Opinion | The Defendants in France’s Rape Trial Are Telling Us Something Horrifying

It’s the case that has transfixed France. Prosecutors say that for almost a decade, Dominique Pelicot repeatedly drugged his wife and invited strangers to join him in raping her. The prosecutors say that she was assaulted by dozens of men as she lay unconscious and that her husband filmed most of the encounters and then filed the videos in digital folders, including one titled “abuse.”

When Mr. Pelicot’s trial opened last month, his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, waived her right to anonymity and spoke with remarkable, withering poise. She has become France’s feminist hero: Women at protests in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux yell, “We’re all Gisèle.” Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him and has said, straightforwardly, “I am a rapist.”

But there are 50 other men in the dock with Mr. Pelicot. Most of them are charged with the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot. More than a dozen have pleaded not guilty; some have argued that they were tricked or were told that Ms. Pelicot was pretending to be asleep because she was shy.

Feminism has long been interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, in how women deprived of knowledge are deprived of power. In the past few weeks, we have been brutally reminded that ignorance or the claiming of it can also be a convenient tool of the powerful. Consent requires an effort to know the desires of the other, while rape requires the complete disregard — the cancellation — of the other, of allowing oneself to have awareness of only one’s own pleasure. Indeed, drugging a woman into complete submission seems like a particularly obvious manifestation of a man’s desire not to know.

“I don’t accept being called a rapist,” one defendant protested in court. “I’m not a rapist. It’s too much for me to bear,” he said. He went on to explain how much he’s learned about consent since his arrest: “The magistrate told me: Even if you’re married, a woman doesn’t fully belong to you.” “Maybe not at all,” the judge corrected, perfecting the defendant’s sexual education in court. “Yes, women don’t belong to men,” he replied. “I hope they’ll teach that in schools. It took me 54 years.”

One defendant said that he was “destroyed” when he learned what had happened. “I will never get over it,” he told Ms. Pelicot in court, as if she had been raped without the knowledge of either the perpetrator or the victim. Pressed, he described it as an “involuntary rape.”

Mr. Pelicot kept meticulous video evidence of most of the assaults, so the defendants cannot dispute the material facts. The only defense they have available is to say that they did not know that what they were doing was rape because they did not know that they did not have the consent of Ms. Pelicot. Some have argued that they went to the couple’s home to have filmed sex on the assumption that Ms. Pelicot was pretending to be asleep but thought she was participating or that they understood that Mr. Pelicot could consent on her behalf as her husband. (“She’s his wife. He can do whatever he wants with her,” one defendant said.) One argued that he did not know what “consent” meant.

A growing number of European Union countries have “yes means yes” sexual consent laws, but France still defines rape as a sexual act committed through “violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” This trial has reopened the debate about whether the definition should be changed. Without a requirement of affirmative consent, an accused person can argue — as one of the defense lawyers in this trial did — that “without intention to commit it, there is no rape.” The system insists that effort be expended to try to divine the true intentions of men who are accused of committing a sex act on a snoring woman.

A recent Ipsos survey revealed significant progress in the understanding of rape since the beginning of the #MeToo movement in France, but some one-fifth of French people still said they do not view forcing their partner to have intercourse as rape, and nearly 10 percent said that forcing sex on someone who is drunk or asleep or incapable of expressing consent is not rape. Among men ages 18 to 24, it’s closer to 30 percent. (“To me, rape is grabbing someone in the street,” one of the defendants is reported to have said.)

It appears to have been easy for Mr. Pelicot to find men who were willing to participate in the abuse of his unconscious wife; many of the accused men lived within about 40 miles of his home. If their number makes them monstrous, taken one by one, they’re sadly normal. Men with families and jobs — a journalist, a firefighter, a nurse, a civil servant. One apparently missed the birth of his daughter while he was at the Pelicot home. According to reporting by Le Monde, 72 of the 83 men Mr. Pelicot approached on the internet forum À Son Insu (Without Her Knowledge) or on Skype said yes. Of the minority who declined, it doesn’t seem that any of them bothered to call the police. Presumably they also did not want to know.

Valentine Faure is a contributing writer for Le Monde.

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