The Mazan rape trial must lead to a ‘wake-up call’ for French society, a lawyer for Gisèle Pelicot, who was drugged and raped for a decade by her husband and strangers he recruited on the Internet, said on Wednesday.
At the opening of the case in the Vaucluse Criminal Court, Ms. Pelicot gave up her right to a closed-door trial.
In doing so, she "invited the whole of society to ask itself questions, to become aware, to change mentalities, for a future that would finally break with a violence that we would like to see as being from another age," attorney Antoine Camus commented.
"How, in France in 2024, can a woman still be subjected to what Gisèle Pelicot was for at least 10 years?" Camus continued. "How can 50, but in fact 70, men - several of whom have never been identified and are not on trial - be found in France to sexually assault this body?"
Banality of evil
Referring to the videos of the events, shared by the victim's husband on the Internet, Camus recalled that Mrs. Pelicot was so inert ‘that you would think she was dead, to the point where you had to roll her body over to move it."
Speaking for an hour, he called on the court to serve "justice and truth" by convicting not only Dominique Pelicot, ‘orchestrator’ of the decade of rapes at their marital home in Mazan, southern France, but also his 50 co-defendants, "all of whom had free will."
Each of them "contributed to this monstrosity and allowed a woman's ordeal to continue," Camus asserted, “it's Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.”
‘The time has come to recognise that rapists are not necessarily serial offenders, that you can rape someone once in your life. There is no such thing as a rapist profile. We need to distinguish between the sexual predator, who hunts down his prey, and the rapist, who chooses an opportunity."
Mr. Camus also dismissed the possibility of any impairment of the defendants' judgement, in response to the ten or so defence lawyers who, on Wednesday morning, submitted this alternative request to the court for 33 of the 50 co-defendants.
Victim chose to 'transform this mud into noble matter'
"All of them chose to give up thinking in order to give precedence to their impulses," the lawyer said.
He called on the court to take "clear" and "firm" decisions, particularly on the question of the intentionality of the rape, an argument put forward by almost all of the co-defendants, who acknowledged the materiality of the facts but not the "intention to rape."
"Gisèle Pelicot would have every reason in the world to be hateful today, to set men and women against each other and to castigate male sexuality in general," said Camus, but her "choice to have her voice borne by two men was not made by chance, it was a carefully considered decision.
"Gisèle Pelicot has chosen to transform this mud into a noble material and to go beyond the darkness of her story to find meaning in it: she is counting on the court to help her do so," her lawyer concluded.
