Her name is Gisèle Pélicot.
He said: “I refuse to let this happen behind closed doors.” He said: “Shame must change sides.”
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot.
As Lola Lafon has written in Liberationthere should be a resounding outcry to accompany the courage, awareness and generosity of this woman.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot. She is 72 years old.
On 2 September, the trial of 51 men began before the criminal court of Vaucluse. I hope they will bear the shame of what they did to her for the rest of their lives. Fifty-one unfortunate men, including Dominique Pélicot, Gisèle’s husband of fifty years, “without doubt the biggest sexual predator of the last twenty years” in the words of his daughter, Caroline Darian.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot.
And her children, the children she had with him, are also experiencing the worst.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot.
Four years ago, her husband was arrested for filming up the skirts of female customers in a supermarket. During the investigation, the French police found hundreds of images of Gisèle, drugged and raped ninety-two times by different men who came to her home.
Between 2011 and 2020, this man, Dominique Pélicot, spent his time inviting other men to rape his wife. They are workers, teachers, firefighters, journalists, students, truck drivers, prison officers, nurses, retirees, councillors… They are between 26 and 74 years old. Their psychological and sociological profile is ordinary, far removed from the caricature of the monster that is so useful in describing rapists and making us believe that they are exceptions. They are “good family men”, as feminist activist Rose Lamy would say. They could be any man.
On a now-defunct website, Dominique Pélicot gave instructions to his accomplices, telling them how to act and the rules they had to follow. None of them had any objections. None of them called the police. At best, they kept quiet. At worst, they came. To impose themselves with violence.
They parked far from the house and waited for the victim to be unconscious. They kept their nails short, did not wear any perfume or make any noise. When they came in, they stripped in the kitchen and washed their hands. They filmed “unbearable scenes of rape, sometimes involving two or three of them.” There is no doubt about what they did.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot. She could be any woman. After ten long years of chemical submission, she now has to face the violence of the judicial system and the mediocrity of comments.
Most of these men will plead not guilty before the judge. In court, some hide their faces; another arrives late because he has gone to take his son to school. They lie. They hide. They have no conscience. That is their only courage. Before the police, almost all of them claim that they thought it was “a libertine game” or that Gisèle Pélicot “was pretending to be asleep.” For some, Dominique Pélicot’s presence during the rape serves as an excuse. They believe that they did nothing wrong, since her husband had given them permission. Their lawyers prepare their defense and the president of the court immediately agrees to their request: “We are going to talk about sex scenes, not rape.”
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot. She would like this to be a trial of chemical submission. I hope it is. But it should also be a trial of patriarchal violence, of a society that has not yet broken with the culture of rape. Because, in this horror, what is being judged is the role of each individual. That of the husband, that of the rapists. That of the health professionals who, despite observing the memory problems, fatigue and sexually transmitted infections that Gisèle Pélicot suffered, did not think of the violence she could be suffering. That of the police, who had already arrested Dominique Pélicot for voyeurbut he did not think to warn his wife.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot. Like Gisèle Halimi, the lawyer, activist and feminist, co-founder of the women’s cause with Simone de Beauvoir, who, in 1972, at the Bobigny trial against a mother accused of helping her daughter to have an abortion after being raped, decided to take on society.
Both are called Gisèle and, watching them, we would like to think that “the era of a finished world has begun”. A world in which men still prefer to believe that a husband can dispose of his wife’s body. A world in which some of them still think that they own women’s bodies. A world in which they are allowed to search on the Internet how to rape a woman. A world in which none of them feels the responsibility to report to the police what the woman is suffering. A world that allows them to commit their crime again without any kind of protection. A world in which men, after raping a sleeping woman several times at night, calmly return to their activities in the morning. A world, too, that gives rise to a whole collection of nauseating comments on the Internet of this type: “He’s lying. It’s impossible that he didn’t know.” “And the victim didn’t ask any questions? Why did she take so long to react?” An ancestral world of domination. The violence of the norm of men, made by men and for men.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot and, like the 1972 trial, her case goes beyond legal aspects and forces us to question human behaviour in general. It questions the justifications used.
Already, the comments are proliferating. People speak of an “out of the ordinary trial.” People praise “the dignity of this woman.” People are astonished: “But you see, these rapists are the most ordinary guys!” As if violence against women were not the norm. As if one could question the dignity of women or that rapists are men. There are already nauseating illustrations. From the refuge of freedom of expression, a satirical weekly has published a disgusting drawing depicting a bloodless Marianne, raped and filmed by Emmanuel Macron while he shouts “Next!” in Matignon to check who is the best prime minister, the one who is best able to rape the Republic. A drawing that only denounces the stupidity of its author.
The press has the freedom to inform and the cartoonist has the freedom to caricature. Everything is legal, but terribly violent.
It is clear that what is at stake in this process, for all of us, is outside the courtroom. If we want to bring about change, we must fight on the terrain of representation and language. Because what must be challenged, in addition to the monstrous violence suffered by the victim, is the violence of men, their way of being sure of their rights, of not questioning their conscience.
Her name is Gisèle Pélicot and, in this French society, where the movement Me Too has little or no impact, she should not be the only brave one. With the same strength as the Spanish women who promoted legal changes after the crimes of the herdthe time has come for all of us to unite.
Because they are not wolves or monsters, but simply men.
#men