, and Luca shrugs.

“What should we do about that?”

You push off the door and step toward Luca, raising your arms to wrap around his shoulders. Luca’s arms circle your waist and pull you closer. With your forehead against his, you decide you're okay with whatever dramatic response Street has.

“I recommend we tell him in a crowded room, so he doesn’t hit me,” Luca whispers.

You tilt your jaw toward his and reply, “Or we stop thinking about him for now,” before you brush your lips against Luca’s.

“It’s believed that the LAPD actually coined the acronym SWAT,” you say.

“You’re back,” Street says as he enters the room, looking around for the detectives you accompanied last time. “Friendly visit?”

You nod and continue your story. “After the Texas Tower Incident, LAPD formed their SWAT team. The concept originated in the late 1960s after sniping incidents. The unit was originally designated the ‘D’ Platoon.”

“I can’t believe you’re related to Street,” Chris muses.

“Me neither,” Tan agrees. “You’re so smart, and he’s so… Street.”

“Hey, I’m smart!” Street interjects.

“Smart enough, maybe,” Hondo adds.

“Not very observant though,” Luca says.

You smile and take Luca’s hand, and Street’s eyes bounce rapidly between your shared hands, your face, and then Luca’s.

“You’re going to get dizzy,” you warn.

“Luca, she’s my cousin!” he exclaims.

“Yeah,” Luca says.

“You can’t date my cousin.”

“Can, and am.”

“I’ll kick you out.”

“It’s my house,” Luca argues, and you ask, “Wait, me?”

Street rubs his hand over his mouth, then promises, “I’ll find a way to fix this.”

“Street,” you say, stepping toward him and using your best loving cousin smile. “I really like him. He makes me happy.”

Street stares at you for a moment, then turns away. “Deacon, tell me you get it.”

“I get how she and Luca look at each other.”

Street tips his head back and groans. “Hurt her, Luca, and-“

“Please, I’d hurt him first,” you interrupt. Luca’s jaw drops, and you promise, “I know you won’t, but it’s the only way to shut him up.”

#dominique luca x fem!reader #dominique luca x reader #dominique luca fic #dominique luca #luca x reader #swat imagine #swat fic #swat x reader #swat cbs #fem!reader #requests #hanna writes✯#jim street

92 notes · View notes

radradmarivy · 4 months ago

Text

Women cannot trust any men, never. Not even the ones who they are married to nor the father of their children. I just saw an article of an elderly french man, Dominique Pelicot, who drugged his wife into a state of coma for 10 years and offered her to almost 80 men so she would be repeatedly raped by them over and over while he filmed it all.

This woman was his wife, the Mother of his three children and he did not gave a shit before offering her to other men on a special app for men who especifically were searching to have sex with non consenting partners. He gave her more than 400 sleeping pills, he could've killed her and did not give a fuck.

He just admitted it outright as soon as he was caught and he was only caught because he was seen taking upskirt pictures in the mall which led to an investigation. Not only that, he is now accused of the rape and murder of a female state agent and the attack of another state agent that could escape and the dna seems to match to his.

Almost 80 men were contacted for ten years. 80. From ages 23 to 73, nurses, a local councillor, a prison guard, journalists, a soldier, a firefighter, a civil servant and only 50 were identified. They all knew what was happening, they had a system to make sure the poor woman couldn't tell what was going on and now they claim that Dominique "tricked" them.

From all the men Dominique contacted only Three refused to participate but still didn't do anything even though they knew about the crime.

We can't trust no men, none of them. Look at all the "nice normal men" That participated in such an abhorrent act that now pretend to have been tricked into despite the apps/forums being proof they KNEW what was going on. These men used their upstanding profiles in the community to commit a crime constantly for ten years without being suspected and will probably try to use it to escape punishment.

We have to send all our strength to Giselle, the victim, who not only is taking all of them to justice but who also doesn't want the trial to be on closed Doors. She wants everybody to know what happened to her to create consciense, to make sure the perpetrator's faces are known. She is so strong and her and her children deserve the world.

#radfem safe #sexism #Giselle Pelicot #news #male violence #male entitlement #men can't be trusted #all men #all men are predators

104 notes · View notes

follow-up-news · 8 days ago

Text

Dozens of men, including the ex-husband of Gisèle Pelicot, were Thursday found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting her in a historic trial that shocked France. Speaking with journalists in the southern town of Avignon after the verdicts were read, Pelicot, 72, said the outcome of her case gave her faith in a future in which “everybody, women, men can live together in harmony, in respect and in mutual understanding.” Pelicot, who has become a hero to many in France for choosing to waive her right to anonymity and highlight the crimes orchestrated by her husband, added that she had fought the case with her children and her grandchildren in mind “because they are the future,” according to a live translation by NBC News’ British broadcasting partner, Sky News.

#france

62 notes · View notes

artthatgivesmefeelings · 1 year ago

Text

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780 - 1867) Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808 National Gallery, London Oedipus, a figure from Greek mythology, stands nude and in profile before the Sphinx, who guards the entrance to the ancient city of Thebes. The Sphinx – a monster with the face, head and shoulders of a woman, a lion’s body, and bird’s wings – asks Oedipus to solve the riddle she poses to all travellers seeking to enter the city: ‘What has a voice and walks on all fours in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?’ Oedipus correctly answers that it is man who crawls on all fours as a child, walks on two legs as an adult, and uses a walking stick as a third leg in old age. The bones of a previous traveller, killed by the Sphinx for having failed to solve the riddle, lie at the bottom of the picture. Thebes is visible in the distance on the right.

The theme of a monster defeated by human intelligence clearly appealed to Ingres. The picture also complements another of his paintings, Angelica saved by Ruggierro, which shows a chivalrous knight attacking a sea monster to save a princess. But this is also a painting of a man facing his destiny, as Oedipus’s actions will lead him to become King of Thebes, as the oracle predicted at his birth, and to unknowingly marry his own mother, Jocasta. This unwitting tragedy and its consequences is the drama of Oedipus Rex, the middle play of Sophocles' Theban Plays.

This painting is a later, and smaller, version of one painted in 1808 and subsequently reworked in 1827 (Louvre, Paris). The first version of Oedipus and the Sphinx was essentially a figure study that Ingres painted while studying at the French Academy in Rome. It was sent to Paris to be judged by members of the Institut de France. As required by the Institut’s rules, the figure of Oedipus was based upon a live model, although the pose was derived from the classical statue, Hermes Fastening his Sandal (Louvre), a Roman marble copy of a lost Greek bronze. Oedipus’s body is presented as an arrangement of geometrical shapes; for example, the triangle formed by his left arm, thigh and chest is mirrored and inverted by his left upper arm and forearm. The use of profile for both Oedipus and the Sphinx, together with the shallow space in much of the picture, recalls classical friezes and ancient Greek vases, which Ingres used as the sources for his deliberately classical artistic style.

118 notes · View notes

rvllybllply2014 · 1 month ago

Text

In previous testimony, many defendants told the court that they couldn’t have imagined that Dominique Pelicot was drugging his wife, and that they were told she was a willing participant acting out a kinky fantasy.

Dominique Pelicot has previously tearfully acknowledged in court that he’s guilty of the allegations against him. He said all of his co-defendants understood exactly what they were doing when he invited them to his home in Provence between 2011 and 2020 to have sex with his unconscious and unwitting wife, who divorced him after learning what he had done to her. He had no difficulty finding dozens of men to take part.

The other men are only facing up to ten years, and I’m not buying the oh we didn’t know it was rape. She was fucking snoring in some videos, they were told to not make too much noise and to warm their hands. They knew they were raping a defenseless woman.

#gisele pelicot #feminism #france

7 notes · View notes

nucrests · 11 months ago

Note

Hey! Wcif the hair Dominique is wearing in your profile picture? Thank you a lot!!

Hiiii!! It's a mesh edit I made for Dom using the hair from the Home Chef Hustle kit + adding his blonde streak overlay 🤭

#💙#wcif #anonymous #asks

29 notes · View notes

kemetic-dreams · 1 year ago

Text

Carol Diann Johnson was born in the Bronx, New York City, on July 17, 1935, to John Johnson, a subway conductor, and Mabel (Faulk), a nurse. While Carroll was still an infant, the family moved to Harlem, where she grew up except for a brief period in which her parents had left her with an aunt in North Carolina. She attended Music and Art High School, and was a classmate of Billy Dee Williams. In many interviews about her childhood, Carroll recalls her parents' support, and their enrolling her in dance, singing, and modeling classes. By the time Carroll was 15, she was modeling for Ebony. "She also began entering television contests, including Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, under the name Diahann Carroll." After graduating from high school, she attended New York University, where she majored in sociology, "but she left before graduating to pursue a show-business career, promising her family that if the career did not materialize after two years, she would return to college.

Carroll's big break came at the age of 18, when she appeared as a contestant on the DuMont Television Network program, Chance of a Lifetime, hosted by Dennis James. On the show, which aired January 8, 1954, she took the $1,000 top prize for a rendition of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein song, "Why Was I Born?" She went on to win the following four weeks. Engagements at Manhattan's Café Society and Latin Quarter, nightclubs soon followed.

Carroll's film debut was a supporting role in Carmen Jones (1954), as a friend to the sultry lead character played by Dorothy Dandridge. That same year, she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role in the Broadway musical, House of Flowers. A few years later, she played Clara in the film version of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1959), but her character's singing parts were dubbed by opera singer Loulie Jean Norman. The following year, Carroll made a guest appearance in the series Peter Gunn, in the episode "Sing a Song of Murder" (1960). In the next two years, she starred with Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward in the film Paris Blues (1961) and won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical (the first time for a Black woman) for portraying Barbara Woodruff in the Samuel A. Taylor and Richard Rodgers musical No Strings. Twelve years later, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role alongside James Earl Jones in the film Claudine (1974), which part had been written specifically for actress Diana Sands (who had made guest appearances on Julia as Carroll's cousin Sara), but shortly before filming was to begin, Sands learned she was terminally ill with cancer. Sands attempted to carry on with the role, but as filming began, she became too ill to continue and recommended her friend Carroll take over the role. Sands died in September 1973, before the film's release in April 1974.

Carroll is known for her titular role in the television series Julia (1968-71), which made her the first African-American actress to star in her own television series who did not play a domestic worker. That role won her the Golden Globe Award for Best TV Star – Female for its first year, and a nomination for an Primetime Emmy Award in 1969. Some of Carroll's earlier work also included appearances on shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Judy Garland, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar, and Ed Sullivan, and on The Hollywood Palace variety show. In 1984, Carroll joined the nighttime soap opera Dynasty at the end of its fourth season as the mixed-race jet set diva Dominique Deveraux, Blake Carrington's half-sister. Her high-profile role on Dynasty also reunited her with her schoolmate Billy Dee Williams, who briefly played her onscreen husband Brady Lloyd. Carroll remained on the show and made several appearances on its short-lived spin-off, The Colbys until she departed at the end of the seventh season in 1987. In 1989, she began the recurring role of Marion Gilbert in A Different World, for which she received her third Emmy nomination that same year.

In 1991, Carroll portrayed Eleanor Potter, the doting, concerned, and protective wife of Jimmy Potter (portrayed by Chuck Patterson), in the musical drama film The Five Heartbeats (1991), also featuring actor and musician Robert Townsend and Michael Wright. She reunited with Billy Dee Williams again in 1995, portraying his character's wife Mrs. Greyson in Lonesome Dove: The Series. The following year, Carroll starred as the self-loving and deluded silent movie star Norma Desmond in the Canadian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of the film Sunset Boulevard. In 2001, Carroll made her animation debut in The Legend of Tarzan, in which she voiced Queen La, ruler of the ancient city of Opar.

In 2006, Carroll appeared in several episodes the television medical drama Grey's Anatomy as Jane Burke, the demanding mother of Dr. Preston Burke. From 2008 to 2014, she appeared on USA Network's series White Collar in the recurring role of June, the savvy widow who rents out her guest room to Neal Caffrey. In 2010, Carroll was featured in UniGlobe Entertainment's breast cancer docudrama titled 1 a Minute and appeared as Nana in two Lifetime movie adaptations of Patricia Cornwell’s novels: At Risk and The Front.

In 2013, Carroll was present on stage at the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards to briefly speak about being the first African-American nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She was quoted as saying about Kerry Washington, nominated for Scandal, "She better get this award."

Carroll was a founding member of the Celebrity Action Council, a volunteer group of celebrity women who served the women's outreach of the Los Angeles Mission, working with women in rehabilitation from problems with alcohol, drugs, or prostitution. She helped to form the group along with other female television personalities including Mary Frann, Linda Gray, Donna Mills, and Joan Van Ark.

Carroll was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997. She said the diagnosis "stunned" her, because there was no family history of breast cancer, and she had always led a healthy lifestyle. She underwent nine weeks of radiation therapy and had been clear for years after the diagnosis. She frequently spoke of the need for early detection and prevention of the disease. She died from cancer at her home in West Hollywood, California, on October 4, 2019, at the age of 84. Carroll also had dementia at the time of her death, though actor Marc Copage, who played her character's son on Julia, said that she did not appear to show serious signs of cognitive decline as late as 2017. A memorial service was held in November 24, 2019, at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York City.

93 notes · View notes

mudwerks · 2 years ago

Photo

(via Adèle Haenel Quits Acting, Writes Scathing Letter on French Film Industry Protecting Rapists)

French actress Adèle Haenel, most famous for her role in the Cannes-prize-winning Portrait of a Lady on Fire, announced her retirement from the film industry in her country in a scathing open letter published on Tuesday. Haenel wrote that people in power in the industry have ignored high-profile sexual misconduct scandals that have come to light in France since #MeToo and “joined hands [to protect] the [Gerard] Depardieus, the [Roman] Polanskis, the [Dominique] Boutonnats,” referring to some of the men behind these scandals.

“It bothers them that the victims make too much noise. They preferred that we disappear and die in silence,” she wrote of leaders in her industry. “They’re ready to do anything to defend their rapist chiefs, those who are so rich that they believe they belong to a superior species, those who make a show of this superiority by… objectifying women and subordinates.”

the times are indeed changing

slowly but surely

#Adèle Haenel #quits film industry #french film industry #protects rapists

82 notes · View notes

sophieinwonderland · 1 year ago

Text

Imitated DID Reloaded

(Part 1, Part 2)

After the controversies of the 80s and 90s, the publications of the imitated DID theory and the rename from MPD, DID diagnosis rates and public awareness of the disorder overall plummeted. Recently though, it's been picking up steam online, which led to a revival of the Imitated DID theory.

Clinicians identified five themes common in these cases they deemed to be imitated.

But before touching those...

An important note on methodology.

Notice the name at the front of the paper on the TADS-I, Boon, is also one of the authors of this study, and of the original Imitated DID paper.

Looking up the TADS-I immediately links to Suzette Boon's own website.

In the limitations section, it's mentioned that TADS has yet to be validated.

So Suzette Boon and colleagues used Suzette Boon's unvalidated interview (TADS-I) to assess patients for having a condition originally made up by Suzette Boon. (Imitated DID.)

With that note on methodology, let's dive right in and address everything wrong with the themes!

The Themes

Theme 1: Endorsement and Identiﬁcation With the Diagnosis

In a modern era, it's pretty common for ordinary people to research a disorder they think they may have. Especially if a mental health professional suggests the diagnosis first, as happened in four of the six cases listed...

If someone says "I think you might have this disorder," MOST young people today are going to look on the internet to determine if it matches up. We literally have this ability in our pocket. Of course we'll use it.

And if you want to establish a theme like this, then you should generally have some type of control group to compare it to.

These were six people out of 85. There are no percentages given of the other 79 who had identified with the disorder beforehand. There are no statistics of how many looked it up online. It seems like it would be easy to get these sorts of stats to test their hypothesis but they aren't there.

Theme 2: Using the Notion of Dissociative Parts to Justify Identity Confusion and Conﬂicting Ego-States

This one is a bit harder to parse.

The idea here seems to be that people who have conflicting feelings or identity confusion will attribute that to alters.

The problem with this, similar to the first one, is that there's no comparison to actual DID groups.

Victoria lacks a firm sense of identity. And I think it's fair to say her acting in different ways to different people probably isn't a different alter every time. But it's possible and common to experience a lack of identity like this, while also having a complex dissociative disorder.

I can't assess whether she has DID or OSDD, but I don't think experiences like this are indicative of her not having it, and I know many DID systems would relate to her not having much of an identity.

2.1: Dominique and Partial DID

The next example in this section is about Dominique.

The reason for dismissing Dominique having DID is that her characters don't live separate lives or have amnesia. And it's possible she may not have it.

But what's never mentioned once in this paper is Partial DID. This paper was published after the ICD-11, and even uses the ICD-11 for its DID criteria. But the profile for Partial DID is never mentioned in the paper.

From the ICD-11

Partial dissociative identity disorder is characterised by disruption of identity in which there are two or more distinct personality states (dissociative identities) associated with marked discontinuities in the sense of self and agency. Each personality state includes its own pattern of experiencing, perceiving, conceiving, and relating to self, the body, and the environment. One personality state is dominant and normally functions in daily life, but is intruded upon by one or more non-dominant personality states (dissociative intrusions). These intrusions may be cognitive, affective, perceptual, motor, or behavioural. They are experienced as interfering with the functioning of the dominant personality state and are typically aversive. The non-dominant personality states do not recurrently take executive control of the individual’s consciousness and functioning, but there may be occasional, limited and transient episodes in which a distinct personality state assumes executive control to engage in circumscribed behaviours, such as in response to extreme emotional states or during episodes of self-harm or the reenactment of traumatic memories. The symptoms are not better explained by another mental, behavioural or neurodevelopmental disorder and are not due to the direct effects of a substance or medication on the central nervous system, including withdrawal effects, and are not due to a disease of the nervous system or a sleep-wake disorder. The symptoms result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.

This sounds a lot like what's described with Dominique.

Of course, Dominique could be a non-disordered system too.

What I find concerning is that at no point is the possibility of Partial-DID or of OSDD brought up. It's expected to be DID or nothing for the purposes of this study.

Another thing I need to say... alters aren't usually heard acoustically. I believe they can be in some cases, but it's not the majority. So I don't understand why that was relevant unless the authors misunderstand how voice hearing typically manifests.

2.2 "No participant provided evidence..."

I'm so curious what evidence people were expected to provide. As a reminder, in the last paper, being too open about talking about your alters or describing your switches was seen as a sign of Imitated DID. And it's the same in other parts of this paper.

How do you go about providing evidence for an autonomous dissociative part?

Theme 3: Exploring Personal Experiences via the Lens of Dissociation

There's not much to say about this one either. People who think they have a disorder begin relating experiences to those disorders. Like with all the other "themes" discussed, there is no comparison to the "genuine" DID group, many of whom would likely also have conducted similar research.

People who have autism, for example, will analyze their behavior and wonder how much of it is because of the autism. Same with ADHD, and various personality disorders.

Theme 4: Talking About DID Attracts Attention

Again, no comparison is made to a "genuine DID" group who is out to friends and family. It's likely that, yes, DID is going to be a topic of conversation for those who are out. But the same is true of many conditions.

"People who are imitating DID talk about having DID" wouldn't be a helpful distinction if people who aren't imitating DID also talk about having DID. (With close friends and people they trust.)

Theme 5: Ruling Out DID Leads to Disappointment or Anger

And like with every other theme in this, there's no comparison to the "genuine" DID group.

If you lied and told the other 80 participants that they didn't have DID, how would they react???

I don't know. Because that study was never conducted.

I predict a lot of DID systems who had been diagnosed by others and identified with the label would react the same way though.

This point feels especially insidious, as it's designed to reinforce a clinicians' belief that they made the right decision after saying someone doesn't have DID.

"Well, you got upset when I told you that you didn't have this condition you're certain you had, therefore I'm even more right that you don't have it."

It can't even possibly help you diagnose because it only comes later. It's only about validating the clinicians after the fact.

All these "Themes" have the same flaw

The themes are derived from six case studies (way too small of a sample size) of so-called "imitated" DID. But there's no comparison to genuine DID. No statistics to show that these same themes wouldn't be present in a majority of "genuine" DID cases too.

In other words, these themes have zero utility in differentiating between DID and non-DID phenomena.

Return of the Shame Criterion

Homosexuality was much more hidden and shameful in the 80s than it is today. The same is true of transness. And the same is actually true of many mental illnesses too. We can talk about our own autism more openly than someone could in the 80s.

Shame is often not simply based on the individual but on the culture and the subcultures they exist in.

Like I addressed in the first post in this series, certain disorders, conditions and just general personality types may make someone less ashamed of traits others would be ashamed of.

But more than that, expected shame can change as a culture changes and we become more accepting. And THAT'S A GOOD THING. We should all WANT a world where people with DID can feel less ashamed of themselves. The expectation of shame, the requirement of shame to be seen as valid, is something we need to fight against.

Here's a post I made on that particular subject.

And let me just make another note on these particular patients: These are not people who had just newly been diagnosed. They've had time to heal and come to terms with what they are, and build connections with the rest of their alleged systems.

Someone who has known about their DID for three years will generally have less shame for symptoms than they might have at 1 month.

This section also appears at odds with the earlier implication that patients show evidence of "dissociative parts," creating a very unfortunate paradox where you need to provide proof, but trying to provide proof is evidence of faking.

Other symptoms of DID

Luckily, the paper doesn't just talk about themes. It also discusses symptoms. So maybe these will hold up better to scrutiny.

Voices

I'm genuinely worried by this that the doctors don't understand the internal experiences of the disorders they're diagnosing.

As far as I know, this is how voices typically present in DID. Earlier on, it mentioned that Dominique didn't report an "acoustic" quality to the voices. But that's how the voices typically work. Acoustic voices are possible too, but voices heard are typically mind voices.

The way this is phrased makes me think the doctors were expecting patients to all have vivid acoustic voices.

And I believe this misconception led to a miscommunication with Mary, who clearly is describing parts talking to her.

But allegedly later denied "hearing voices."

My own interpretation, at least, is that Mary was probably confused and thought the clinicians were asking about actual audible voices. Which it actually sounds like they might have been.

Voice hearing is complicated, and this paper is written in a way which might add more confusion, making readers falsely believe that alters will always speak in these sorts of acoustic voices rather than mindvoices resembling internal thoughts.

This sort of misunderstanding is genuinely dangerous to patients.

Amnesia

There are a couple points that need to be made about Amnesia.

First: Under the DSM, there is a presentation of OSDD that includes all the symptoms of DID but without the amnesia. In the community, we typically refer to this as OSDD-1b.

Second: Under the ICD-11, while described as "typically present," amnesia isn't even a hard requirement for a DID diagnosis as seen below:

Third: Partial DID in the ICD-11 also had no amnesia feature at all. At no point is this or OSDD brought up.

Focus on the amnesia criterion here, while necessary for a diagnosis of DID under the DSM-5, doesn't address larger questions of if the patients might have disorders involving "dissociative parts."

The fact that these other disorders exist where amnesia isn't required NEEDS to be addressed this paper.

Language

This is somewhat good advice. I'm against the implication that knowing jargon, for patients who have been told by other clinicians that they have a dissociative disorder, is an indicator of imitated DID.

But I do very much agree with the fact that people who use these terms don't often understand them and you need to ask questions that go beyond the terms selves. Getting someone to describe a flashback is more useful than them saying they have flashbacks, when they may just mean they have vivid memories.

Although for the 1st person perspective, this may just be different ways of contextualizing the same experience, or even trying to phrase things in ways they thing a singlet will understand. I think, for a paper that tries to beat people over the head with how DID is usually a "disorder of hiddenness," they're ignoring how referring to yourselves in the 1st person with other people becomes habitual.

Not to mention that certain parts of the DID community even believe it's healthier to refer to everything they do as a system using singular pronouns, viewing it as a form of system responsibility.

Depersonalization

Are "self-states" not autonomous?

What... actually is the difference between an autonomous dissociative part and an autonomous unintegrated self-state with its own name and identity?

Is there a way to reliably differentiate between these concepts?

Switches

This is the part that I feel rises to actual misinformation.

Before getting to the highlighted part, I'm going to point out that the source for the "shame and fear" of disclosing their internal parts is the study from the previous two posts.

The study THAT DIDN'T INCLUDE ANY EXAMPLES OF "GENUINE" DID CASES.

It was stated as a fact with no statistics or evidence to back it up whatsoever. And one of the authors, Suzette Boon, is also an author of this study. This "source" might as well be Suzette Boon quoting herself claiming something.

Now, to the highlighted part... this is complete misinformation.

I'm shocked it got published.

Some DID patients can, in fact, control switches. This has been observed in fMRI scans:

DID systems DO NOT need to be triggered to switch. This has been proven with actual brain scans, in addition to decades of reports in the literature.

And I need to repeat again that this group was also taken from people who were already in treatment for DID.

In other words, even if they couldn't control switching before, it would be something they likely would have picked up through treatment.

A Solution in Search of a Problem

Ultimately, this is a study which has little reason to exist. In their sample of 85 people, they found only six they claim had Imitated DID. Even if these assessments are were correct. Even if they weren't conducted by people who seem to not understand how switching or voice hearing works in DID... this would leave us with a 7% false positive rate.

Meanwhile... mentioned in this same paper...

26%-40% of DID patients will be diagnosed with and treated for Schizophrenia first. And this doesn't even address misdiagnosis of other disorders like BPD.

Imitated DID continues to be a solution in search of a problem.

But there is a very REAL problem of underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of actual DID cases. Something that will only be exacerbated by convincing doctors that "genuine" DID systems can't possibly control switching (and anyone who does is faking), that voices heard are always acoustic, and that DID systems will always be ashamed of their symptoms.

Papers like this are going to result in fewer systems who need help being able to get a diagnosis.

39 notes · View notes

someone-will-remember-us · 12 days ago

Text

In the four years after she discovered her husband had been drugging her and inviting strangers into their home to rape her, Gisèle Pelicot liked to walk to clear her head.

Striding through the countryside alone, she would throw the questions that tormented her to the wind: “Dominique, how could you have done it? Why did you do it? How did we get here?” Asked what she was doing when she was disappearing for hours, she would tell her three children: “I am talking to your father.”

From his prison cell, Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted orchestrating the rapes at the couple’s home in the Provençal town of Mazan, could not answer. Nor would he when facing his former wife across a crowded courtroom, except to say: “I am a rapist … like the others in this room.”

The 50 men who appeared alongside him, charged with aggravated rape and sexual abuse, have also failed to explain their actions.

Why, when confronted with the inert body of a drugged and unconscious woman, did these “ordinary men”, as they were described in court, with ordinary names – Laurent, Nicolas, Philippe, Christian, Hassan – not leave? Why did not one of them go to the police and put an end to the decade-long abuse of a woman that could have killed her?

“The question is not why you went there, but why you stayed,” one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, told the court.

Camus cannot imagine why the men, who he says represent a “kaleidoscope of French society”, did so except for a lack of empathy towards their victim, who he says was treated as “less than nothing”.

As the trial enters its final days this week, the accused will be permitted a last word on Monday before the president of the court and five judges known as “assessors” withdraw to consider their verdicts and sentences. The public prosecutor has demanded a maximum prison term of 20 years for Pelicot and sentences of between four and 18 years for the 50 others.

Then, Gisèle Pelicot will walk out of court for the last time, flanked by her two lawyers, Camus and Stéphane Babonneau, who have protected her like praetorian guards every day. There will be a last round of applause and cheers from the crowd – mostly women – who have arrived at dawn to queue for hours outside the courthouse for a place in the hearing, and who have presented her with gifts and shouted “Merci, Gisèle!” as she left each evening.

A criminal trial aims to answer questions. During this three-and-a-half-month hearing, the accused have produced excuses but few answers.

Sitting in court, we listened to the men arguing that Pelicot had given his consent for them to rape his wife; that they had not “intended” to rape her; that what they had done was not rape; that they did not have the profile of a rapist and therefore were not one. That they believed Gisèle Pelicot was only pretending to be asleep. That they had too much testosterone – that it was their body, not their brain, acting. That they too were victims of her manipulative, perverse husband.

With Gisèle Pelicot unconscious and unaware of what was being done to her, the videos her husband recorded of the assaults were, as the public prosecutor pointed out, “worth a thousand words”. In them, we saw Pelicot directing his personal pornographic scenes, moving his unconscious wife – dressed in lingerie that was not hers and with crude messages written on her buttocks – into positions, holding her mouth open, whispering to his cast of naked strangers to “get on with it”, to do this, do that, or to get out if she so much as twitched. Defence lawyers tried to have those recordings struck out as evidence.

“It is evident that Mme Pelicot was not in a normal conscious state,” public prosecutor Laure Chabaud said.

“She was in a state of torpor closer to a coma than sleep. [This] didn’t seem to dissuade the participants, none of whom spoke to Gisèle Pelicot or sought her consent.”

Several of the accused did admit there was something bizarre about the scenario, as Pelicot instructed them to get undressed and warm their hands on the radiator because his wife was “sensitive to the cold”. But they stayed anyway. A few realised their “mistake” and were sorry. Others were almost defiant, shocked they were in court. Most deny rape.

Those facing the gravest accusations, of up to six counts of rape, sat in a second glass box on the left of the courtroom, stroking their chins, fiddling with their beards, bowing their heads or complaining to their guards that journalists were “looking at them meanly”. Those on bail and free to come and go went in and out of the courthouse with collars pulled up, hats pulled down and masks hiding their faces.

Giving evidence, the Pelicots’ younger son, Florian, dismissed the men as “not la creme de la creme”, but they looked ordinary enough in their jeans and leather jackets, anoraks, trainers and hoodies. Their backgrounds were varied and in other circumstances might have provoked sympathy – broken homes, childhood abuse, drug and alcohol problems – but there was no common thread. Many had no previous criminal record, although some were charged with possession of child abuse or bestiality images. They were all functioning adults, most with jobs, children and partners.

For Camus, their excuses are evidence of French society’s “culture of rape” being played out in real time. “These absurd suggestions, prejudices, hypotheses, preconceived ideas … all deployed before our very eyes, and all at the expense of Gisèle Pelicot,” he says.

In court, she would stare at them or the ceiling, listen to their excuses, dismiss their apologies, her face impassive. “She is disgusted, appalled and indignant … but not surprised,” Camus adds. Her reaction was the same as it had been when she had first seen the videos in the run-up to the trial: how could they? “She was waiting for the explanations, some kind of exchange, and she has not had that.”

The depravity of what the world has seen and heard will not be easily erased from the memory.

“We thought we knew everything men were capable of inflicting on women but never imagined a husband drugging his wife and offering her up to dozens of predators for 10 years,” said one woman who has been attending court to support Gisèle Pelicot.

The case has also raised broader questions over the toxic masculinity riddling French society, how the police, courts and society treat rape victims, the use of drugs in rape, and, of course, consent, or the absence of the concept in French law. In France, rape is defined as “sexual penetration, committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. The Mazan rapes have been shoehorned into the “surprise” category – but feminist groups are divided over whether adding consent to the law would be a good thing or simply place undue focus on the victims.

Statistics from the Institut des Politiques Publiques in France suggest that over a 10-year period there were more than 400,000 cases of sexual violence in France, 86% of which resulted in no action and only 13% in conviction. There are about 700,000 cases of domestic abuse each year, only 27% ending in conviction. Campaigners are hoping the Pelicot trial will signal a watershed in a country where the #MeToo movement has struggled to maintain much impetus.

The case has been shocking because of its scale and perversity, but we have been here before. In 2018, as French women began to open up about sexual abuse in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, a collective of 100 women, including the grande dame of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve, wrote an open letter saying it had all gone too far and was stifling men’s ability to seduce.

Blandine Deverlanges, a teacher and founder of the local feminist group Amazons of Avignon, says the Pelicot trial is already encouraging other rape and sexual assault victims to speak out. “Gisèle Pelicot has offered us her story and it is our story. She has held her head high and in doing so encouraged other women hesitating over whether to report rapes to come forward.”

The Avignon trial lies on a continuum that began in France in 1974, in Aix-en-Provence, when another Gisèle, feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi, represented Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castellano, two Belgian women who had been raped by three men while camping.

Like Pelicot, they also waived their anonymity and refused a closed-door hearing at a time when rape was treated as a public indecency misdemeanour under laws that dated back to the Napoleonic era. Halimi said at the time: “You must convict these three men, because otherwise you will condemn women to never again be believed.” The men were convicted and the trial led to a rewriting of France’s criminal code.

Agnès Fichot, a lawyer who worked with the late Halimi on the case, says attitudes have changed in the past 50 years, but there is “still a long way to go”.

Fichot argues the law does need a “consent” clause but that the burden of proof should be inverted. “It should not be for the victim of rape to prove she consented, but for the man to prove he had her express and clear consent,” she says.

Fichot has attended the trial and is astonished that none of the men recruited by Pelicot had considered reporting him. She is dismayed by their refusal to take responsibility for their actions. “Not one of them came out of that house and thought of going to the police to say there was a woman in danger, to tell of the horrors her husband was inflicting, so she could be saved.”

The videos ruled out suspicions, fostered by some defence lawyers, that Gisèle Pelicot had been complicit in the abuse. Still, they questioned her about her sex life – whether she was a swinger, an exhibitionist, an alcoholic, a manipulated and subjugated wife. One asked why she had not appeared angrier with her former husband, and why she had not cried more in court. As more videos were shown, the questions seemed as obscene as the images we were watching.

“I went to court hoping the [defence] arguments would be changed since the 1970s but they had not,” says Fichot. “The testosterone excuse was the absolute worst. It was the archaic argument that males, who have all the privileges and domination over women, have this weakness and we cannot blame them for it because they are male and have uncontrollable urges.”

It took four years after Pelicot, a retired electrician, was arrested in November 2020 for the case to come to trial. Until she walked into court in September this year, Gisèle Pelicot had not seen the man she once considered a “perfect, loving, attentive and caring” husband, father and grandfather, who she had been married to for 50 years, since he had been taken into custody.

On 2 November 2020, the couple left their neat home with a swimming pool, where they had intended to spend their retirement, to drive to the police prefecture in Carpentras. Six weeks earlier, Dominique Pelicot had been arrested for filming up the skirts of four women in the Leclerc supermarket. He had made a tearful confession to his wife, promised not to do it again and to seek medical help. He told her on this occasion they would be home by lunchtime.

But at the police station, a senior officer showed Gisèle Pelicot some photographs and told her what her husband had been doing to her for almost a decade. After the shock came the indignation that prompted the decision to waive her anonymity and insist that the trial – including appalling videos described by Roger Arata, the president of the court, as “particularly offensive to human dignity” – be held in public so that “shame changes sides”.

It was a decision that made the 73-year-old grandmother internationally recognised and gave feminists a new slogan.

“We warned her holding the trial in public would cause a storm, but it meant the outside world could look in and see exactly what had happened,” Camus says.

His fellow lawyer Babonneau says Pelicot’s determination that this should not happen to another woman is her driving motivation. “Normal people need to read about it to be aware it can happen. She was an ordinary woman, a pensioner living in the south of France … what could she expect from life: no trauma, no dramatics, a nice house in a nice village and she thought this would be her life for ever.”

Babonneau and Camus are struck not just by her former husband’s manipulation but his cynicism. The drugs he had been giving her had caused blackouts and memory loss. She had inexplicable gynaecological problems, and was convinced she had a brain tumour or degenerative neurological disease.

Her children had persuaded her to see specialists. She was accompanied by her husband, who did not once try to ease her fears.

“When she was tired, when she said she had gynaecological problems, Dominique would joke: ‘Gisèle, what are you doing at night?’ It is beyond belief. Disgusting,” Camus says.

He likens her betrayal to that of the moment in The Truman Show when the film’s main character discovers his existence has been a reality television programme. “He discovers that everything he believed was real is false … For Gisèle, it has been the same, except it was a pornographic film and the director was her husband.”

The trial will indelibly mark all those who spent time at it. Reporters who jostled for a seat in the small courtroom listened to Arata read the list of alleged crimes for each accused in a monotone, as if repeating a weekly shopping list: digital penetration, vaginal penetration, oral penetration, anal penetration, sexual touching. We would hear the most appalling evidence, see the most appalling videos and think nothing could be worse. Except the next day it often was.

Marion Dubreuil, court correspondent for the French radio station RMC, was there almost every day, live-tweeting and sketching those in the courtroom. “What saved me was documenting it,” she said. “I found sense in my work.

“I tell myself: this trial will change things. Rape is the most absolute crime; the most banal and the most common. Now we are speaking about it, people realise it is happening all the time. I see this in those around me. The trial has made them think.”

The public prosecutor, Jean-Marie Huet, who had originally wanted the case to be held behind closed doors, admitted to Gisèle Pelicot he had been wrong. “I salute your courage, madame, and your dignity throughout these proceedings,” he said. “We asked for a closed-door hearing without knowing the force of your character.

“In an incredible burst of resilience, you asked for a public hearing, and you were right, madame.”

Sitting in a local cafe, Camus taps the table irritably when reminded of the defence lawyers who have attacked Gisèle Pelicot.

“When people say she is not feeling enough hate, that she doesn’t cry enough … I ask, what do people want of her?” he says. “What do they expect her to do? Kill herself? That she is still standing is a testament to her amazing resilience.

“My preoccupation, my obsession since the beginning of this trial, is that she does not come out of it more damaged than when she went in and, in fact, I have the impression she has come out of it strengthened. She went into it very fragile with her head held high and she has come out of it … with a sort of pride.

“People will remember Gisèle Pelicot because there are many lessons to be learned from her and this trial. She is a monument, she raised her head, she lives, she refuses to be swallowed by the shadows or by hate.”

It is the job of courts to ask questions and dig out the answers. Reporters, too. In this instance, we have both failed. The question of how so many men were able to dehumanise Gisèle Pelicot will take psychologists and social anthropologists some time to unravel.

(archive)

#radblr #radfem #radical feminist #gender critical #radical feminism #terfblr #gisele pelicot

311 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 4 months ago

Text

In November 2022, Dominique Lazarski stood among a small crowd of people on the Pontoise airfield near Paris, watching a flying taxi trace wide circles in a clear blue sky after it took off for the first time from a working vertiport in France. Airborne, the vehicle looked like a giant quadcopter; its rotors spinning rapidly to keep a small taxi cab aloft. Yet Lazarski, who lives in the city part time, was thinking only about the whirring sound coming from above her head. “I thought it was quite, quite noisy,” she remembers.

What Lazarski—who is president of ADERA, a group that campaigns against increased air traffic at Paris-Beauvais Airport, north of the city—had witnessed was the beginning of a campaign to get Parisians excited about the prospect of flying taxis in the skies above the Summer Olympics.

“The development of low-altitude aviation for urban air mobility is an adventure full of promise—for employment, for the environment, and for the lives of Île-de-France residents,” pledged Valérie Pécresse, president of the regional council of Île-de-France, the region which includes Paris, that same year. The first airline ticket might have been issued in Florida, she added, but the first flying taxi would take off from French soil. “The Olympics are an incredible opportunity and showcase to launch this project.”

Yet after years of planning, the project failed to convince Parisian politicians, the public, and safety officials that the technology was ready for widespread use at the Summer Olympics. A sole flying taxi ascended over Versailles for five minutes on the last day of the Olympics, but it had no passengers. The promise of tourists traveling over Paris in flying taxis failed to materialize, and instead the technology suffered a high-profile setback. Volocopter declined WIRED’s request for an on-record comment about what went wrong.

Flying cars have been mythologized by sci-fi, featuring in movies from The Fifth Element to Blade Runner as a symbol of the future. But what happened in Paris shows the barriers that stand between the technology and its modern-day debut. Their supporters have yet to find a way to effectively sell them to the public or even decide what—or who—exactly flying taxis are for.

The idea of Olympic tourists soaring over Paris in flying taxis was initially greeted with enthusiasm. “Paris Dreams of Flying Taxis for 2024,” read a 2021 headline in the news outlet Les Echos.

By 2023, a year after the demo in Pontoise, the two companies behind the project, German flying taxi developer Volocopter and French airport operator ADP, remained bullish. The noise wasn’t going to be a problem, they said, claiming the flying taxis would not be audible from the ground when flown at an altitude of around 500 meters. Edward Arkwright, ADP’s deputy CEO, acknowledged in June 2023 there would be challenges ahead. But he insisted: “All lights are green for us to be there in the summer of 2024.” ADP did not reply to a request to comment.

Six months before the opening ceremony, Dirk Hoke, CEO of Volocopter, was still hopeful. “[We’re] making people aware that this is not science fiction,” he told WIRED in February, touting the flying taxi as a sustainable, safe, and quiet mode of transport that would become normal in just a few years. “It works and it starts this year.”

Flights on Volocopter’s VoloCity model would be free-of-charge, and initially three routes were planned across Paris. But even as those plans were made public, Hoke had yet to travel in one of his own vehicles. “I would love to,” he said, “but so far, according to the regulation, only test pilots are allowed.” Still, his tone was optimistic. “We will hopefully start flying in July and then start also with passengers, probably in August.”

But just two months later, Hoke started expressing doubts in German media. After being rejected for a state loan, the company was facing the prospect of insolvency “in the foreseeable future” if its shareholders would not agree to more financing, he told the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

At the same time, backlash to the project was mounting, with critics complaining the VoloCity (which could transport only one passenger at a time) was more akin to a private plane than any form of public transport. “We don't need them,” says Lazarski. She believes the flying taxis would create visual and noise pollution in the skies above Paris, without giving its residents anything back. “It’s not mass transportation,” she says, claiming the vehicles would be used by only the most privileged. “They’re for business people.”

Lazarski was not alone in her concerns. Seventeen thousand people have signed a petition so far calling for the project to be scrapped, and politicians in charge of Paris also joined the backlash—pitting politicians in the capital against the wider region and government.

Dan Lert, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of the green transition, called the VoloCity an “absurd gadget” that will “only benefit a few ultrarich people.” His colleague David Belliard, deputy mayor in charge of mobility, echoed that sentiment. “It is useless, it is anti-ecological, it is very expensive,” he said in July.

Volocopter, however, defended its product as affordable. “We strongly believe that when we go into the hundreds and thousands of these vehicles, that we can easily reach a price per equivalent seat which is only a bit higher than a taxi on the street,” Hoke said in February.

Yet other flying taxi executives have acknowledged that getting to that point will take time, and that first there will be a period where these vehicles cater to the wealthy. “A lot of the initial use cases will be first- and business-class passengers connecting with flights,” Michael Cervenka, chief technology officer of UK-based flying taxi company Vertical Aerospace, said earlier this year.

By late July, it was clear that Volocopter’s plans for the Paris Olympics were being scaled back, even as the company claimed its immediate money problems had been solved. “It's a technological advance that could be of use,” transport minister Patrice Vergriete insisted, acknowledging the flying taxis might not be able to welcome any passengers in time for the Olympics. Publicly, Volocopter was careful not to credit the public backlash with the setback, instead blaming an American supplier for “not [being] able to provide what it had promised,” as well as its failure to win approval from the EU Aviation Safety Authority to operate commercially.

Lazarski does not consider the failure of flying taxis so far a victory. “It's more relief,” she says. But for her, the battle is not over. As vice president of UFCNA, the French union against aircraft nuisance, Lazarksi is involved in a legal challenge against plans to operate a vertiport on the river Seine for flying taxis to take off and land from central Paris. That launchpad has already secured permission from the government to operate until December. The race for the Olympics may be over, but the dream of flying taxis over Paris is not dead.

4 notes · View notes