Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Gisèle Pelicot Shows Us Why “Shame Must Change Sides”

Fifty-one ordinary men raped an unconscious woman. Her case reveals the limits of anti-carceral feminism.

Gisele Pelicot has published the book A Hymn to Life in which she recounts her memories of discovering one morning in November 2020 that her husband had been secretly drugging her and inviting strangers to her home to rape her.

Gisèle Pelicot thought she had a good marriage. Sure, it had its ups and downs—there were money troubles, and both she and her husband had affairs—but the way she saw it, she had had 50 years of quiet contentment. She had a good job, a devoted husband, two sons and a daughter, plenty of grandchildren, and a retirement home in the town of Mazan in Provence with a swimming pool and plenty of countryside outside the front door.

As the whole world now knows, and as her recently published memoir A Hymn to Life describes in painful detail, the reality was rather different. From 2011 to 2020 her husband, Dominque Pelicot, was drugging her and using a chatroom called “à son insu” (“without her knowledge”) to invite local men to rape her while she was unconscious. He might never have been found out had he not been caught taking pictures up women’s skirts in a supermarket. The police took his computer, and in a folder neatly labeled “abuse,” there were hundreds of videos of local men assaulting his wife’s orifices, often with his help.

What happened next astonished the world. Gisèle Pelicot revealed her identity and chose an open trial so that the world could see what had happened to her and by whom. Only Dominique acknowledged that he was a rapist; the other 50 men on trial treated the proceedings as a joke and insisted they had done nothing wrong: It was just kinky sex; she was only pretending to be asleep; and anyway the husband gave permission, so how could it be rape? Sadly, some of the wives and girlfriends of the accused blamed themselves: They didn’t satisfy their husbands, so what do you expect? Sadder still, some 20 men in the videos could not be identified and are free to rape again.

I think of Gisèle when anti-carceral feminists argue against prosecuting those accused of sex crimes. I suppose they would mourn the conviction of her rapists: Dominique got 20 years and the others sentences ranging from three to 15 years. (The prosecution had asked for 10 to 18.) After all, with a few exceptions, these were normal middle-class and working-class men, aged 26 to 74. There was a truck driver, an IT worker, a journalist, a banker, a mechanic, and a baker. One was even her next-door neighbor. They weren’t all ideal citizens: One was an HIV-positive retiree who refused to wear a condom. Another was a worker in a garden store who, perhaps taking a leaf from Dominique, drugged........

© The Nation