“I have always loved the inaccessible. My wife is not submissive, quite the contrary. It’s that stupid egotism that so many men have… No one belongs to anyone, and I defied this sentiment, so that I could do what I wanted, when I wanted.”
So declared Dominique Pelicot, on 18 October, during the hearing in which he was the protagonist, as Marlène Thomas reports in Libération.
“She’s his wife, he can do what he wants with his wife”. This is what Simon M, one of the accused in the “Mazan rapes case”, declared, as Lorraine de Foucher reported in Le Monde in June 2023.
Is there any better explanation of patriarchy?
The “Mazan rape trial”
The trial for what has become known as the “Mazan rapes case” began last September and will continue until the end of the year. Between July 2011 and October 2020, in Mazan, a small town near Avignon (south of France), Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife with Temesta (the active ingredient of which is Lorazepam) and then invited men he met online to come to their home and join him in raping his wife.
The police compiled a list of 83 attackers, thanks to Dominique Pelicot’s rigorously maintained archive of videos and photos.
Only 50 of these men have been identified, and will be tried together with Pelicot. 32 have so far escaped justice.
This trial has been called “historic” because of how it strikes the conscience of France, but also because its scope goes far beyond national borders: press from across the globe is present to report from the Avignon Criminal Court. It is also historic because it takes place in a “post-#MeToo” world.
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In Krytyka Polityczna Aleksandra Herzyk writes that the trial displays the “banality of evil” that is so often hidden behind media attention that focuses on immigrants without legal permits, and avoids looking instead “into the homes of ordinary families, the respected members of the community”.
Mazan’s defendants are, for the most part, “family men”, “normal”, “banal” people: “The 51 rapists are a kaleidoscope of French society. The youngest is 26, the oldest 73. They are all from the region and live close to the couple. Many of them work in the public sector: firemen, military personnel, prison guards, nurses or journalists. Others are truck drivers, hold responsible positions in companies, and one is a municipal councillor. Some have precarious jobs, are under supervision, or are already in prison for violence committed against women. Five face an additional charge: during a search of their computers, the police found large quantities of child exploitation images” de Foucher explains.
Another feature that makes this trial historic is the position taken by Gisèle Pelicot.
Divorced from her husband at the time of writing, she still uses her married surname so that she can use her maiden name more freely.
Pelicot wanted the trial to take place in open court: “If Gisèle stands upright in the dock and speaks out, it is because she knows that her ordeal is that of all women, since the dawn of time, always and everywhere. Besides the judges, she speaks to society as a whole, as a typical victim of patriarchy. Whatever the sensationalists say, there is nothing exceptional or unprecedented about this case. That a husband abuses his wife, that he offers her to others, that a man drugs a woman in order to use her at will, that a multitude of men take turns on a woman’s body, all this constitutes the ordinary pattern of patriarchal violence,” writes philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie in Le Soir.
“In waiving her anonymity, allowing the process to be held in public and agreeing to the videos her husband made to be shown in open court, Gisèle Pelicot has diverted the spotlight on to her alleged rapists”, writes Kim Willsher on The Guardian.
“I want all the women who are victims of rape to be able to say, ‘Madame Pelicot did it, so I can too’. I want them to stop feeling shame. Because when you are raped, you feel shame, when it’s really the men who have to feel shame. I am speaking from neither anger nor hatred. I am speaking from a determination to change society”, Gisèle Pelicot declared on 23 October.
Consent in the definition of rape
This trial also occurs in the wake of a long debate among European feminists about the concept of consent in the definition of rape, which culminated in the European Directive on Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. This directive eventually excluded the article that sought to define rape as “absence of consent”.
Researchers Sara Uhnoo, Sofie Erixon and Moa Bladini in a June 2024 article for the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice identified as many as 20 European rape laws based on consent, with rapid change beginning in 2017.
“Could the introduction of consent be a possible answer to the Mazan trial?” asked French magistrate Denis Salas in Le Monde. The Guardian correspondent in Paris, Angelique Chrisafis, seems to respond to this question directly when she writes that “the courtroom testimony has highlighted how society in general has not yet got a clear understanding of consent. The trial has opened a debate on whether to more explicitly spell out the active need for consent within the law on rape in France.“
In Poland, a new law, due to come into force in 2025, has redefined the notion of consent, as Notes of Poland discusses. Rape, according to this legislation, is sexual intercourse without consent. This has led to some doubts and criticism, writes Hanna Kobus in Krytyka Polityczna. Many, especially those on the far right, fear it will undermine the presumption of innocence or lead to an increase in false convictions.
In Europe, according to data from a survey carried out by Patricia Devlin and Maria Delaney for Noteworthy and the European Data Journalism Network, between 2021 and 2023 more than 68,000 victims of rape and more than 116,000 victims of sexual violence were recorded.
At the October 2024 Biennial of Thought in Barcelona the Spanish philosopher Clara Serra, famous for her book El sentido de consentir (Anagrama, 2024), also spoke about the Mazan case. The discussion has been written up by Xavier de La Porte in Le Nouvel Observateur, and shared on the philosopher’s X profile. According to Serra, the notion of consent “accords too much importance to the ‘yes’, when what is central ‘is the possibility of saying ‘no’”. In the Mazan case, many of the defendants justified themselves by saying that they thought they were taking part in a “couple’s game” to which Gisèle Pelicot had supposedly consented: “What the system has to say to the defendants is that even if she had given a ‘yes’ – either verbally or in writing – this does not exonerate them from anything, because none of the defendants could have been unaware that the woman could not have said no at any time,” she concludes.
Besides Gisèle Pelicot, one other woman is known to have been raped, using the same method, by her husband and Dominique Pelicot. This woman did not press charges, as Kareen Janselme reports in L’Humanité. Janselme adds that the “couple” has five children, two of whom still live at home, that the woman does not work, and that she is financially dependent on her husband. At the Avignon trial, she was therefore only heard as a witness.
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