The Most Unthinkable, Ordinary Crime

So many aspects of the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other defendants in France over the past month have been so extraordinary to experience that they feel somehow surreal, or upside-down. In 2020, Gisèle Pelicot, a 67-year-old retiree living in the small French town of Mazan, was told by police that her husband of almost 50 years, Dominique, had been arrested after trying to film up women’s skirts in a shopping center. At first, Gisèle was cautiously understanding. If Dominique was willing to go into therapy, she thought, they could stay together. But then the police confronted her with something infinitely more shocking. On his hard drive, a folder titled “abuse” contained some 20,000 photographs and videos of Gisèle being raped and assaulted by strange men—72 in total—as well as her husband. For about a decade, they told her, he had been drugging her food and drink, and inviting men he met on the internet to abuse her. In court last month, Dominique Pelicot validated the charges against him. “I am a rapist, like the others in this room,” he said. Fourteen of the other men on trial have pleaded guilty to the charges against them, but the majority claim innocence, arguing that they thought they were simply participating in a “libertine” game between husband and wife.

Before his arrest, with regard to his own security, Dominique was meticulous to a fault. The men who came to his home had to warm their hands on a radiator before entering his bedroom. They had to undress in the kitchen. They weren’t to smell of cigarette smoke or aftershave, lest they leave any discernible trace of themselves behind. If Gisèle stirred while an assault was ongoing, Dominique ordered the assailant to leave the room. He kept detailed records, saving videos and photographs of each man in file folders categorized by their first name—“part pleasure,” he later explained in court, “but also, part insurance.” With regard to his wife’s safety, however, he was strikingly nonchalant. He didn’t require that any of the men accused of raping his wife use condoms. Some are accused of choking her while Dominique watched; others, of assaulting her with objects. One man, who was HIV-positive, allegedly raped Gisèle on six separate occasions, telling Dominique that he couldn’t maintain an erection if he wore protection. When Gisèle began to complain of strange physical symptoms—substantial weight loss, hair loss, huge gaps in her memory, difficulty moving her arm—Dominique drove her to doctor appointments, but didn’t stop drugging her, or facilitating her abuse. When she mentioned that she’d been having unexplained gynecological issues, he accused her of cheating on him. Of her husband, she said in court: “In 50 years, I never imagined for a second that he could rape.”

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The mass trial of Dominique and 50 other men who could be identified (more than 20 alleged assailants remain at large) began in September, exposing a case that’s both wholly unprecedented and dully familiar. The fact that we’re aware of it at all is because of Gisèle, who gave up her right to privacy so that the allegations of what happened to her could be made public. What she believed, her lawyer said, was that “shame must change sides”—for the men accused of raping and assaulting her to be the ones whose characters were stained, whose reputations were maligned. In the process, she’s become a feminist icon in France, in whose name women’s groups have rallied, seeking to raise awareness about sex crimes involving drugging and pointing out that women are most likely to be raped by someone they know. Every day, before she enters the courtroom, Gisèle is applauded by crowds who have gathered outside to support her.

In court, though, Gisèle’s cross-examination has mostly been by the book, which is to say that lawyers for the defense—more than 40 in number—have done everything they can to impugn her character. “There’s rape and there’s rape,” one defense attorney told her, implying, as many of the defendants have argued, that Gisèle and her husband were swingers participating in an elaborate sex game. “No, there are no different types of rape,” she replied. Although the judges in the trial denied the prosecution’s request that videos documenting her abuse be shown in court, agreeing with defense lawyers that doing so would compromise the dignity of the defendants, they did allow those lawyers to show some 27 pictures that revealed Gisèle’s genitalia, and her face with her eyes apparently open. (A medical expert has testified that, given the medication Dominique was secretly administering, Gisèle was so heavily sedated, she was closer to being in a coma than being asleep.) Lawyers asked her whether she was an alcoholic, and whether she had “a secret inclination for exhibitionism.” In response, Gisèle stated that every day since the beginning of the trial, she’d been intentionally humiliated, and that she understood why most rape victims don’t press charges. Although she appears composed on the surface, she has said that, internally, she is “a field of ruins.” Even so, a few weeks into the trial, one defense lawyer, Nadia El Bouroumi, posted an Instagram Reel of herself in her car, miming to the Wham song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” (She later deleted the video and posted a statement saying she was profoundly sorry if her meaning had been misinterpreted.)

This kind of ritualized cruelty toward victims is standard in legal systems worldwide, and yet the Pelicot case has stripped away all the usual obfuscations and muddying of details to make certain things clear. There are just so many accused rapists in this case, each one caught on camera. There are so many men who are alleged to have assaulted a drugged grandmother of seven that before they go into the courtroom, they have to form a queue, shuffling one by one in hunched, sullen fashion, as though waiting in a breadline, or for a bus. The men range in age from their 20s to their 70s. One was a firefighter. One was a nurse. One was a journalist. One was a prison guard, one a civil servant. Many were apparently happily married with children. One, a 22-year-old, missed the birth of his daughter the night he went to allegedly rape Gisèle.

Not all men rape women, the adage goes. But the Pelicot case has upended that argument: not all men, but any man, of any age, any profession, any marital status. Living in a small town of 6,000 people, Dominique was able to find 72 men nearby who were allegedly willing—as per his invitation on a forum titled “Without Their Knowledge”—to “abuse my sleeping, drugged wife.” The site he used, Coco.fr, was shut down earlier this year, but it has been implicated in 23,000 separate crimes that are under investigation by more than 70 public prosecutors’ offices across France. Not all men but, still, so many men. One defendant in the Pelicot case, a 72-year-old former firefighter and truck driver who was described by friends and family as “kind,” “attentive,” and “open to others,” told the courtroom that he had “a deep respect for women,” and that if his ex-wife were present, she’d tell them, “He loves the woman in all her diversity, all her complexity.” Nevertheless, he is accused of raping an unconscious woman, Gisèle’s lawyer countered; the man has denied the accusation. Another defendant explained that he realized what he was doing was wrong when Gisèle moved while he was assaulting her, and Dominique quickly ushered him out of the room. “When I crossed the garden, I thought about reporting the incident,” he said in court. “Then life resumed its course; the next day, I went to work very early, and that was that.”

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The men accused of raping and assaulting Gisèle, it’s worth remembering, are so numerous that they were arrested in five separate waves, spanning almost a year. In court every week, a new group of defendants has been presented to the judges for consideration, so that their psychological profiles and the testimony of their partners and ex-partners can be taken into account. One defendant, a private nurse, was apparently extremely empathetic to his patients, whom he considered family. He and his wife tried for many years to have children, undergoing multiple rounds of IVF and eventually hoping to adopt. Another, a mason, was reportedly a wonderful father whose friends testified that he was respectful and quiet, never even making dirty jokes at parties. Some of the men have been described as egocentric, aggressive, and routinely unfaithful. One was incarcerated for acts of sexual violence against three other women at the time of his arrest. One has asked about the possibility of restorative justice. Some confessed to having been abused as children. One, although not charged with assaulting Gisèle, is accused of being mentored by Dominique in the drugging and rape of his own wife, who has stayed with him despite learning that both her husband and Dominique allegedly raped her while she was unconscious on several occasions. One defendant was described by his fiancée, with whom he shares a 15-month-old child conceived after his arrest, as having a “heart of gold.”

Following along with the trial, what’s been hard to process is the disconnect between how the defendants are being treated and what Gisèle has endured. The men’s psychological profiles are inherently humanizing—it’s difficult not to feel pity for those whose children have died, or who were reportedly abused themselves, or who apparently fought for their children with special needs to receive the educational assistance they needed. And yet these men also allegedly participated in the abuse and rape of a passed-out woman: an immobile, voiceless, dehumanized body served up to them by her husband, whose actions implied—and were accepted by the men—as ownership. “If a man came to have intercourse with me, he still should have asked for my consent,” Gisèle said in court. But that acquiescence itself would have been in opposition to what so many men apparently wanted: ultimate sexual domination over someone who couldn’t consent, orchestrated by the one man whom she loved and trusted the most.