[imagesource:here]

In what many are calling the trial of the century, the defiant Gisèle Pelicot is challenging outdated and dangerous myths about what constitutes rape.

Nearly every day since 2 September, Gisèle has been at the centre of a trial in which 51 men are accused of raping her, including the man she was married to for 50 years. Dominique Pélicot stands accused of drugging and filming his then-wife while strangers, recruited through a now-defunct chatroom called Against Her Knowledge, raped her in her own home, in the village of Mazan.

Police were only able to identify 50 suspects out of the 83 that appeared in Dominique Pelicot’s videos. Their ages range from 26 to 68 and they hail from all walks of life – firefighters, pharmacists, labourers and journalists – “ordinary men” – many of whom are also fathers and husbands.

“What shocked me even more is that so many men could have done this – more than 50 ‘normal’ men, who all lived nearby,” Caroline, a 43-year-old doctor from Paris, said via the BBC.

“[Pelicot] didn’t even have to look very far for them. It really scares me because it is a reflection of society. It’s not the norm, but there are too many.”

As many say, ‘not all men, but always a man’:

Hundreds of women gathered in cities across France in support of Gisele Pelicot, a woman whose husband is on trial, accused of drugging her and recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her over nearly a decade https://t.co/erDET0ABZY pic.twitter.com/nh3blldTHN

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 14, 2024

Standing with remarkable bravery, Gisèle Pélicot, 72, has become a symbol of resilience and defiance, waiving her right to anonymity to seek justice for all women who are victims of voyeurism, drug rape and secret surveillance, “an unholy trinity of crime that can turn a 21st-century “smart” home into a chamber of horrors” notes The Guardian.

Her legal team said opening up the trial would shift the “shame” back onto the accused, and above all, begin a really painful conversation about rape that many in France say is long overdue.

The Pelicots’ daughter, Caroline, has also taken the stand, believing that her father abused her when she was unconscious. Although Dominique Pelicot admitted the charges against him when it came to his wife, he denies abusing his daughter.

🚨 IT GETS WORSE – UPDATE ON THE MONSTER OF FRANCE TRIAL 🚨

More details emerge in this dark and twisted case out of Avignon, France. Dominique and Gisele Pèlicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, 45, testified in court that her father was the “worst sexual predator of the last… pic.twitter.com/mKABUvKwUW

— Unmasked True Crime (@crimeunmasked) September 8, 2024

Meanwhile, some of the accused claim that Gisèle had given consent, an issue at the heart of most rapes.

 “I was a dead woman,” she said quietly in an electrifying testimony at the criminal court in Avignon. “These people knew exactly what they were doing… They treated me like a rag doll.” Pélicot told the court that her calm demeanour masked “a field of devastation”.

Since the defence of many of the accused hinges on the premise that they did not “know” they were raping Gisèle – in other words, that they thought they were having consensual intercourse with her – this trial is also dredging up questions over the language surrounding rape.

At least two of the defendants stated they did not feel they had raped Gisèle because she had been “offered” to them by her own husband, and one man said he did not consider his actions rape because “for me, rape is when you grab someone off the street”.

“I don’t have the heart of a rapist,” he added.

Céline Piques of the feminist organisation Osez le Féminisme hopes the fact that the accused are mostly ordinary men will “demolish the myth of the rapist who is a psychopath…”

“They raped because they were sure of their impunity.”

On top of this, there is also the realisation that 500,000 visitors (a month) saw Dominique’s post on the Coco.gg website and did nothing to report the crime.

“One hundred per cent of these people… never made a phone call to stop this abuse,” says Piques. “Not one man thought about informing the police of these criminal facts.”

Another key issue this case has thrown up is the little-discussed phenomenon of chemical submission – drug-induced assault in the home.

1,229 people in France suspected they had been drugged without their knowledge in 2022, according to Leila Chaouachi, a pharmacist at the Paris addiction monitoring centre and an expert on drug rape – a number she believes is “only the tip of the iceberg”.

For the 10 years her husband was drugging her, Gisèle Pelicot had unexplained neurological symptoms as well as gynaecological issues, and yet no one put the clues together. There is now a call to educate and train medical staff, authorities and the public about chemical submission as a phenomenon in many rape cases.

With more awareness of these nuances, the legal semantics around what constitutes rape is being questioned.

In French law, rape is sexual penetration obtained by constraint, violence or surprise. While Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers are expected to argue that “surprise” covers the case of a sedated or unconscious woman, Guillaume De Palma, a lawyer for six of the defendants, is causing outrage by arguing that “rape is not always rape”, and that “without the intention of committing rape, there is no rape”.

Gisèle’s daughter Caroline stormed out of the trial exclaiming “I am ashamed of the justice system”, while the president of the court suspended the session amid a mood that reporters described as “extremely tense”.

The trial is due to run for three more months and France has only just begun to understand the domestic and global implications of this case where Gisèle has become a one-woman challenge to the many myths that surround rape.

[source:bbc]