In college, I was raped by a seemingly nice guy I knew. To me, this is a banal description of a fact, but if this sentence makes you uncomfortable, I understand why. I talk about it this way to emphasize how my experience is not unique.
In public debate, we view rape as an exceptional event, something that only happens in extraordinary situations. Pop culture – especially crime shows – has taught viewers to think that a “real” rape is committed by a stranger in a dark alley. However, most sexual assaults take place in situations where the victim knows their assailant.
I was thinking about this while friends and I were discussing the horrible affair of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband, to whom she had been married for many years, regularly drugged her and invited dozens of men to come and rape her at her home. them. More than 50 of them are now in the dock – of all ages, some in their twenties, others in their seventies – for raping her while she was unconscious.
Drugs and threats
Last week in New York, Sean Combs, also known as “Diddy,” found himself in court, accused of sex trafficking and racketeering. Prosecutors say he hired sex workers for parties he called “freak offs” [que l’on pourrait traduire par “délires de ouf”]then forced them into sexual intercourse by drugging and threatening them.
This case follows the release in May of a video dating from 2016, where we see him dragging Cassie Ventura, his girlfriend at the time, by the hair and hitting her in the corridor of a hotel. (She later filed a lawsuit against Combs, who promptly agreed to an out-of-court settlement.)
These cases are so terrible, so far-reaching, that it is easy to miss how much they have in common. In both cases, the man at the heart of the trial is accused of committing rape or confessed to raping or assaulting a woman he claimed to love (a wife, a girlfriend).
An everyday reality
Together, these cases involve dozens of men who are accused of having facilitated these acts, or even of having participated in them when they thought they could escape unscathed. It’s also easy to forget how much these cases have in common with
