The trial of the Mazan rapes must lead to an ‘awareness’ of society, a lawyer for Gisèle Pelicot argued Wednesday before the Vaucluse court. She was drugged and raped for ten years by her husband and dozens of strangers recruited on the internet.
‘By this almost political gesture of renouncing the closed session’, on September 2, at the opening of this extraordinary trial, Ms. Pelicot ‘invited all of society to ask questions, to become aware, to change mentalities, for a future that would finally break with a violence that we would like from another age,” insisted Me Antoine Camus.
‘How, in France, in 2024, can a woman still suffer what Gisèle Pelicot suffered for at least 10 years? How can we find in France 50, but in reality 70 individuals (several have never been identified and are not tried), men’, to come and sexually assault this body, continued the lawyer.
And Mr. Camus, referring to the videos of the events, recalled that Ms. Pelicot was so inert ‘that one would believe her to be dead’, ‘to the point that one had to roll (her body) on itself to move it’.
Rendering ‘justice and truth’
For an hour, without fanfare, he demanded that ‘justice and truth’ be served by condemning Dominique Pelicot, the ‘conductor’ of this decade of rapes, at their marital home in Mazan, but also his 50 co-defendants who, ‘all, had free will’.
‘Everyone at their own level contributed to this monstrosity and allowed the ordeal of a woman to continue’, he said, ‘it is the banality of Hannah Arendt’s evil’.
‘No rapist profile’
‘It is time to understand that rapists are not necessarily serial, that you can rape once in your life. There is no rapist profile. We must distinguish between the sexual predator, who will hunt his prey, and the rapist who will choose an opportunity.
Me Camus notably brushed aside the possibility of any alteration in the discernment of the accused, in response to the ten defense lawyers who, on Wednesday morning, filed this subsidiary request to the court concerning 33 of the 50 co-defendants.
‘Clear’ and ‘firm’ decisions required
‘All have chosen to resign from thought to make their impulse prevail,’ he said, asking that the court make ‘clear’ and ‘firm’ decisions, particularly on the question surrounding the intentionality of the rape, argument put forward by almost all of the co-defendants who recognize the materiality of the facts but not the ‘intent to rape’.
‘Gisèle Pelicot would have every reason in the world to be full of hatred today, to pit men and women against each other and to castigate male sexuality in general,’ the lawyer concluded. But his choice to carry his voice through two men is not a coincidence, it is a carefully considered decision. Gisèle Pelicot chose to transform this mud into noble material and to go beyond the darkness of her history to find meaning in it: she is counting on the court to help her.
/ATS
