“Isn’t free will what links all the accused together?” ask Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers – Libération

This Wednesday, November 20, the lawyers of the civil parties Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau tried to show how, behind the 51 accused, it was the culture of rape which was at the heart of this historic hearing.

The two lawyers took the stand with a “responsibility” double: that of“auxiliary of justice” and that “of men of [leur] generation”. Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to accompany Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau did not “nothing of a coincidence”, said the first before the Vaucluse departmental criminal court. For this woman, whom her ex-husband raped and had raped in a comatose state by dozens of strangers for nine years, it was about affirming the importance of a «conversation» between the sexes, theorized by the philosopher Manon Garcia, present in the room and to whom Antoine Camus referred. A way of calling for their assistance in this work of major societal transformation that is the fight against violence. Both lawyers pleaded being aware “expectations and hopes aroused outside this room by this trial which is already being described as “historic” because we collectively, viscerally, urgently want it to be so,” introduced Antoine Ca