Gisèle’s 80 rapists were monstrous, but not monsters. They were ordinary men

Gisèle Pelicot was pale when she walked out of the courtroom where her husband had confessed to repeatedly raping her, drugging her, and allowing dozens of others to rape her in her own home for a decade. Her face lit by the lights of swarming cameras, she managed a small smile for a man who pushed through the line of onlookers to thrust a bunch of flowers into her hands, before passing them to her lawyer. Around her, people stood applauding and shouting, acknowledging her courage.

A quiet pensioner and choir-singer from a small village in southern France, Pelicot has been catapulted to the status of a national feminist figurehead, due to her determination that the horrors she experienced be exposed and damned, not hushed and forgotten.

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

Externally, she is composed. Internally, she told the court, she is a “field of ruins”.

The ordeal this 72-year-old grandmother has endured is almost unfathomable. Yet she has taken the unusual step of waiving her right to anonymity during the trial, allowing members of the public to attend, because, her lawyers said, the “shame” would then, correctly, be placed back onto the accused. (It will mean, too, that some of the thousands of videos of her sexual assaults will be played in court. All she has asked is that her children not be present in the room.)

Across France, women have borne placards aloft saying: La honte doit changer de camp. Shame must change sides.

The shocking thing about this story is that Pelicot lived happily for half a century alongside a man who was capable of treating her like a bag of meat to be passed to strangers to do with as they would. “For 50 years, I lived with a man who I would’ve never imagined could be capable of this,” she said. “I trusted him completely.” She loved him.

Dominique Pelicot, a retired electrician, declared this week that he was, indeed, a rapist, but said he was “crazy” about his wife and still loved her “immensely”.

“I loved her well for 40 years and badly for 10,” he added, thereby dramatically expanding the possibilities of what it might mean to “love badly”.

He said he grew addicted to abusing her, which is why he failed to respond to his wife’s concerns about random gynaecological issues as well as hair and weight loss, and lapses of memory, which we now know were due to the heavy drugs he was plying her with. She began to worry she had Alzheimer’s or brain tumours but he dismissed her concerns.

She must have felt she was going mad. Imagine how deeply you would need to be drugged to reach a coma-like state where for hours at a stretch you could be violently assaulted, unaware. According to police counts, as she slept in her bed, Pelicot was raped about 200 times.

There are so many questions. Dominique Pelicot says he “became perverted” when a male nurse he met online told him how to heavily sedate women. “That’s when it all clicked,” he said. “Everything started then.”

What is “it all”, though? What was pre-existing? Why did they meet? What else has this man done?

This case has demonstrated both the prevalence of rape and the apparent ordinariness of those who commit this crime. Fifty-one men, aged between 26 and 74, have been charged, including Dominique. Forty-eight have been charged with aggravated rape, one with sexual assault and another with attempted rape. (One man has been charged with drugging his own wife, who Dominique then raped.) There were 83 men seen assaulting Gisele in the thousands of videos her husband captured with a camera stuck on a tripod in their bedroom – but about 30 could not be identified, and are currently walking free, much to the unease of locals.

This is the world women live in.

All those charged were local men, living in or near their little medieval village in Provence in southern France, responding to an ad Dominique posted online inviting people to come and have sex with his wife. The web forum he found was called “without her knowledge”. Which seems pretty plain, even though some have argued they assumed she must have been aware of this ploy. Gisèle even recognised one of the men; he had come to her home to discuss cycling with her husband; she had seen him around town, in the bakery, exchanged pleasantries. “I would say hello,” she said. “I never thought he’d come and rape me.”

Eighty-three men. They came from a range of backgrounds and professions – a fireman, a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a supermarket worker. Fathers, sons, husbands, neighbours. Not one of them called the police. Not even an anonymous tip-off.

Meanwhile, Gisele walked streets and crossed paths with her rapists without having any knowledge of their crimes, or the unfettered access her husband had allowed them to her body. (The only way she discovered what her husband was doing was when he was busted filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket – and police went on to find a cache of other videos he filmed of strangers assaulting Gisele.)

Ordinary men.

The idea that rapists present as monsters is, of course, a myth.

Céline Piques, from the feminist group Osez le Féminisme, told the BBC this case “demolishes the myth of the rapist who is a psychopath … they raped because they were sure of their impunity”. Audrey Darsonville, a professor of criminal law at the University of Nanterre, told The New York Times: “Sexual offenders are often imagined as being dysfunctional misfits, when, in reality, they are Mr Everyman. That’s what this trial reminds us.”

It’s also an alarming reminder of the use of “chemical submission”, or drugging of women, and the spiking of drinks that appears to be far more prevalent than we realise. (As Gisele has pointed out, unlike her, most women this happens to don’t have proof.) And it is a reminder of the continual diminishing of rape as a non-serious crime. Take the words of Louis Bonnet, the mayor of the medieval village of Mazan, where the Pelicots lived: “People here say ‘no one was killed’. It would have been much worse if [Pelicot] had killed his wife … the family will have to rebuild itself. It will be hard. But they’re not dead, so they can still do it.”

It’s hard to see this ignorance as anything but defensive or calculated. Or as part of a culture of impunity that women are now demanding be burnt down.

Painted on a wall in Avignon, where the case is being heard, are these words: “On la disait brisée, c’est une combattante Gisele” – “They said she was broken, she’s actually a fighter, Gisele”.

Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.