The Daily - France’s Horrifying Rape Trial Has a Feminist Hero

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.After months of testimony, verdicts are expected as soon as this week in a rape trial that has both horrified and captivated the people of France.Catherine Porter, who has covered the trial, discusses the woman at the center of the case and how, with a single decision, she has turned the power dynamics of the #MeToo era on their head.Guest: Catherine Porter, an international correspondent for The New York Times based in Paris.Background reading: France’s horrifying rape trial has a feminist hero.Dominique Pelicot says he invited men to rape his wife, whom he had drugged. The French media call them “Mr. Every Man” because they come from such ordinary backgrounds.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobauro. This is The Daily. As soon as this week, after months of testimony, verdicts are expected in a rape trial that has both horrified and captivated the people of France. Today, my colleague, correspondent Catherine Porter, on the woman at the center of that trial, and how, with a single decision, she has turned the power dynamics of the MeToo era on their head. It's Wednesday, December 18th.

Catherine, it has been a really long time, and I am very glad to be speaking with you. Me too. It's nice to be back with you, Michael. So we're going to be talking today about a case that when it first began to reverberate outside of France where you are, really shocked the world. And then as even the most shocking things do, it kind of receded from our collective consciousness, but not from yours. No. Oh my God. And I think it hasn't receded from the French consciousness either because once you put your mind to it and you lock your eyes on it, it's really hard to tear them away. of a rape trial in which 51 men are on trial at the same time for raping or sexually assaulting

the same woman. So I think that even if you just hear that much, it's so much to handle, but there's all these other elements that have made this case impossible to look away from. And the most important one is the woman at the center and the way she has conducted herself throughout this trial and her decision really to use her own private torment and hell as a force for greater good to change society. Well, to understand how the woman at the center of this case does this remarkable thing, let's start at the beginning of this case.

Sure. So this case begins in the end of 2020 and it involves a married couple living in the south of France, Gisèle Pelicot and her husband Dominique. They had been married for about 50 years and had retired from the Paris region and moved down to this small, idyllic town. And in many ways, they lived a very idyllic life. He was going for long bike rides.

She had become a big walker, they had three children who they're very close to and seven grandchildren who would come down for long weekends. And by all accounts, they were very happy, except for she was suffering some weird medical problems. Her hair was falling out, she had lost quite a bit of weight, but most notably, she had these increasing blackouts. And he was driving her to different medical appointments to try and figure out what was going wrong. And then one day in September, things began to really change. Her husband, Dominique, is caught by security guards filming up the skirts of women in a nearby grocery store,

and they call the police. The police come and they take not only his two cell phones and cameras he's using, but they go back to his house and get his laptop and some other electronics. And they discovered something pretty shocking on them. They found these pictures and videos of a woman who seemed to be unconscious being raped and some screen captures of conversations about raping her. So there is something very dark happening just under the surface of what looks like this very idyllic life. Yeah, that is right.

When all this is happening, Giselle is in Paris helping take care of some of her grandkids. So she only learns about it from her husband when she gets back, and he only tells her about the arrest at the store, not anything that the police have found on his electronics because he hasn't been confronted by that either. He says he was caught filming up the skirts of women, and he's in tears. He apologizes. And she says her reaction is,

I will stay with you, because I've always stood beside you, and I will forgive you. And their life kind of returns to what it was beforehand. Mm-hmm. And then, in November, the cops call her and say, do you know what your husband's been charged for?

And she says, yes, I do. I'm a little worried about it, but we're talking about it and we're going to work on it together. And they say, well, we'd like you to come down when he comes down for his next meeting at the police station. So that morning they get up, they have breakfast, she says, totally normal conversation. They get in the car, they drive to the police station. He goes in to meet with some police officers, and she goes in to meet with others.

And they unload a bombshell to tell her that the life as she has known it is nothing, nothing like what she thinks it is. What exactly do they tell her? They tell her that these videos they've been looking at on her husband's electronics are of an unconscious woman being raped by him, and they believe it's her. And they believe not only that her husband has been drugging her in order to rape her, but he has been inviting strangers into their home to join him in raping her.

An unfathomable piece of information to absorb, I have to imagine, because in this moment, she is hearing that her whole life is not what she thought it was, and that the man she's married to is a monster. Not only married to, she's been with him since they were teenagers. She's built her entire life around this man. She has said that she contemplated

committing suicide that night. Wow. Because it would just be almost impossible to conceive of or to accept that the person that is your person has been so terribly betraying you. Mm-hmm. And just to be very clear, because it almost seems impossible to wrap one's head around this, she, if I'm intuiting from you correctly, has no inkling of any of this.

No, and it's even worse than that, Michael. Remember I told you about those horrible symptoms she had been suffering? The hair loss, the weight loss, but most worrying the blackouts. Well, in the end, you know, he was driving her to all these medical appointments, and it was the drugs he was mixing into her food and drink that were causing those symptoms in the first place. Wow. And in the meantime, the police are continuing their investigation. They find this hard drive in the couple's garage and on the hard drive, they find about 20,000 photos and videos, most of them filed in a folder that Mr. Pellicoe had labeled abuse and these are

videos and photos of The rape scenes in that bedroom at night when he's inviting men over he's cut into a separate little either video or or photo To keep for himself and through these, you know 20,000 little data points plus using his Skype conversations, they start tracking down these men and start arresting them in waves over many months. And what do we learn about these men accused of this unbelievably horrible act? Well, in the French press, they started calling them Monsieur Tout Le Monde, Mr. Everyman,

because really when you look at them, the guys who have been charged range in age from late 20s to in their 70s, their grandfathers. Many of them are fathers themselves. They kind of span all the range of middle class or working class men in small town France. They're truck drivers, they're carpenters. One of them is an IT specialist in a bank, another is a journalist. A number of them have history of drug or alcohol abuse abuse and some of them have their own history of

sexual assault in their own lives as children But the thing that's the most Remarkable about them is that they just seem like you know your next-door neighbor They could be your next-door neighbor and in the end That's what really shocked a lot of French people is that they were their next door neighbors. It feels like this is normally the stage in a story like this, as we know from countless Me Too episodes of this show that we have made, where despite even the unique horrors

of what you're describing here, the legal system kicks in in this kind of predictable way. And the media world starts to pay attention in a way that focuses very heavily on the perpetrators, on the men. And the victim, the woman here, quite understandably, remains anonymous. Right. Because most victims are offered the right to have a closed trial, and most of them take it. I've covered a lot of rape trials in my career, and almost never named the victim in them.

I can think of only one other time, because most rape victims don't want their names out there, because there's a lot of shame around rape, even though it's completely undeserved. And there shouldn't be shame, but people feel culpable in some way. And so I fully expected her as a grandmother, as someone who was not a feminist activist before, to take the regular path of deciding to have her case be private. So I wrote the first story and I was very careful.

We didn't want to identify her. So she had moved out of the town and she had changed her last name to her maiden name. So we could use her name as Giselle and that's it. And then her lawyer said to me maiden name, so we could use her name as Giselle and that's it. And then her lawyer said to me that she seemed pretty sure she was going to go public. And I thought, you know, I just didn't believe it because I thought there's no way that the 71-year-old grandmother would,

once she got into court, decide to use her full name and to be the face of such a traumatic series of rapes. But in the end, she decided, in a very poignant statement, that she wanted shame to change sides. She thinks there's no place for shame on the side of the victim. It should be placed on the side of the accused. And she makes this really brave and unusual decision to open her trial to the public and use her married name.

In other words, to use her husband's name. Right. So she decides on the day that the trial opens that she will be known publicly as Giselle Pelléco. We'll be right back. So Catherine, take us inside the courtroom into this trial and walk us through how this remarkable decision ends up influencing how the case plays out. Well, it meant that I could be in the courtroom together with many other journalists. I'm inside the courthouse now.

It's a big room. There's a raised bench behind which five judges and two prosecutors sit. And then the very wide box that was built specially for this trial into the room. The courtroom was nothing like a courtroom I've ever reported in. It had been retrofitted for all of these accused. The defendants are starting to come in. Many have hats, sunglasses, and surgical masks on to try and protect their identities.

And what's really noticeable is they appear to be a full range of ages, styles, looks. Some are very skinny and gaunt and the other has, I'm looking at, has quite a big paunch. It's a full spectrum and you really get that sense sitting here where I'm looking around at Just All it's like being in a bus all sorts of people they're sitting all around Me as a journalist in the back of the room But also right up against madame pelico who's sitting against one wall Behind her two lawyers and in front of her and all around her Are the accused men who

are charged with raping her. From what you're saying, the scale, the enormity of the alleged crime here is just physically inescapable in the room. The enormity of the crime, the number of men, but also what I was saying before, just the fact that you really sort of physically and literally can see this idea of Mr. Everyman. And at the center of it all, quite literally, the scene is Giselle Pellico. Yeah. Madame Pellico comes in that first day with her two lawyers and her three children trailing behind her. And she literally embodies this idea of not being ashamed.

She's so dignified. What do you mean? Well, you know, just imagine. This would be a moment of great nervousness, of fury, of anger, of probably emotional crisis. And yet, from the first moment, Madame Pellico has been literally the picture of poise and grace and calm. She's like a classic Parisian grandmother. Her clothing is perfectly appointed, not too beautiful, but also just neat and tidy.

Her hair, she's got a nice bob. Her head is held high. And when she took the stand the first day, she described how her life had fallen apart that morning when she stepped into the police station and how she is making this decision that she wanted France to look at rape straight and she thought that this was the time for the country to have a big conversation around what it means to be raped and how prevalent it is.

She says this out loud, which sounds a bit to me like the words of a civil rights figure, not a French grandmother. Yeah, she says this out loud. And not only does she say this, she and her lawyers fight to have these videos play in court in the public. Videos of her sexual assault. Videos of her sexual assaults. Many of them.

Because many of the men are denying that this was rape. They basically saying they believed that she had consented to this and that they hadn't intended to rape her. And here they have, intended to rape her and here they have Unlike most rape victims. They have evidence of what had exactly happened in that room. They have videos Hmm. So after lifting the veil of anonymity that so often surrounds the victim. She's now making sure That there is no anonymity whatsoever Around the conduct of the accused men.

She's making sure that every graphic, horrific detail of this case is aired publicly. And you know, when they are played in court, this real awkward silence descends. And after a few minutes, many journalists stop looking at the screens because it's so uncomfortable. Her snores are filling the courtroom. The evidence of her unconsciousness.

It's just she is, I mean, one of the doctors in the case described her as a corpse. And she sits there throughout. I have never seen her leave the courtroom while one of those videos is playing. It's hard for me, Catherine, to fathom what kind of a defense can be put forward by the dozens of men, many of them in this courtroom, knowing what's on those videos, these audible sounds of her being asleep.

So what are they saying or do we expect them to say in this trial in their own defense, if anything? Right. I mean, most cases of rape are he said, she said, but here is there's a library of proof. And yet, most of the men say what almost every man says in defense when it comes to rape, that they thought she was consenting. Most of them say that they had not come to rape her, but that Mr. Pelico had invited them over for a threesome and had either explained to them that she was pretending to sleep

and it was part of their fantasy that she be woken up by this stranger together with her husband, or some say that they were told that she had taken a few sleeping pills just as they got there to help her relax because she was shy. And a few by the end were saying that they believe that Mr. Pellicoe had also drugged them. That even though in the videos they seemed totally normal and weren't sleeping,

were very active, that they have no memory of what happened in there and they believe that somehow he had slipped something into a glass of water and had drugged them. And since we're talking about the defense of these men, what has her ex-husband said in his defense? He has pled guilty. He has said that he was traumatized as a child and that he had these impulses that just got stronger and stronger and he couldn't help himself and that his wife did not deserve this and that he loved her despite all the evidence

To the contrary so he is in no way denying that the worst Conceivable version of this is exactly what happened Right. He's in fact saying that these men who say they were tricked or They didn't understand that she was drugged, that they're all lying, that he says, clearly I am a rapist and all of these men in the room are rapists just like me. You had said that Giselle Pelico wanted to change society with this approach to the trial,

by letting herself be named, by opening it up to reporters like you. So the question is, has she accomplished that? And if she has, how exactly? Well, let me tell you what I've experienced going to the courtroom. The first few days, there were just a few reporters. And then by, I would say, the second week,

there were not just many more reporters. There were crowds and crowds of mostly women coming to get a seat in this courthouse to watch her. Wow. I'm standing outside the courtroom and people are leaving and there's a walkway that has formed of spectators, mostly women outside the...

And they are applauding Madame Jalico while she walks out. You can hear them applauding, saying bravo. And when she would leave the courtroom at the end of every day, they started to form an honor line and line her route to applaud her and cheer her. And that crowd has not subsided. You know, I met a bunch of feminists

that are part of a small feminist organization in Avignon in the courthouse. They've been going regularly to watch the trial. And at night, they have been taking what they've heard inside the courtroom and pasting it on the walls of Avignon in a way to kind of shock the city, I think, and shock the country to listen to what these men were saying in the rooms. So some of them that I passed on the streets

on the way to the courthouse were like, it was an involuntary rape, or it was an accidental rape. Or one that really stopped me was, I raped her with my body, but not with my mind. It feels like if this scene outside the courtroom is any indication that what Giselle Pellicoe wants to happen around shame and rape culture,

it's actually already starting to happen. She is effectuating this change herself. Yeah, the response has been enormous. People are talking about this around the dining room table, on the radio, in the newspapers. The stories in the newspapers have just been erupting. Men are talking about toxic masculinity and needing to change it. Women have been talking about consent and teaching consent in the classrooms because that's something that has not been happening in France.

Now she's really launched this very large, profound conversation and you can feel it reverberating out across the country. it reverberating out across the country. It strikes me that the unintended consequence of these long-time practices that we use when it comes to rape, of shrouding a victim in anonymity, which makes so much sense for so many reasons because of the shame you described that they've had this unintentional consequence that we haven't really thought that much about which is we end up focused so little on the women who have had this experience. had this experience because they mostly remain anonymous. We end up spending so much of our time focused on the men. And what's changed here is that Giselle Pellico has said, not just that she's gonna switch up the question of shame, but she's gonna switch up the question of basic power.

Right. I mean, it's amazing to watch her in those videos because she's so objectified. I mean, she is not a human being. She is a sex doll, basically. And she has taken something that she's so objectified and become, you know, a fully formed, very powerful person. Something else, Michael, that really resonated with me is that one of her lawyers said, you know, in most cases, trials when you keep it private is just you, the victim, facing the accuser alone in a room. And Gisele Pelico invited all of France into that room with her.

And all the world, all of us. Right. And I think she's felt incredible support because of that. You know, on the last day of the court before the final statements, the judges asked her if she had anything else she wanted to say. And she got back up and she said, you know, at the beginning of the trial, her family felt ashamed of the name Pellico, but she felt that over the past four months, she was sure that the name Dominic Pellico would be long forgotten. But the name that people

remember from this court case would be hers, Giselle Pelico, and that already her grandchildren are proud to have that name. Well, Catherine, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Ukraine says it has assassinated the general who led Russia's nuclear defense force. The general, Igor Kyrgylov, was killed when an explosive device planted inside a scooter

was detonated on Tuesday morning near the entryway to a residential building. It was one of Ukraine's most brazen assassinations since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago. And... This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation. On Tuesday, New York City prosecutors charged Luigi Mangione with first-degree murder in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. The charges branded Mangione a terrorist and portrayed his alleged murder plot as a political act. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lin and Eric Krupke with help from Rob Zipko

and Olivia Natt. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sego-Lenn Lestradek. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro.

See you tomorrow.