We Are Asking the Wrong Question in the Horrifying Pelicot Rape Case
We already know how this could happen — there’s something else we desperately need to investigate
TW: rape, sexual assault, violence against women
It took me a long time, but I’m finally ready to talk about a subject I’ve been avoiding for a while. It was just too triggering. Too traumatic. I have a hard time getting through scenes that depict violence against women in film, let alone digesting it in real life.
Any case of sexual violence also brings up horrific memories for me. Worse, it reminds me why I have so many memories like that in the first place — because this kind of thing is so normalized in our culture that I didn’t even know it was wrong when it was happening to me.
But it’s just too big, something like this case: A man drugging his wife and soliciting nearly 100 men (that we know of) to rape her over the course of a decade.
The actions of Dominique Pelicot are pure evil…but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I think it’s time we talk about the fact that this is not an anomaly, as so many people have argued. This is just another day in a patriarchal society.
If you don’t know the details of this case, brace yourself. Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old retired electrician in southeast France, is on trial for a decade-long string of sexual crimes against his wife, Gisèle. In this case, no one has to insert the word “alleged” in front of the charges because Pelicot took video recordings of 92 rapes that took place over the course of ten years, committed by 72 different men. Again…that we know of.
Pelicot began drugging his wife with Temesta (lorazepam), then raping her while she was unconscious. He filmed these rapes and posted the videos on a message board on the currently defunct website Coco (well-known for postings about illegal activities) called “Without Their Knowledge.” Over time, he graduated to soliciting other men to join in, inviting them to his home where they would rape Gisèle in her own bed while her husband filmed it.
These videos and photos were discovered after police seized Pelicot’s computer when he was caught taking photographs up women’s skirts in a local grocery store. The assaults against his wife were organized into files in a folder labeled “Abuses.”
Tragically, that’s not all. Currently facing trial alongside Pelicot are 51 men who were identified in the rape videos. (There are more who could not be identified who are, therefore, not on trial.) None of these men’s names have been released, despite the fact that there is proof of their crimes in the videos and photographs. But we do know that they range in age from 26 to 74, many of them have children (daughters, I wonder?), and they work as nurses, firefighters, prison guards, truck drivers, and journalists.
Pelicot has admitted to the rapes and pleaded guilty to all charges, though he hardly has any other choice considering the 20,000+ incriminating photos and videos on his hard drive, including, I might add, nonconsenually-obtained nude photos of his daughters-in-law, and a video of his daughter unconscious on a bed wearing her mother’s underwear.
As for the others, only 14 of the 51 men have admitted to raping Gisèle Pelicot and expressed regret. The others denied any wrongdoing, insisting either that it was an elaborate swinger’s ruse in which the victim was a willing participant, or that her husband’s consent was sufficient.
During the investigation, one of them told police “it was like raping a corpse.” I don’t know what is more chilling: his implied disappointment that the rape was not as exciting as he would have liked, or the casual admission to raping an unconscious woman.
I find myself enraged when people — men, in particular — ponder with confusion in their eyes, How could this have happened? You will find this sentiment somewhere in every single news report on this story. As if this is just an anomaly, one man who went off the rails.
But Dominique Pelicot didn’t just wake up one day and decide to victimize his wife in a ten-year-long rape spree. That’s like someone becoming a serial killer overnight. These kinds of crimes are the result of decades of escalating criminal behavior. And they become these so-called “anomalies” when offenders don’t have to face sufficient consequences for their actions.
Protecting men who commit sexual violence is not an anomaly. In a culture where violence against women is normalized, these kinds of crimes often receive a slap on the wrist, if anything. Take the case of Aundria Bowman, for example, whose murder was recently featured in a true crime documentary on Netflix called Into the Fire. Aundria had been physically and sexually abused for years by her adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, the former abuse being witnessed by many of her friends. But the adults around her did not believe her and encouraged her to admit she was lying, which she eventually did.
At 14, her adoptive father murdered her, dismembered her body in order to fit it into an oil barrel, then buried her in his backyard. Incredibly, his crime was only discovered after he was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of another woman several decades earlier, when DNA evidence led police to his door. It was also revealed that Bowman confessed to raping countless other women who may never be identified.
Perhaps worst of all, while Aundria Bowman was just six years old, her adoptive father was arrested for the attempted rape of a teenage girl, but was released from prison early, just three years before he killed Aundria. The police didn’t yet know about the earlier murder, but I can’t help wondering why firing a gun at a teenage girl during an attempted rape wasn’t enough to keep him in prison for a lot longer than a few years — and if Aundria would be alive today if Bowman had had to finish his sentence…
Likewise, Dominique Pelicot had already committed a string of sexual violence stretching back at least 30-some years. Pelicot had been arrested for taking photos up women’s skirts in 2010, but was only fined and then released. Police did not report this incident to his wife who has said she would have been “on alert” had she known. As a woman, I feel this is extreme negligence, knowing what we know about sexual violence. To purposefully keep women in the dark when a husband has been arrested for a sex crime is yet another example of violence against women.
But that’s not even the worst of it. DNA swabs they took at the time (just before he began drugging and raping his wife) led to Pelicot being investigated in an attempted rape of a 20-year-old in 1999. He is also under investigation in a rape and murder case involving a 23-year-old victim, back in 1991.
Horrifying crimes like those committed against Gisèle Pelicot, as well as the victims of Dennis Bowman’s crime spree, are not an anomaly — we’ve just been conditioned to see violence against women as normal, except in so-called extreme cases like these.
But when you consider how many times men like this get a pass that allowed their criminal behavior to escalate, it becomes glaringly clear just how little our culture cares about women, just how very common this kind of violence really is.
I want to bring attention to a little-known fact about the Pelicot case that will, I hope, have everyone convinced that calculated, conveyor belt violence against women is, actually, a norm. That is the case of Jean-Pierre Maréchal.
Maréchal, a 63-year-old retired truck driver, set out to commit the same violence against his wife as Pelicot committed against his. These copycat crimes resulted in 12 instances of rape and attempted rape against Maréchal’s 54-year-old wife, Cilia. Like Pelicot, he drugged her, intending to invite other men to rape her while he watched. Pelicot perpetrated 10 of those rapes.
Maréchal, like Pelicot, claims to love his wife and that he never would have committed these acts had he not met Pelicot. He describes Pelicot as a mentor, urging him into this string of sexual assaults, teaching and reassuring him.
It bears noting, however, that Maréchal met Pelicot on the Coco website, on the “Without Their Knowledge” message board where Pelicot was posting the videos of his wife’s rapes. That doesn’t seem like the action of someone who would never have considered orchestrating the mass-rape of his wife before an accidental meeting with someone who was already committing this act of treachery and violence against his own wife. I think it’s safe to say that a man who loves his wife isn’t sneaking around on a message board called “Without Their Knowledge” watching another man rape a wife he also claims to love. That math doesn’t really math.
The bigger point here, however, is that if violence against women on a mass scale wasn’t already a norm, we wouldn’t have men like Maréchal who only needed one little nod of encouragement to cross the line and commit monstrous violence against his wife.
Do I really have to say this? It shouldn’t take so little to inspire a man into such depravity.
We have to stop asking how this happened. That question is sickeningly disingenuous. It happens all the time, and even on a smaller scale, we should be equally horrified.
What we need to be asking is: What’s it going to take for men to get it? To understand how many of them have been programmed to see us as objects, and how much we have conditioned them to eroticize violence? When are men going to stop talking about how #MeToo destroyed the lives of thousands of men who were falsely accused of rape and then lost their jobs, homes, and families (seriously, name one)? When are men going to stop insisting that rape isn’t that bad compared to murder?
And when are we going to stop pretending that large-scale (or any-scale) violence against women is a one-off?
Enough is enough. Every act of sexual violence should be this shocking. And every perpetrator should face serious consequences, instead of the wrist slaps that allow them to continue to escalate their crimes.
We know over 80 men participated in the rape of Gisèle Pelicot. That alone should raise a red flag. Not one of them paused to ask why she was unconscious? Not even the nurse or firefighter who work in professions that require trainings around rape, consent, and violence against women?
I hate to break it to you, but just because this happened to one woman doesn’t make it an anomaly. We should be looking at the 83 men who didn’t have any ethical misgivings about having sex with an unconscious woman. That’s a hell of a lot of men to call a one-off…