Branding Dominique Pelicot A Monster Allows Society To Ignore Problems
Yesterday Gisèle Pelicot faced the cameras outside the courthouse in Avignon, the South of France, for the very last time. After three months of waking up every day, putting on her impressively chic outfits and heading into court, head held high, she no longer has to watch or hear what was done to her by the man she thought loved her. And the many men he recruited. Because her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, who drugged her, raped her and invited other men into the family home to join in while she was unaware, filming the ordeals and then denying any understanding of the cognitive and physical symptoms she had of this persistent debasement, has been found guilty of her rape. The sentence handed him, a paltry 20 years, will likely see the 72-year-old die in jail. Gisele thanked her children, grandchildren, daughters-in-law and other victims for their backing, sharing, 'my deepest gratitude to all the people who supported me throughout this ordeal. Your testimonies have upset me and I have drawn from them the strength to come back every day.'
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Gisèle has redefined our understanding of bravery, waiving her right to anonymity so that the case could be better publicised 'to ensure that society could see what was happening'. She even had to fight for the videos to be shown, so that the jury could see just how unaware she was during the rapes. It’s no wonder Dominique Pelicot has been called a ‘monster’ in various headlines. No human brain should even go to such depths. However, calling him a monster, although it indicates the severity of his acts, allows society to ignore the root problems. Too often when the press leads the public into calling disgusting men ‘monsters’, it serves to position their acts as outside of the rest of society. We are to believe that these men are no longer men, and perhaps never were, and are therefore not men’s, or humanity’s responsibility to resolve.
However, these ‘monsters’ are actually a cruel symptom of our society that festers with a whole spectrum of violence against women. Gisele had had no idea that her husband was a bad guy, let alone a ‘monster’. It was 2020 when he caught by a security guard upskirting women at a supermarket, and this led to the police investigating his computer and finding the footage of his own wife being defiled, over and over, by hordes of men. But years ago, authorities weren’t so hot on the case of violence against women. As this case closes, Dominique Pelicot faces another, with charges against him of raping and murdering an estate agent in 1991, and a separate attempted rape in 1999.
Before Gisèle was summoned into a police station in 2020, all she knew was that her partner of 50 years, the father of her children, was 'the perfect husband'. And then the police showed her the photos of what he had done to her.
It wasn’t just him, though. The depravity of his plans rested on not just her normal, everyday husband deciding to dehumanise her but his normal, everyday co-defendants, all 50 of them, joining in. Some of the men who hurt Gisèle walk free - several in the case got such short sentences that they served them while on remand, and up to 30 other men who appeared in the videos have not yet been identified. These men are from all walks of life, all social strata, all ages. Beyond the fact they were all drafted in from a 25km radius of the Pelicot’s former home in the sleepy Provence town of Mazan, and the fact they were men, they had nothing else in common when they ventured onto an illicit website called Coco. The forum, set up in 2003, was shut down earlier this year after years of campaigns against it; it has been implicated in the coordination of killings, paedophilia, homophobic attacks and sexual assaults. It was the perfect place for Dominque Pelicot to advertise the deal; men could come and sleep with his unconscious wife in return for him filming it.
If we are to call Dominique Pelicot a monster, then what about the other men? What about the three men who went along with his plan, turned up to the house, realised what was happening, freaked out and left but didn’t report it anywhere? The men who saw the post on Coco and just scrolled by? The men who were ever part of that forum? The male politicians and male-led authorities who could have closed Coco, and other forums like it, down sooner? The male doctors who suggested that when Gisèle was presenting with various symptoms that she was going senile? The male solicitors who defended the 50 men, some of them arguing that perhaps Gisèle was in on it, perhaps she’d invited it all in? The men who consider women’s consent as flimsy and unnecessary? Or who think women’s desires are irrelevant? The men who see online pornography as their right to access rather than exploitative by nature and extremely violent in practice?
When you actually interrogate the levels of odiousness here, it’s hard to know where to place the boundary between the men and the monsters. Of course not all men, but if this motley crew of random men would happily do things to a woman so long as they thought she’d never find out - or, perhaps more pertinently for them, that they’d never get caught - who else would be up for it? It’s not as if men in wider society are covering themselves in glory. All too often we see and hear men dehumanising women in other, perhaps more subtle but no less concerning ways; those who simply think we’re not the humans that they are, deserving of kindness and consideration and rights over our own bodies and desires.
Perhaps rather than fling out Dominique Pelicot to the boggy realm of monsters and move on with confidence in society’s comparative goodness, it’s better that men to look - aghast, I’d hope - at what they might have in common with Dominique Pelicot’s porn-influenced brain and work out exactly what they do in their day-to-day lives to actually distance themselves from him and his ilk.
Gisèle has now reverted to her maiden name. She had only kept Pelicot for the trial, she said, for her grandchildren who bear it 'I don’t want them to be ashamed of their name'.
She has done everything within her control to draw a boundary between her and the shame that her perpetrators should feel. A boundary between her and the things they did to her when she just wasn’t there to consent, let alone know what was happening. A boundary between her and the culture that created the swamp in which Dominique Pelicot marauded, the army he enlisted.
However, it’s not for society to put boundaries between Dominique, his co-defendants and the rest of a culture that told them that this was not only okay, but something they could get away with, and something that, even when they were caught, could be, at least to them and their lawyers, plausibly deniable.
What Pelicot and those 50 men did, what those further 30 men are walking free able to do again, perhaps feeling braver now they’ve slipped through the net, isn’t isolated. Women who’ve been attacked by their own husbands, brothers, fathers, exes, cousins, friends, colleagues, acquittances, dates, know already that if all of them were monsters, there just wouldn't be very many men left. Gisèle Pelicot hasn’t only inspired women to stand tall against the harms they’ve faced, but should inspire the rest of society, especially those who can see what’s going on, to notice it and stop believing the myths they spin for themselves.
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