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someone-will-remember-us · 17 days ago

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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

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thebusylilbee · 4 months ago

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"Chère Gisèle Pelicot, vous êtes entrée dans nos vies comme au tribunal d’Avignon, par la grande porte. [...] Le jour de l’ouverture du procès de vos violeurs a aussi été celui de l’officialisation de votre divorce. [Une meute] vous attend dans la salle d’audience : celle des 50 hommes qui sont jugés pour viol en réunion. Il y en aurait des dizaines d’autres qu’on n’a pas pu identifier. Vous faites face. Rien ne vous préparait à être dans cette salle d’audience. Un des accusés est arrivé en retard parce que, dit-il, il devait accompagner son fils à l’école pour la rentrée. Je me suis demandé qui avait accompagné vos petits-enfants, qui faisaient, eux aussi, leur rentrée scolaire. Je sais que vous avez pensé à eux à ce moment précis.

Réalité difficile à accepter

Vous les voyez tous pour la première fois sauf ce voisin que vous croisiez parfois dans la vie d’avant, celle qui ne reviendra jamais, celle de la maison du Vaucluse et de l’ignorance préservée. Vous les regardez. Ils regardent leurs pieds. Ils n’avaient jamais vu vos yeux, Jean, Didier, Jean-Luc, Romain, Redouan, Cédric, Grégory, Karim, Jean-Marc, Philippe, Quentin, Nicolas, Vincent, Patrick, Paul et les autres… On ploie sous la longueur de la liste et la banalité des profils. Les trois quarts d’entre eux ne reconnaissent pas les viols, comme tous ceux qui font les gros titres de l’actualité, les PPDA, Nicolas Hulot, Salim Berrada, Gérard Miller, Olivier Duhamel, Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon, Gérard Depardieu…

Leurs arguments sont toujours les mêmes. Ils font tourner l’infect disque rayé du mensonge complaisant. Ils n’ont pas compris ce qu’ils faisaient. Ils sont sûrs d’être, eux aussi, des types bien, pas des monstres, même quand on leur montre les vidéos des crimes. Ils sont pompier, journaliste, étudiant, chauffeur routier, gardien de prison, infirmier, retraité, conseiller municipal, nos amis, nos amants, nos pères, nos frères. Une réalité difficile à accepter.

Un seul s’est adressé à vous pour vous présenter des excuses. Leur défense est un échantillon chimiquement pur de la violence patriarcale et des masques derrière lesquels elle s’abrite pour prospérer. « Le patriarcat est dans la maison ce que le fascisme est dans le monde », écrivait Virginia Woolf dans Trois guinées (1938).

Certains évoquent le poncif éculé de la pulsion, d’autres la frustration sexuelle due à l’absence prolongée d’une compagne officielle. Il y a celui qui trouve « bizarre » d’avoir fait ça. On trouve aussi des traces de « libertinage incompris ». Il y a celui qui ose l’ahurissant « viol involontaire ».

« Consentement par délégation »

Puisque vous étiez comateuse, il est difficile de prétendre que vous étiez partante. Difficile, mais quelques-uns tentent quand même le « j’ai pu croire qu’elle faisait semblant de dormir ». Les plus audacieux essayent le « consentement par délégation » ; le mari était d’accord, « il fait ce qu’il veut avec sa femme ». Une femme est soumise à son compagnon. L’ordre immémorial de la hiérarchie masculine est respecté.

Ce qui est certain, c’est qu’ils ont tous bandé à l’idée de pénétrer un corps inerte. Le viol et l’ordinaire de la sexualité semblent avoir beaucoup de points communs dans leur esprit. Ils ont bien le droit. Ils ont le pouvoir de le faire. Ils n’allaient pas passer à côté d’un viol gratuit près de chez eux. Ils ont été biberonnés à la haine des femmes, au mépris qui s’excite de l’impuissance de l’autre. Le sexisme féroce transpire de leur discours. La pornographie violente dont certains collectionnaient les images les plus répugnantes y est sans doute pour quelque chose. La domination absolue les a fait jouir. Ils ne voient pas le problème. Même au tribunal. Même devant vous.

Ils font ce que font la plupart des hommes accusés : ils se victimisent et rajoutent une couche de mépris sur celle qu’ils ont déjà humiliée. Ils sont tombés dans un traquenard. On les a piégés. Vous êtes restée là, à les écouter sans ciller, droite sur le ring. Vous décrivez désormais votre vie comme un combat de boxe. Le combat est déloyal. L’adversaire a les armes du terrorisme patriarcal. Que vous soyez à terre ou debout, cassée ou le poing levé, votre droiture fait craqueler la carapace d’impunité qui les a longtemps protégés.

Ce n’est pas seulement vous, Gisèle, qu’ils ont traitée comme une chose. Ils nous disent, à toutes, notre insignifiance. Votre force nous rend la nôtre. Merci pour ce cadeau immense.

Hélène Devynck, journaliste et autrice d’Impunité, (Seuil, 2022)"

#french #france #upthebaguette #cw misogyny #tw rape #patriarchy #feminism #mazan rape case

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coochiequeens · 4 months ago

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Men say shit like women should get married to have a man who will protect them then do shit like this.

Woman, 72, 'drugged by her husband so 50 men could rape her while unconscious' appears in court after bravely waiving right to anonymity as he goes on trial along with men 'filmed having sex with her'

Gisele P opted for a public trial and waived her right to anonymity, lawyers said

Police say she suffered 92 rapes by 72 men, 51 of whom have been identified

Those identified will also go on trial alongside the main suspect, Dominique P

By David Averre 2 September 2024

French woman whose husband is on trial for drugging her and allowing dozens of strangers to rape her while unconscious appeared in court for the first time after waiving her right to anonymity.

Gisele P., 72, was seen standing in the courtroom supported by her three children to witness the opening day of the trial of Dominique P., 71, which began this morning in Avignon.

He is accused of orchestrating a sick rape ring, using an online forum to invite a horde of men to his home in Mazan near Avignon before filming them assaulting his wife over nine years between 2011 and 2020.

Police counted a total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom were identified and are being tried alongside the main suspect, a former employee at France's power utility company EDF.

Presiding judge Roger Arata announced that all the hearings would be public, granting Gisele her wish for 'complete publicity until the end' of the court case, according to her lawyer, Stephane Babonneau.

Gisele could have opted for a trial behind closed doors given the nature of her husband's alleged crimes, but 'that's what her attackers would have wanted', another lawyer named Antoine Camus said.

Still, the trial will be 'a horrible ordeal' for Gisele.

'For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,' Camus said, adding that his client had 'no recollection' of the abuse which she only discovered in 2020.

Gisele P. - a French woman whose husband is on trial for drugging her and allowing dozens of strangers to rape her while unconscious - is seen arriving in court today

Dominique P. is accused of orchestrating the sick rape ring, filming strangers he met online attacking his wife while she was drugged between 2011 and 2020 Ladies let's share this face everytime men spew crap about men protecting women

The President of the Vaucluse Assises Court Roger Arata speaks at the courthouse during the trial of Dominique P. in the south of France, in Avignon, on September 2, 2024

The couple met in 1971 and married two years later before having three kids together.

Gisele previously said her husband had asked her to try swinging - a request she refused.

But she also described him as a 'great guy' with a 'normal sexuality'.

Their eldest son said nothing in his father's behaviour suggested any deviance and that 'he had always fulfilled his role as a father', while their daughter spoke fondly of her father's presence in her life as a young girl.

The heinous campaign of sexual abuse masterminded by Dominique P. is said to have begun in 2011 when the couple was living near Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.

Police began to investigate the defendant Dominique P. in September 2020 when he was caught by a security guard secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.

Police said they found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife on his computer, visibly unconscious and mostly in the foetal position.

The images are alleged to show dozens of rapes in the couple's home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people roughly 20 miles from Avignon in Provence.

Investigators also found chats on a site called coco.fr, since shut down by police, in which he recruited strangers to come to their home and have intercourse with his wife.

Dominique P. later admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug.

Demonstrators hold placards and smoke bombs during a protest outside the courthouse during the trial of a man accused of drugging his wife for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, a small town in the south of France, in Avignon, on September 2, 2024

Beatrice Zavarro, lawyer for the accused Dominique P, waits at the courthouse during the trial of her client accused of drugging his wife for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, a small town in the south of France, in Avignon, on September 2, 2024

The husband took part in the rapes, filmed them and encouraged the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.

In previous hearings, he explained how he took a range of precautions to avoid his wife or family from discovering the dark deeds.

French outlet Le Point reported how Dominique P. imposed strict rules on each of the men who he invited to rape his wife: no perfume or tobacco, cut and clean nails, hands first run under hot water so as not to risk waking the victim.

The attackers would park a few minutes from the couple's home and undress in the kitchen. No money changed hands.

The accused rapists included a forklift driver, a fire brigade officer, a company boss and a journalist.

Some were single, others married or divorced, and some were family men. Most participated just once, but some took part up to six times.

Their defence has been that they simply helped a libertine couple live out its fantasies, but Dominique P. told investigators that all were aware that his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

An expert said her state 'was closer to a coma than to sleep'.

Her husband told prosecutors that only three men left the house quickly after arriving, while all others proceeded to have intercourse with his wife.

Dominique P., who said he was raped by a male nurse when he was nine, is ready to face 'his family and his wife', his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro said.

'He is ashamed of what he did, it is unforgivable,' Zavarro told reporters on Monday morning, adding that the case was 'in a form of addiction'.

'My client's line of conduct is that he recognises what he did and there has not been an ounce of protest since the beginning,' she said in comments carried by French press.

But this trial may not be his last.

The defendant has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, to which he admitted after DNA testing.

Experts said the man does not appear to be mentally ill, but reportedly concluded that had a need to feel 'all-powerful' over the female body in assessments included in court documents.

The shocking trial is due to last until December 20

#France #Avignon #Gisele P is a hero for a agreeing to a public trial just to make sure the rapists ate exposed #How the hell can Beatrice Zavarro defend that man

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rebellum · 25 days ago

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I just learned about the Gisele Pelicot case.. Oh my god. She is so brave for making the trial public. Those men should never know peace. Wherever they go, for the rest of their lives, people should know who they are.

and he only got caught because of another crime. this is not the only time this thing has happened, he's just the only one to be caught doing it. she would have just never known. there are, doubtlessly, other people in the world doing this, who would never be caught. thats terrifying.

seriously STRONG trigger warning for rape, sexual violence, and rape culture, if you are in doubt about your emotional ability to handle it, I recommend you do NOT look up the case, and to block "Gisele Pelicot" "Gisèle Pélicot" and "Mazan rapes"

i feel sick, and kind of wished i never found out about the case

#Gisele Pelicot /////#Gisèle Pélicot ////#Mazan rapes ////

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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 2 years ago

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Full text below cut, trigger warning for the whole thing.

A French man has been accused of drugging his wife and the recording at least 51 men rape her while she slept over the period of 10 years.

Dominique P, a pensioner who had been married for over 50 years, allegedly mixed the anti-anxiety drug Lorazepam into his wife's evening meal, La Monde reported.

He would then invite his "guests" into their house in Mazan to rape his sleeping wife between 2011 and 2020.

A total of 51 men between the ages of 26-73 have been identified, arrested and charged with rape following an inquiry launched in 2020 in the southern city of Avignon.

The suspect reportedly found the men on “a son insu” - an active French internet forum where members discuss performing sexual acts on women without their consent and often drugged.

The exchanges on the web forum were erased after being linked to a criminal investigation into paedophile, racist or anti-Semitic content and the sale of illicit substances.

Law enforcement officials learned about the videos during a preliminary investigation three years ago when the suspect was caught trying to film woman in a changing room with a hidden camera.

The videos were found on the man's computer, where they were meticulously archived in a file called "Abuses". The titles of the hundreds of videos indicate a date, a first name and the nature of the actions, according to the French newspaper.

Investigators have identified 92 cases of sexual assault of the woman by 83 suspects, but are yet to identify all the men.

Tobacco and perfume were banned by the suspect in order to avoid strong smells that could waken his wife. The men were asked to wash their hands in warm water to avoid sudden temperature change and were made to undress in the kitchen to avoid leaving clothes in the bedroom.

The "guests" had to park near a school and walk in the dark to the house to avoid raising neighbours' suspicion.

Some claimed they had no idea his wife has not consented to the sexual acts, while one person denied it was rape, saying: “It’s his wife, he does what he likes with her.”

According to prosecutors in Avignon, the suspect insisted that "none of the men who came to his house gave up going through with sexual acts on his wife given her state".

"He never used violence or threats against anyone so that rapes would be committed. Each individual was in possession of his free will to stop these acts and leave,” the prosecutors said.

When the woman was asked to talk about her husband in November 2020 during the initial investigation, she described him as a "great guy" and "kind and caring". She said he tried to get to agree to partner-swapping but she refused as “she didn’t like to be touched without having feelings (for someone)”.

When the police informed her of the tapes, she reportedly began pieceing together the past. The woman said she had flashbacks and that the drugging could have been the reason behind her frequent fatigue and “absent-mindedness”.

Medical examinations found she had been infected with four sexually transmitted diseases.

If the investigating magistrate follows the prosecutor’s indictment, a "historic trial" is expected to take place early next year with 52 defendants in the same box.

The woman has filed for a divorce.

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head-post · 2 months ago

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How Pélicot case exposed rape culture in France

50 people stood trial, accused of raping the motionless body of Gisèle Pélicot while her husband recorded their actions for his video library. The unprecedented mass rape case revealed the actual image of a rapist, according to AP News.

A trial in France shows how pornography, sex chat rooms and men’s disdain for consent are fuelling rape culture. French society was disturbed not by the fact that her husband Dominique Pélicot orchestrated the mass rape, but that he had no difficulty finding dozens of men who agreed to engage in unlawful sexual acts.

One of the rapists, a married plumber with three children and five grandchildren, said he was not particularly bothered that the woman was not moving when he visited the Pélicot family home in the town of Mazan in 2019. He stated that it reminded him of adult videos, featuring women “pretending to be asleep and don’t react,” he watched.

Many of the other defendants told the court that they could not have imagined Dominique Pélicot drugging his wife and that they were told she was a willing participant acting out a perverted fantasy. However, the husband denied the accusation, claiming that his co-defendants was aware of the situation.

Pornography flourishing

Céline Piques, a spokesperson of the feminist group Osez le Féminisme!, or Dare Feminism! stated that many of the men under investigation were perverted by pornography. Although some websites started fighting search terms such as “unconscious,” hundreds of such videos could still be found online, Piques stressed.

Last year, French authorities registered 114,000 victims of sexual violence, including more than 25,000 reported rapes. However, experts argue that most rape cases go unreported due to a lack of tangible evidence. Many women do not press charges, with most dropping cases before investigations start.

The Pélicot case was unique in the French judicial system. After a shop security guard caught Dominique Pélicot making videos of unsuspecting women’s skirts in 2020, police searched his home and found thousands of pornographic photos and videos. The main defendant later revealed that he had recorded and stored the sexual encounters of each of his guests and organised them neatly in separate files.

France thrilled world community

Gisèle Pélicot, who is in her early 70s, did not know she had been raped. She chose to stay in the courtroom while the videos were shown. Unable to watch, she closed her eyes, stared at the floor or buried her face in her hands.

Sexual assault experts say the unwillingness or inability of the accused to confess to rape reveals the taboos and stereotypes that persist in French society. Magali Lafourcade, a judge and general secretary of the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights, did not attend the trial but said popular culture had given people a wrong idea of what rapists looked like and how they acted.

It’s the idea of a hooded man with a knife whom you don’t know and is waiting for you in a place that is not a private place.

Two-thirds of rapes occurred in private homes, with the vast majority of victims knowing their rapists, Lafourcade emphasised. She drew attention to the frightening reality that the Pélicot case “makes us realise that in fact rapists could be anyone.”

For once, they’re not monsters – they’re not serial killers on the margin of society. They are men who resemble those we love. In this sense, there is something revolutionary.