Gisèle Pélicot’s husband is accused of inviting men to rape her. She wants you to know her name
WARNING: This article may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
The trial surrounding Gisèle Pélicot — the French woman whose husband is accused of inviting more than 50 men to secretly rape her while she was drugged unconscious — has horrified the public, making headlines around the world.
But the case isn’t significant only because of the nature of the crimes, which her husband filmed and has confessed to, but because we know Gisèle Pélicot’s name at all.
The media doesn’t typically identify survivors of sexual abuse. Usually, publication bans prevent the media from doing so in order to protect the privacy of survivors and encourage them to report the crimes in the first place. But Pélicot, now aged 72, waived her legal right to anonymity.
She said she wanted the trial to be held publicly to alert the public to sexual abuse and drug-induced blackouts.
“So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pélicot,” she told the court in the southern French city of Avignon on Thursday, according to the New York Times. “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized.”
Lawyer Stephane Babonneau, who represents Pélicot, told French media she wanted to show “that shame must change sides.”
The case is “horrifying,” but choosing to speak out publicly sends a powerful message, said Bailey Reid, CEO of the Ottawa-based sexual violence prevention program The Spark Strategy.
“That she chose to be public with it shows an important value that women should not be ashamed when they’re sexually assaulted. It’s never their fault, and they shouldn’t feel that it is,” Reid told CBC News.
“It’s actually quite different than a lot of the victim-blaming and shaming that we see in a lot of media, and sexual violence tropes in television and movies.”
‘This really happened’
Dominique Pélicot, now 71, and 50 other men are standing trial on charges of aggravated rape and face up to 20 years in prison. The trial started Sept. 2 and is expected to run until December.
Beatrice Zavarro, a lawyer for Dominique Pélicot, has told French media that he admits to his crimes.
News website Vox reports that a psychologist told the court that Dominique Pélicot’s reasoning for the assaults is that his wife rejected swinging. He was supposed to testify Tuesday, but was instead hospitalized for medical checks and treatments for a possible bladder infection, his lawyer told reporters.
Last Thursday, Gisèle Pélicot said she pushed for the trial in open court in solidarity with other women who go unrecognized as victims of sexual crimes.
“I no longer have an identity…. I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself,” Pélicot told the court.
Tanya Couch, a co-founder of advocacy group Survivor Safety Matters and a survivor herself, told CBC News that’s exactly how she felt when she reported her own high-profile military sexual assault case.
“You don’t know who you are anymore, and that takes a long time to heal from,” Couch said. “I’m so thankful that she’s willing to do this publicly.”
Couch, who lives in the Greater Toronto Area, noted that sometimes when a survivor’s name isn’t published, the attacker’s identity is then also protected if it would identify them.
But that’s not the case in this trial, where Dominique Pélicot’s name is also front and centre.
“Kudos on her to be willing to use her story as an example to show the public that this really happened, and her own husband gathered evidence for her,” Couch said.
“The amount of strength it takes to be public, and come across as credible, and manage your own pain throughout all of it? It’s an extreme act of courage in my opinion.”
While both Couch and Reid applaud Gisèle Pélicot for going public, they add it’s important to recognize that not everyone might make the same decision or even have the choice under a publication ban. Couch, for instance, was identified by a pseudonym in media stories about her case.
“Survivors always know what’s best for themselves,” Reid said.
An exhibit at the Nova Scotia Community College in Lunenburg looks to dispel a myth around sexual assault. On display are outfits representing what survivors were wearing at the time they were assaulted.
Alleged rapists had to follow a protocol
The court learned that Gisèle Pélicot and her husband of 50 years lived in a house in Mazan, a small town in Provence. In 2020, a security agent caught Dominique Pélicot taking photos of women’s crotches in a supermarket, leading investigators to search his phone and computer.
They found thousands of photographs and videos of men appearing to rape Gisèle Pélicot in their home while she appeared to be unconscious. Police investigators found communications Dominique Pélicot allegedly sent on a messaging website commonly used by criminals, in which he invited men to sexually abuse his wife.
The alleged abuses began in 2011. Dominique Pélicot told investigators that men invited to the couple’s home had to follow certain rules — they could not talk loudly, had to remove their clothes in the kitchen and could not wear perfume or smell of tobacco.
They sometimes had to wait up to an hour and a half in a nearby parking lot for the drugs he secretly administered to her — a mixture of Temesta and Zolpidem, hypnotic and anxiolytic drugs, according to a toxicologist — to take full effect.
Because Dominique Pélicot videotaped the alleged rapes, police were able to track down — over a period of two years — a majority of the 72 suspects they were seeking.
Besides Pélicot, 50 other men, aged 22 to 70, are standing trial. Several defendants are denying some of the accusations against them, alleging they were manipulated by Pélicot.
Questioned in court, Gisèle Pélicot rejected the argument that any of these men were manipulated or trapped.
“These men entered my home, respected the imposed protocol. They did not rape me with a gun to the head. They raped me in all conscience,” she said. “Why didn’t they go to the police station? Even an anonymous phone call could have saved my life.”
Couch said the case is important because it details the “excuses” of the alleged attackers.
“It’s always women who are the ones accused of lying, but it’s not us lying,” Couch said.
She added the case also highlights how common it is for sexual assaults to occur in the home, and how — without the video proof of the assaults on Gisèle Pélicot — “there wouldn’t have been any evidence that she wasn’t just crazy.”
According to People magazine, Gisèle Pélicot told the court that until police told her of the assaults, she had been convinced that her drug-induced memory lapses and blackouts could be due to Alzheimer’s disease, and that Dominique Pélicot drove her to the doctor.
For anyone who has been sexually assaulted, there is support available through crisis lines and local support services via the Ending Violence Association of Canada database.
For anyone affected by family or intimate partner violence, there is support available through crisis lines and local support services.
If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911.
Published at Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000
Harris toys with Trump in U.S. presidential debate
Kamala Harris exorcised the ghosts of June. After needling Donald Trump in their televised debate, nudging him off topic, she finally stuck the landing that famously eluded her boss.
It was a catastrophic cognitive blip in June’s debate that ultimately curtailed President Joe Biden’s career when he lost his train of thought and erroneously boasted that he’d crushed a public health-insurance system cherished by seniors: “I beat Medicare.”
Coming from the vice-president, on Tuesday, the same message sounded more coherent: “We have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices — on behalf of you, the American people.”
By this point, it was already late in the debate, and Democrats were giddy, Republicans were fuming about biased moderators, and Harris was enjoying a little bump from different online betting markets in her chances of becoming president.
At a basement watch party in North Carolina, her supporters expressed relief over a late-summer debate that bookended the early-summer disaster.
“It was so disheartening. A horrible, sinking feeling,” Yana Whitman of Asheville said of the June Biden debate. Now? “She’s doing a great job,” she said of Harris. “She’s embarrassing [Trump].”
She was referring, specifically, to Harris dropping little ego land mines for Trump – references to supporters leaving his rallies, or world leaders mocking him – right at moments of the debate where he could have done damage to her, like a discussion about the porous southern border.
‘First, let me respond to the rallies’
Trump couldn’t resist diving right in to rescue his pride. Instead of discussing the border he said: “First, let me respond to the rallies.” Trump added: “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
He then pivoted to the possibility of another world war, spread a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating people’s pets, and, finally, wound up back where he started: Talking again about his rallies.
The border was supposed to be his winning topic. Instead, he played into hers: the notion, raised repeatedly by Harris, that Trump cares about himself, not ordinary people. She even got Trump to complain again about the 2020 election being stolen, and to defend his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Donnie Jones didn’t bother watching the first debate: the North Carolina graphic designer says he’s an independent, tends to vote Democratic, and isn’t a political junkie.
But he said he started getting excited about the campaign a few weeks ago, and there he was Tuesday, at a watch party in the basement of a wooden house on a dead end on the outskirts of Asheville, at the Democratic Party’s county headquarters.
“I’m feeling good now,” he said.
Trump fans say he won debate
Some Republicans insisted they also felt good Tuesday. Trump, for his part, posted a string of unscientific polls where his fans declared he’d won.
“I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” Trump wrote on his social-media site, Truth Social.
That was a reference to the moderators correcting him several times. Such as when he accused Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating pets: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats,” Trump said.
This was based on flimsily-sourced social media posts involving a town that has, indeed, seen an influx in undocumented migration.
After Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed that illegal immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, ABC News Presidential Debate moderator David Muir said the city manager told ABC News ‘there have been no credible reports’ of such incidents.
Republicans fume at moderators
ABC’s moderator said the network had checked with the mayor and he said there were no reports of pets being kidnapped for food. Trump replied that he’d seen it on TV.
It is true that the moderators only corrected Trump. They did not intervene to challenge Harris different times when she quoted Trump out of context, including his recent prediction of a bloodbath in the auto sector because of Democrats’ trade policy on electric cars.
Harris suggested he was threatening political violence.
“Unfortunately we had moderators who were clearly biased. Who were constantly fact-checking Donald Trump but none of these kind of whoppers the vice-president was saying,” Trump’s new campaign ally, Robert Kennedy Jr., said on Newsmax.
But as two Republican panellists on CNN conceded afterward: Trump had a poor night. One used a basketball metaphor, saying it’s no use complaining about the ref if you don’t make the shot.
Trump pressed Harris briefly over several left-wing policies from her failed 2020 campaign, which she now repudiates; he questioned why she should be trusted to achieve anything the current administration hasn’t.
And he complained about being described as a menace to democracy, when he’s the one facing myriad criminal charges, and was just shot.
“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,” Trump said. “They talk about democracy. That I’m a threat to democracy. They’re the threat.”
But when Harris got a chance to address her own chosen topics she charged ahead.
On abortion, for instance. Trump has waffled on how he would handle it in a second term: he’s said he wouldn’t, then said he could, restrict access to abortion pills, and it’s unclear whether a Trump-led postal service would halt interstate shipments of the medication.
Trump took credit for appointing judges who ended Roe v. Wade, saying he’d given the country what it wanted: a chance to settle the issue on a state-by-state basis.
‘The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,’ Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said during the ABC News Presidential Debate on Tuesday in Philadelphia.
Confrontation on abortion
Harris tore into him. She described cases of women who have suffered the consequences, like a miscarriage and doctors too afraid to intervene.
“She’s bleeding out in a car in a parking lot. She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that,” Harris said.
While discussing the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Harris spoke directly to moderate Republican voters disgusted by the events of that day.
She joked that Trump was fired by 81 million voters and he’s having a difficult time processing that. And she invited Republican voters to support her: “There is a place for you. To stand for country. To stand for democracy. To stand for rule of law. … Let’s not go back.”
It was part of an unambiguous pitch to centre- and some centre-right voters. Harris described herself as a gun owner, and promised not to confiscate firearms.
She touted recent record oil production. This was the only moment that drew a boo from someone at the Democratic watch party.
Debates don’t always mean much
She boasted about having the support of Dick Cheney, the former Republican vice-president, and referred to the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nominee as, “The late, great John McCain,” while discussing his 2017 Senate vote to save Barack Obama’s health-care law.
Now, a brief reality check for those giddy Democrats.
Debate performances aren’t necessarily predictive of electoral success. Hillary Clinton won her first, second and third debates against Trump, according to polls in 2016. She then enjoyed a small bump in support.
These contests tend to budge the polls a point or two in the direction of the perceived winner. It’s sometimes an ephemeral mirage, as supporters of the so-called winning debater are briefly more enthusiastic about talking to pollsters.
Case in point, Mitt Romney in 2012 who, like Clinton in 2016, was believed to have dominated his first debate with Obama, then lost the election.
That’s what makes the Biden disaster in June such an anomaly. That bumbling performance was easily the most consequential televised debate in U.S. history, leading to the end of his campaign.
After Tuesday, it feels like more distant history.
Published at Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:58:04 +0000
