By DIANE JEANTET
AVIGNON, France — They’re, on the face of it, probably the most odd of males. But they’re all on trial charged with rape. Fathers, grandfathers, husbands, employees and retirees — 50 in all — accused of taking activates the drugged and inert physique of Gisèle Pelicot whereas her husband recorded the horror for his swelling non-public video library.
The harrowing and unprecedented trial in France is exposing how pornography, chatrooms and males’s disdain for or hazy understanding of consent is fueling rape tradition. The horror isn’t merely that Dominique Pelicot, in his personal phrases, organized for males to rape his spouse, it’s that he additionally had no problem discovering dozens of them to participate.
Among the many practically two dozen defendants who testified throughout the trial’s first seven weeks was Ahmed T. — French defendants’ full final names are typically withheld till conviction. The married plumber with three children and 5 grandchildren stated he wasn’t notably alarmed that Pelicot wasn’t shifting when he visited her and her now-ex-husband’s home within the small Provence city of Mazan in 2019.
It reminded him of porn he had watched that includes girls who “fake to be asleep and don’t react,” he stated.
Like him, many different defendants informed the court docket that they couldn’t have imagined that Dominique Pelicot was drugging his spouse, and that they have been informed she was a keen participant performing out a kinky fantasy. Dominique Pelicot denied this, telling the court docket his co-defendants knew precisely what the scenario was.
Céline Piques, a spokesperson of the feminist group Osez le Féminisme!, or Dare Feminism! stated she’s satisfied that lots of the males on trial have been impressed or perverted by porn, together with movies discovered on fashionable web sites. Though some websites have began cracking down on search phrases reminiscent of “unconscious,” a whole bunch of movies of males having intercourse with seemingly handed out girls may be discovered on-line, she stated.
Piques was notably struck by the testimony of a tech skilled on the trial who had discovered the search phrases “asleep porn” on Dominique Pelicot’s pc.
Final yr, French authorities registered 114,000 victims of sexual violence, together with greater than 25,000 reported rapes. However specialists say most rapes go unreported on account of an absence of tangible proof: About 80% of ladies don’t press costs, and 80% of those who do see their case dropped earlier than it’s investigated.
In stark distinction, the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants has been distinctive in its scope, nature and openness to the general public on the sufferer’s insistence.
After a retailer safety guard caught Pelicot capturing video up unsuspecting girls’s skirts in 2020, police searched his dwelling and located hundreds of pornographic images and movies on his cellphone, laptop computer and USB stick. Dominique Pelicot later stated he had recorded and saved the sexual encounters of every of his company, and neatly organized them in separate information.
Amongst these he had over was Mahdi D., who testified that when he left dwelling on the night time of Oct. 5, 2018, he didn’t intend to rape anybody.
“I assumed she was asleep,” the 36-year-old transportation employee informed the panel of 5 judges, referring to Gisèle Pelicot, who has attended practically day by day of the trial and has turn into a hero to many sexual abuse victims for insisting that it’s public.
“I grant you that you just didn’t go away with the intention of raping anybody,” the prosecutor informed him. “However there within the room, it was you.”
Like just a few of the opposite males accused of raping Pelicot between 2011 and 2020, Mahdi D. acknowledged nearly the entire information introduced in opposition to him. And he expressed regret, telling the judges, “She is a sufferer. We are able to’t think about what she went by way of. She was destroyed.”
However he wouldn’t name it rape, even when admitting that it was may get him a lighter sentence. That led prosecutors to ask the court docket to display the graphic movies of Mahdi D.’s go to to the Pelicot dwelling.
In June, authorities took down the chatroom the place they are saying Dominique Pelicot and his co-defendants met. For the reason that trial began on Sept. 2, it has resonated far past the Avignon courtroom’s partitions, sparking protests in French cities massive and small and galvanizing a gentle movement of opinion items and open letters penned by journalists, philosophers and activists.
It has additionally drawn curious guests to town in southeastern France, reminiscent of Florence Nack, her husband and 23-year-old daughter, who made the journey from Switzerland to witness the “historic trial.”
Nack, who famous that she, too, was a sufferer of sexual violence, stated she was disturbed by the testimony of 43-year-old trucker Cyprien C., a defendant who spoke that day in court docket.
Requested by the pinnacle choose, Roger Arata, whether or not he acknowledged the information, Cyprien C. answered that he “didn’t contest the sexual act.”
“And the rape?” Arata pressed. The defendant stood silently earlier than finally responding, “I can’t reply.”
Arata then started to explain what was on the movies implicating him. They’re solely proven as a final useful resource and on a case-by-case foundation. However for a lot of within the courtroom, such detailed descriptions can final a number of minutes and be simply as heavy as watching them. Gisèle Pelicot, who’s in her early 70s, has chosen to stay within the courtroom whereas the movies are proven. Unable to look at, she normally closes her eyes, stares on the flooring, or buries her face in her arms.
Specialists and teams working to fight sexual violence say the defendants’ unwillingness or incapacity to confess to rape speaks loudly to taboos and stereotypes that persist in French society.
For Magali Lafourcade, a choose and normal secretary of the Nationwide Consultative Fee of Human Rights who isn’t concerned within the trial, fashionable tradition has given folks the incorrect thought about what rapists seem like and the way they function.
“It’s the concept of a hooded man with a knife whom you don’t know and is ready for you in a spot that isn’t a non-public place,” she stated, noting that this “is miles away from the sociological, criminological actuality of rape.”
Two-thirds of rapes happen at non-public houses, and in a overwhelming majority of circumstances, victims know their rapists, Lafourcade stated.
It may be troublesome at occasions to reconcile the information with the personalities of the accused — described by family members as loving, beneficiant and thoughtful companions, brothers and fathers.
Cyril B.’s tearful older sister informed the court docket: “It’s my brother, I really like him. He’s not a imply individual.” His companion described him as “type, his coronary heart on his sleeve and stuffed with consideration.” She insisted that he isn’t “macho” and that he had by no means compelled her to do something sexually that she wasn’t snug with.
Though Lafourcade doesn’t imagine “all males are rapists,” as some have concluded the trial exhibits, she stated that not like the #MeToo accusations which have ensnared French celebrities, the Pelicot case “makes us perceive that in reality rapists could possibly be everybody.”
“For as soon as, they’re not monsters — they’re not serial killers on the margin of society. They’re males who resemble these we love,” she stated. “On this sense, there’s something revolutionary.”
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