Before the Mazan rape scandal broke out, Fabien, a married forty-year-old and father of two children, learned about cases of sexual violence from afar, without particularly emotion. “There was DSK, a powerful presidential candidate capable of attacking a black cleaning lady in a hotel. As for Fourniret and Guy George, the media system put them at the devil's table and that suited us all », says this quality director in the metallurgical industry in Marseille.
Since the opening of the trial on September 2 at the Vaucluse criminal court in Avignon, each day of the hearing has been dissected live on social networks and continuous news channels. An international media impact made possible by the refusal of closed doors and the personality of the victim, Gisèle Pelicot, 71 years old, whose dignity and courage are unanimously recognized. For Fabien, the banality of the profiles of the 51 accused, 37 of whom are fathers, and the chilling mechanism of this affair, came to shake the “peace of mind behind which men have hidden until now”.
For ten years, Gisèle Pelicot was drugged by her husband, who raped her and had her raped while she was unconscious, on more than 200 occasions, by strangers he recruited on the Coco website, filming moreover these sordid crimes. The shock wave also lies in the insistence of these accused to repeat that they are not rapists. Firefighter, lawyer, worker, truck driver, journalist… Everyman, aged 26 to 74. Our neighbors, our colleagues, our brothers.
“Knowing that these dozens of men live not very far from me, it goes round and round in my head, Fabien testifies. How can we say to ourselves: this evening, I'm going to go get a girl put to sleep on medication by her husband and then I'll get back to my life, morning coffee with colleagues, football training, life with my lady? » The father wonders: is this violence present in every man? An intimate repercussion which echoes the male voices which have been raised in the media to affirm that this trial would not only be that of Dominique Pelicot and the fifty accused, but the first trial of masculinity as a system of domination, at the time where nine out of ten women know their attackers, and where 97% of sexual violence is the act of men, according to a 2021 INSEE report.
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