What One Mass Rape Case Shows about the Depth of Rape Culture

So many men were willing to rape a woman. And not one was willing to try to stop it.

Please note that this piece contains extremely upsetting details about rape and sexual abuse. I would ask you, if you have the bandwidth, not to turn away from it but rather to find the right moment to read it. We are now responsible, as I’ve argued, for bearing witness to these crimes. We are responsible to the victim. And she has asked us to listen to her and to reckon with, as she puts it, the macho, patriarchal culture that enabled all this to happen. If you find something valuable in this essay, please ‘like’ it via the heart below, restack it on notes, or share it via social media. I would like this one to reach a wide audience—although I pretty much expect crickets due to the very indifference the piece highlights—and so have left it public. As always, the best way to support my work is with a paid subscription.

They had been together for forty years, and they had had their ups and downs. But she now deemed him the perfect husband—loving and attentive. Often, he prepared her meals, and even brought her ice cream in bed: raspberry, her favorite. She was more tired than usual these days, and sometimes found herself passing out quickly afterwards. She attributed it to her prodigious walking habit.

She experienced pain in her cervix and, sometimes, a strange feeling as if her water had broken—despite being postmenopausal, in her 60s. But she recognized the sensation as being similar to what she felt before giving birth to their three children. Her husband took her to see three different gynecologists.

Her memory began to fail—she lost time, she lost experiences. She woke up with a haircut that she could not remember getting. Fearing dementia or a brain tumor, she consulted with a neurologist. Again, her husband drove her to her doctor’s appointments and brain scans. He chalked up her exhaustion, memory problems, weight loss, and hair loss to her helping to care for their grandchildren.

The real source of her problems: her husband was lacing her meals with drugs (anxiolytics and sleeping pills), raping her, and inviting strange men into their home to rape her while she was unconscious. He recruited 72 men—then aged 21 to 68, who came from a wide range of backgrounds and occupations—from the message board “Without Her Knowledge” over the course of nearly a decade. He took photographs and videos for “insurance” purposes. That is, he collected evidence of the rapes in case one of the men reacted badly after the fact, and tried to turn him in. He planned ahead: he’d head them off by threatening to ruin their reputation.

None of the men threatened to turn him in. His crimes were only discovered because, in 2020, he was caught taking “upskirt” videos in a supermarket near their home, in Mazan, in the South of France. The police, searching his computer, found a USB drive with a folder labelled “abuses.” On it, some 20 000 images her husband took of the rapes, labelled with names, dates, and other details. As one report from the BBC explains, “the videos leave no doubt that the sex acts were not consensual. [She] can be seen lying on the bed, snoring, as her husband whispers instructions to various men to touch her, prod her, use her.” She was treated, in her own words, “like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.” Afterward, her husband would clean up and put on her pajamas.

Her name is Gisèle Pelicot. Her now ex-husband Dominique’s trial for rape, gang rape, and disseminating sexual images is due to wrap up on December 20. They are both 72 years old at the time of this writing.

Gisèle Pelicot, flanked by her lawyers: image credit NYT

It is of course difficult to overstate the horror of Dominique Pelicot’s crimes, but they are not what I want to focus on here. I want to focus on the fact that so many men participated. And that nobody came forward. In fact, prior to the police investigation, nobody helped Gisèle in any way whatsoever. Despite upwards of 70 men raping or sexually assaulting her—fifty-one of whom are now simultaneously on trial, while over twenty remain at large—her degradation and suffering could easily have remained ongoing; and, a secret. It was only discovered, after all, because her husband was caught making non-consensual pornography that targeted three strangers. He lamented in court that if he hadn’t been arrested, he “would still be happy, and she too—everything would have continued the same way.” (His is a strange conception of happiness given her severe health deterioration.)

Some of the perpetrators claimed that they thought it was going to be a threesome or a consensual sex game where Gisèle merely pretended to be asleep. But not one man got out of there after they saw that she was unconscious and, often, heard her snoring. (To be fair, one did so after touching her sexually —he is hence charged with sexual assault, not rape.) Not one man experienced a sufficiently guilty conscience to go to the police or take the story to a reporter. Not one man so much as sent Gisèle an anonymous letter letting her know what was happening. Neither did anyone in the small town where they lived, which most perpetrators hailed from—and where, surely, people talk. As Gisèle said during her ex-husband’s trial: “I feel anger against those who are behind me [in court] who not for one moment thought of reporting it. Not a single one reported it. It raises some real questions.” For one, how is this possible?

The answer, I think, is probably twofold: one, we do not care very much about the rape of girls and women, as I’ve written about time and time before in this newsletter. Two, we think that a husband is entitled to control the body and sexual fate of his wife—as well as, perhaps, his daughters. Dominique Pelicot was also discovered to have a semi-naked photograph of his daughter, Caroline Darian, who courageously confronted him in court. Given the paucity of other evidence of the abuse she believes he must have inflicted upon her, she is, as she put it, this trial’s forgotten victim.

Notice that I say that many people don’t care about the rape of girls and women above. Not everyone cares about the rape of boys and men, of course (let alone non-binary people). But Dominique Pelicot’s apprehension that at least some people do—and rightly so, of course—was betrayed by some of his excuses for his unconscionable behavior. As well as complaining that Gisèle refused his proposals to start swinging, he said he was driven by having been raped as a nine year-old boy by a male nurse when he was receiving medical attention for a head injury. (His mother had looked into the matter previously and found that it didn’t add up: there were no male nurses working at the hospital during the relevant period.)

Dominique Pelicot now bemoans the way the trial has destroyed his life and seeks forgiveness from his family. When asked by his defense lawyers about the possibility of winning back his wife, he said: “It is important to have hope,” and again emphasized his own trauma. A more disgusting bid for himpathy—the undue sympathy often given to male perpetrators—is difficult to envisage.

It’s also a bid for himpathy that is based more on myth than fact. The theory that abusers were once abused themselves—sometimes known as “the cycle of abuse”—came about because psychologists and counsellors noticed that a fairly high proportion of the abusers they saw reported a history of being abused. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that abuse makes people more likely to become abusers: it turned out to more so reflect the fact that abuse is sadly widespread in the general population. In one particularly high-quality 2015 study, people who experienced sexual abuse as children were not significantly more likely to sexually abuse others than their counterparts who did not (though there was a correlation between childhood maltreatment, abuse, and neglect and subsequent sexual offenses among men, interestingly). And indeed there was always a large hole in the “cycle of abuse” theory: it doesn’t make sense of the fact that girls are more likely to be abused than boys, but are far, far less likely to become abusers as adults. The proclivity to abuse is a highly gendered phenomenon, which must hence be tied to patriarchal social structures and differential moral permissions. “It is time for us to look at this macho, patriarchal society and change the way it looks at rape,” as Gisèle Pelicot put it, naming its “banality” in the tradition of Hannah Arendt.

Some of the subsequent reporting has tried to locate the problem specifically in French culture. But misogyny—including our deep, systemic, and violent indifference to the suffering and degradation of girls and women—is not isolated to any particular nation or culture or religious tradition. We often hear that marital rape was legal in the US until 1993, which is shocking enough, but what we don’t hear about is all of the loopholes. In Minnesota, for example, rape committed by someone with whom the victim is in “an ongoing voluntary relationship” was still prosecuted under a different code until recently—making for a de facto marital rape exemption. This defense was successfully deployed after a man made a video of himself raping his ex-wife while their four-year-old child slept nearby (when divorce proceedings were ongoing). He received a mere forty-five days in jail, for “invasion of privacy.” The statute enabling this defense was repealed in 2019, following widespread outcry.

I wrote about another case in Minnesota that took place in 2013. Rae Florek, a woman in her mid-fifties, had long been battling throat cancer. She was often in pain and had had some fifteen surgeries. Her on-again off-again boyfriend, Randy Vannet, took advantage of an occasion she had passed out from pain medications and alcohol to “take her,” as he put it—making up for the times she couldn’t have sex due to the pain, he told her blithely. Realizing it was rape, Florek began to surreptitiously record their conversations. She took the recordings where he admitted what he’d done to the police. They interviewed him, and Vannet admitted it again. Ultimately, however, the police and prosecutor did nothing: they declined to make an arrest or charge him, let alone prosecute him for his crime. Whatever you think about our criminal (in)justice system, this inaction betrays the sense that even a man in a tenuous relationship with a woman is entitled to have sex with her while she could not possibly consent, because she is unconscious. In other, better words, he is deemed entitled to rape her.

When allegations of rape against Trump made by his ex-wife, Ivana, resurfaced in 2015, he too appealed to the legality of marital rape, via his lawyer, Michael Cohen. Later, after it was pointed out that marital rape was indeed illegal in New York State at the time (1989), Trump backtracked by blaming Cohen for misspeaking. “Nobody speaks for Mr. Trump but Mr. Trump,” said Trump’s spokesperson.

That heterosexual marriage is a fundamentally violent patriarchal institution doesn’t just stem from what takes place within marriage: widespread domestic violence, emotional abuse, and gaslighting, as well as sexual assault and rape, predominantly by men of women. It also concerns the fact that many people still believe, at least tacitly, that husbands are entitled to get whatever they want from their wives: domestic labor, emotional labor, children-cum-heirs, and of course sexual satisfaction. And if they do not receive these goods, they are then deemed entitled to extract them via coercion, violence, drugging, raping, and enforcing pregnancy. The gender-reversed scenario—in which women team up to rape or otherwise torment their sleeping husbands—is virtually unthinkable. That fact demands acknowledgement as well as explanation.

We are dealing with a problem, in effect, of indentured personhood—where a marital contract covertly implies a man’s ownership of his wife in body and mind. This doesn’t just permit her husband’s mistreatment of her: it results in her being unhelped and unheld in the face of such abuse. Much of society will ignore her, and back him, or even actively collaborate on his say-so. Many of Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists said they thought her husband’s permission to have sex with her was sufficient permission for proceeding. They had not violated her, they reasoned, because they had not infringed upon a man’s wife conceived as his personal property. He had invited them in, and so they were not trespassing. Her person is his property. And his property is her person.

“Your body, my choice!” “Repeal the 19^th amendment!” “Get back in the kitchen!” These cries have been developed and amplified following the US election. But they are hardly an expression of a newfound, de novo sentiment, nor one that is geo-culturally restricted. American boys and men are saying the quiet part out loud now, a reflection of their emboldening. In other words, their sense of entitlement to control women is just becoming more blatant: otherwise the election would not have gone Trump’s way in the first place.

We only know about Gisèle Pelicot’s case because, in an extraordinary act of courage, she waived her right to privacy and insisted upon a public trial. “It’s not for us to have shame—it’s for them,” she testified, coining a new feminist slogan: shame must change sides. That is, shame not on the women who have been raped but on the men who are their rapists. I would only add: shame too on the society that condones and enables these men. Shame on the indifferent. Shame on rape culture.