The Pélicot case: a horror exposed

For members of the Pélicot family, one date will be etched on their memories forever, said Luc Leroux in Le Monde. It was on 2 November 2020, in a police station in southern France, that Gisèle Pélicot, now 72, was told what investigators had found on her husband Dominique's computer: tens of thousands of images of her being raped and sodomised by him and by scores of strangers, while she was drugged and unconscious.

In court last week, where 51 men, including Pélicot, are on trial, Gisèle testified that she had no idea of her husband's depravity; their marriage had been happy, their sex life conventional. Her world had "collapsed" when she saw herself lying like a "rag doll" in her bed, being "sacrificed on the altar of vice". Her daughter, on being told of what her father had done, had screamed "like a wild beast". One of her sons had vomited.

This case has so many horrible details, it is hard to select the worst, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. Was it the allegation that Pélicot had allowed a man who was HIV positive to rape his wife six times? Or that, out of the 80 that he invited to his house, only three left when they realised that Gisèle was unconscious?

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Much has also been made of the seeming normality of many of the defendants: they include nurses, civil servants, a journalist and a firefighter. But when it comes to the cruelties men are capable of inflicting, I am past feeling surprised. This case is unusual; but the misogynistic attitudes that enabled it – that women are "meat puppets", whose purpose is to pleasure men – are not. They are shared by men who use prostitutes; by those who get off on flashing women, harassing them and groping them; and they are promoted online, where porn has normalised the view that, for women, sex should be painful and humiliating.

It was on a dark corner of the web that Pélicot lurked, said Nabila Ramdani in The i Paper. On the Coco platform, he joined a chatroom called Without Their Knowledge, where he found no shortage of men who wanted to rape his wife (though many of the defendants claim they thought the sex was consensual). Coco was facilitating a range of "unspeakable" crimes; yet it was only closed down in June.

Many see this as evidence that sexual violence is still not taken seriously enough in France, said Peter Conradi in The Sunday Times; and it's telling too that most of the alleged rapists in this case are not in custody; and that it has not made front-page news in France. That is why Gisèle Pélicot waived her right to anonymity: she wanted people to know the evil that men do.