#pelicot trial

[msclaritea]

[pseudowho]

Might I just say, that I'm standing with Gisèle Pelicot today, as should we all. She has been an absolute bastion of strength during one of the most hellish experiences that could happen to a woman. She should be utterly proud, and France should be utterly proud of her.

JUSTICE FOR GISÈLE PELICOT.

[kelthoumrambles]

[wifegideonnav]

i just think that if gisele pelicot is brave enough to make her trial public then you can be brave enough to say the word rape when using her story for ad revenue on tiktok

[sickofthis666]

Dominique Pelicot's trial progressed today... he stated that he's a rapist, that the other accused men are rapists too and that they perfectly knew what they were there for.

Yet he also claims that he never hated his wife, and still loves her today...

[malloryrowinski]

About the men on trial for Gisèle Pelicot's rape

I am beyond convinced that every single man on trial for the horrific and brutal acts Gisèle has endured for NINE years sleep soundly at night.

Source

These are just six of the FIFTY ONE men on trial rn. Reading this makes me sick. Their excuses are pathetic.

I also find it interesting how details of their childhoods are included here. I would LOVE to know why! Are we implying that what they've done is reasonable, or maybe expected of them, because of what happened to them in the past? Are we gonna hide their sexual terrorism behind the guise of "the abused becomes the abuser", as if that is in any way an excuse (or even reasonable explanation) for their actions?

I've been sexually abused as a kid, yet interestingly enough I don't go around raping drugged women! Yet I'd never, not even for a split second, think that a man offering his drugged wife's body is somehow an indicator of her consent! I'd never even consider it a normal situation in any way, AND YET that's their whole defense. "I was sexually abused/grew up poor/my parents were assholes, so when I saw a drugged naked woman for me to rape I obviously thought it was fine! Come on her husband was there, he said it was fine, clearly I'm the victim - he lied to me, I just believed him!"

I'll say it again: I too was sexually abused as a child. For years! And yet, you'll never catch me threatening my wife with an axe, being charged with domestic abuse, sexual assault of a minor, possession of child pornography, claiming I don't fucking understand what consent is, or - for fuck's sake - claiming I can't "control my sexuality" and want an "inert body at my disposal".

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

Also, you know what else is incredibly infuriating?

Further proof that a man can be the worst fucking thing to ever walk this earth and he'll still be able to come across a woman who'll worship the ground he walks on. Women owe other women better! You owe it to your own goddamn selves. Wake the fuck up and take a long good look at the men y'all are so eager to defend.

[mizelaneus]

“The majority of the defendants deny raping Ms Pelicot, and argue that they cannot be guilty because they did not realise she was unconscious and therefore did not "know" they were raping her.”

[lecoindecachou]

Honestly the Gisèle Pélicot story is so fucking awful and the more you read about it the worse it gets.

Like, for context, her husband specifically told the men he invited over to rape his drugged wife not to wear a condom. And as it turns out at least one of those men was HIV-positive and knew he was HIV-positive. He raped her SIX times, which means she (and all the assholes who raped her but fuck them all the way to hell, I hope their dicks fall off) was exposed to HIV on six different occasions.

And while she did not catch HIV she was still diagnosed with four different sexually transmitted diseases. Just. What the fuck is wrong with people.

[trendynewsnow]

Protests in France and Italy Address Violence Against Women

Protests Erupt Across France and Italy Against Violence Towards Women On Saturday, thousands of individuals took to the streets in France and Italy to protest the alarming prevalence of violence against women, coinciding with the approach of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, observed on November 25. These demonstrations aimed to highlight various forms of…

[radlymona]

I can’t get over the mass rape case in France. It disturbs me on so many fucking levels but one thing that has stuck with me is that he was with her for 30+ years before the rapes began. According to the victim (Gisèle Pelicot, who I consider to be one of the bravest people on earth for going public with the trial) she considered her and husband be an idyllic couple. She loved him. And she thought he loved her. For thirty fucking years she was with him through thick and thin and in their late 50s he started raping her. I never want to hear another woman shamed for “choosing wrong”. It can happen at any fucking time no matter how much you think he loves you. This is so fucking terrifying

[radicalcoffeeclub]

"Tensions at the French mass rape trial burst into the open on Wednesday when Dominique Pelicot’s daughter Caroline shouted at her father from across the courtroom that he would “die alone like a dog”.

!The main defendant said he most wished he still had Caroline's support.

“Some may laugh but it’s my daughter I wish I could look at in the face. It hurts to see her like this,” he said, sitting in a glass box only metres away from his daughter and the rest of his family.

“I would love to see her, I would love to talk to her,” he added. As his voice faltered, Caroline’s rose: “I will never come see you. Never. You will die alone like a dog,” she shouted.

“We all die alone,” he replied. “You especially,” she hit back."

Iconic!

[dduane]

For those of us who have been sexually assaulted, this woman is a beacon.

(She’s my age, by the way.)

 In almost two months of testimony, the court has heard from dozens of accused men. The majority have denied rape. Some said they thought Pelicot was pretending to be asleep or was playing a game, or felt the fact her husband had consented was sufficient.“ (itals DD’s)

[warningsine]

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.”

[acloudofsparklingdust]

The reality of Gisele Pelicot is horrific and yet she chose to have a public trial to raise awareness for sexual crimes such as the ones she was a victim of. I can't wrap my mind around the pain she has faced, and on top of that the horror her daughter has faced. And the great strength they're displaying by chosing to share this with the public in detriment to themselves.

Her daughter's naked pictures were also found in her father's computer under a folder named "around my daughter, naked". The level of psychological horror and abuse these women have been through is not only terrifying, it's disgusting. It's hard to read about. It's hard to conceptualize.

He did this for years. The men involved took no action. No one helped Gisele Pelicot between 2011 and 2020, and yet she is choosing to help other women by having a public trial.

I can only wish Gisele Pelicot and her daughter the best possible lives after this tragedy. I hope they remain safe and well.

And I hope that the disgusting men behind their suffering will face consequences on par with these unspeakable acts.

[serial-unaliver]

A sex crime case I have been following,

Mrs Pelicot, who has divorced her husband, was in the courtroom as she has been every day since the trial opened on September 2. She has eschewed the right to anonymity and a trial in camera to publicise the evils of domestic rape.

It's quite brave and admirable to do this, a trial for such crimes alone is re-traumatizing, let alone publicizing it with these horrible defenses being made...also, the defenses (like this one) may sound insane but can have logic to them regarding the law.

The issue of consent has dominated the hearings, with the accused insisting that they were unaware they were raping Mrs Pelicot, although some have said they accept now that they committed the offence.

To elaborate, the husband recruited these men as swingers. So the men claim they assumed she consented due to those circumstances despite her physical state, being told she was drugged, or even assisting drugging her.

“She raised her head a little,” according to Dogan. Nevertheless, he said that he had sex with her for about half an hour until her snoring became loud and he decided to leave.

Some people (like me) grew up in a house with domestic rape and hoping people realize how common the issue is rather than dismissing these men as random psychopaths. They are just as human as everyone else. The crime is more evident of an attitude towards the importance of consent and how much humanity you award the victim.

[radradmarivy]

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.