The enduring story of the rape trial that has gripped France over the last three months is not the evil of the perpetrators, but the extraordinary resilience of Gisèle Pelicot. The phrase used by one of her lawyers, “the shame has switched sides”, became an almost instant anthem for fury about sexual violence; she has become an avatar for the courage and fortitude of victims. It is understandable that her dignity has eclipsed his depravity.
But Gisèle Pelicot did not put herself through what the ordeal of a public trial because she wanted to be an icon. Instead, as she made clear again on Thursday, after the sentencing of 51 men for her rape and sexual assault while she was drugged and unconscious, she did it to start a conversation; for “society to seize the necessary debate”. It would be an injustice to her to simply focus on her bravery and ignore the questions raised by the trial.
The most important of these, and the one that has not yet been satisfactorily addressed, is what made Dominique Pelicot capable of such a thing. It is tempting to label him a monster and move on. The evidence presented about him in court would certainly lend itself to that characterisation. Expert witnesses called near the beginning of the trial described him as someone cleaved in two, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde character. “Side A”, they said, was the charming, genial grandfather, who was utterly besotted with the woman he saw as a “saint”.
“Side B” was a man who is perverse, manipulative, overconfident, incapable of empathy, addicted to sex. “In every man there is a demon,” he testified grandiosely. “Mine came from my childhood.” He would frequently build on this theme in court: “I have something inside me that I fought for a long time.”
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That’s all a bit too easy. Blaming the “demon” inside Pelicot absolves him and society – French society in this case, but it could just as well be Irish society, or any society – of any part in what was done to Gisèle Pelicot.
Dominique Pelicot’s methods and the scale of his offending – the sheer, sick brazenness of his hosting an open house for rapists which he advertised on a chat forum; the painstaking documenting of the crimes against his wife, which he filed away on a hard drive helpfully labelled ‘abuse’; the drugging of her to the point that she thought she was developing signs of Alzheimer’s – made this case exceptional. But he was not aberrant; he was a product of a society and culture in which predators can and do still act with impunity.
Organisations campaigning for victims have long been making the point that our legal systems do not do enough to deter sexual violence – and here again, Dominique Pelicot was the only one to get the maximum sentence of 20 years
He did nothing that has not been done before. Take his earlier crimes, snatching photographs of strangers’ underwear underneath their clothes: they were such a staple of tabloid culture in the 1990s they even have a nauseatingly cutesy name: “upskirting”. Then there is the fact that he found his co-conspirators online, on a chat forum called Coco that has been cited in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity. When so much of the internet is taken up with fantasising about sexual violence against children and women, it’s not a shock to learn there are corners of it where men get together and organise to do it in real life.
There should be no real surprise, either, that he so easily found up to 70 others to participate in these dark fantasies. The French news media called the 50 who have been identified and convicted “Monsieur Tout-le-monde”, or “Mr Everyman.” Aged between 26 and 74, they included tradesmen, firefighters, truck drivers, a journalist, a nurse. The courts here are heaving with similar pillars of the community who have done terrible things to the women, girls and boys who trusted them.
Organisations campaigning for victims have long been making the point that our legal systems do not do enough to deter sexual violence – and here again, Dominique Pelicot was the only one to get the maximum sentence of 20 years. The majority were given sentences ranging from eight to ten years. A few, incredibly, were given deferred sentences for raping a woman as she slept in her own home.
Gisèle Pelicot made the point that nobody told her what her husband had done at the time of his first arrest a decade earlier. Had she known then, she said, she would have left him, or at least been better able to protect herself.
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There is nothing uniquely French about institutional lethargy when it comes to sexual violence. Earlier in December, the publication of the report of the inquiry into the case of “Grace” – a young woman with significant intellectual disabilities who was left in a foster home in the Waterford area for 20 years, despite a succession of sexual and physical abuse allegations – was again delayed. When it is finally published in April 2025, it will be six years overdue. The world is rightly furious about what happened to Gisèle Pelicot. But where is the outrage for Grace, or the 47 other children who were in that foster home?
“We share the same fight,” were Gisèle Pelicot’s first words after the sentencing. She might have been referring to the fight against a culture that minimises sexual violence; against online harms; institutions and legal systems that move too slowly and deliver sentences that are not enough of a deterrent. And men like Dominique Pelicot and his co-defendants, who are not monsters but something far more frightening – ordinary men, and products of a society where sexual violence still flourishes. We owe it to her to not simply declare her an icon and him a monster and move on. We owe it to her to have this conversation.
The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre 24-hour free helpline can be contacted at 1800 77 8888