daniel chigunwe
PARIS. —The evidence heard in court has horrified the world but as the trial comes to an end, the questions it has raised about ‘ordinary’ men, French society, and rape culture have still not been answered
In the four years after she discovered her husband had been drugging her and inviting strangers into their home to rape her, Gisèle Pelicot liked to walk to clear her head.
Striding through the countryside alone, she would throw the questions that tormented her to the wind:
“Dominique, how could you have done it? Why did you do it? How did we get here?”
Asked what she was doing when she was disappearing for hours, she would tell her three children:
“I am talking to your father.”
From his prison cell, Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted orchestrating the rapes at the couple’s home in the Provençal town of Mazan, could not answer.
Nor would he when facing his former wife across a crowded courtroom, except to say: “I am a rapist . . . like the others in this room.”
The 50 men who appeared alongside him, charged with aggravated rape and sexual abuse, have also failed to explain their actions.
Why, when confronted with the inert body of a drugged and unconscious woman, did these “ordinary men”, as they were described in court, with ordinary names — Laurent, Nicolas, Philippe, Christian, Hassan — not leave?
Why did not one of them go to the police and put an end to the decade-long abuse of a woman that could have killed her?
“The question is not why you went there, but why you stayed,” one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, told the court.
Camus cannot imagine why the men, who he says represent a “kaleidoscope of French society”, did so except for a lack of empathy towards their victim, who he says was treated as “less than nothing”.
As the trial enters its final days this week, the accused will be permitted a last word today before the president of the court and five judges known as “assessors” withdraw to consider their verdicts and sentences.
The public prosecutor has demanded a maximum prison term of 20 years for Pelicot and sentences of between four and 18 years for the 50 others.
Then, Gisèle Pelicot will walk out of court for the last time, flanked by her two lawyers, Camus and Stéphane Babonneau, who have protected her like praetorian guards every day.
There will be a last round of applause and cheers from the crowd — mostly women —who have arrived at dawn to queue for hours outside the courthouse for a place in the hearing, and who have presented her with gifts and shouted “Merci, Gisèle!” as she left each evening.
A criminal trial aims to answer questions.
It is the job of courts to ask questions and dig out the answers. Reporters, too. In this instance, we have both failed.
The question of how so many men were able to dehumanise Gisèle Pelicot will take psychologists and social anthropologists some time to unravel.— The Guardian
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