The Pelicot Mirror; Or Consent, Manufactured

January 2025

Consciously at least, I meant to present myself in court on the fourth and last day of the first instance in 2022. I must have silenced my alarm while half asleep because I woke to a call from my lawyer. “Restez à la maison,” she said: “Stay home. It’s just the defense’s closing arguments.” I mumbled a thank you and hung up. When I woke again a few hours later, a text said deliberations had begun. I tried to imagine the jurors in conversation. I had spent the last three days attempting to mask my obsessive scrutiny of their body language and facial expressions, but I’d never heard any of them speak. These six voiceless men were instructed to judge whether the rape I had reported to the police six years prior was sufficiently in evidence. This — my lawyer had insisted — was what the verdict meant, but I hadn’t managed to divorce myself from the sense that they were also judging if I’d told the truth about the rape specifically and about myself in general. I made my way to the grocery store that morning at odds between the exhilarating sense of having slept through the defense’s closing arguments and the angst inherent to the question: what will they think of me — already pondered, but now — if I’m not there?

One of the earlier articles documenting the Pelicot trial — known locally as the procès des viols de Mazan, or the Mazan Rape Trial — was published in September of 2021. It reports that, in 2020, Dominique Pelicot — a retired electrician-turned-real-estate-agent-turned-businessman, residing with his wife of nearly fifty years in a nearby village — was caught on security footage up-skirting women at a supermarket in the town of Carpentras. It further reported that a decade earlier, Dominique Pelicot had been arrested for a nearly-identical offense in a grocery store in Seine-et-Marne, near the couple’s former residency. On that instance he had been released following the collection of a DNA sample and a fine. At the time Gisèle Pelicot was not informed of the incident by her husband or police: “If I had known about the first arrest I might have left him,” she is reported to have said on the stand, pausing before she added, “or not.”

On September 12, 2020, “Mr. Pelicot” — as his ex-wife would refer to him in court — had come home from grocery shopping and mentioned a bit of a run-in; a bit of a voyeuristic blunder.  It had seemed to his wife, at the time, unlike him. Meanwhile, a search warrant for the couple’s residence in the Vaucluse region was issued; cellphones, hard drives, and computers seized. Later that autumn, in the wake of this police search — with its ensuing discovery of a digital folder entitled, quite simply, “Abuse,” containing 20,000+ audiovisual files, and unequivocal footage of an unconscious Gisèle being raped by dozens of men from 2011 onward — that law enforcement would inform the victim of the myriad crimes perpetrated against her by her husband and a host of assailants. The former and several of the latter were placed in detention awaiting trial, and the dissolved couple’s adult children convoked from the capital to empty the Provençal home in a matter of days. The woman anonymized in early coverage as “Françoise P.” was reported to have divorced her husband, moved to a distant province, begun psychotherapy, and reclaimed her maiden name. With one successful probatory act so rare it might as well be a miracle, the police had rescued her from the perpetuation of unimaginable brutality.

I first read about the Pelicot case the morning after my last day in appellate court this spring, just shy of eight years after I’d pressed charges. Victims and perpetrators anonymized at that point, « Pelicot Case » had yet to enter the international lexicon, and as I read — “Affaires de viols de Mazan — le procès se tiendra au Palais de Justice dAvignon” on France Bleu Vaucluse — and then the first paragraph — “51 hommes vont comparaître pour viol aggravé,” “fifty one men to appear in court for aggravated rape,” reflexively I put down my phone and closed my eyes. “Fifty-one” was giving me a head rush. I wondered how they would fit them in the court room, and then how many would appeal. Through the final months of 2024 headlines parroted that the Pelicot case — and the heroism of its primary if not solitary victim Gisele P. — would redefine how sexual violence against women is prosecuted, in France and perhaps the world. In the intervening period, fifty-one defendants have been handed down sentences varying from a few years to the French maximum of twenty for the charges at hand. Seventeen have since appealed their sentences. And, most significant for the future adjudication of this crime, two legislative proposals have been submitted to France’s National Assembly, both with an eye to writing a consent statute into rape’s current constraint-focused legal definition. 

Article 222-23 of France’s Penal Code defines rape as “any act of sexual penetration, of any nature, or any bucco-genital act committed upon another’s person or that of the author, by violence, constraint, threat, or surprise.” Absent aggravating circumstances, the crime is deemed punishable by fifteen years of criminal reclusion; Article 222-24 enumerates those aggravating circumstances that incur a maximum sentence of twenty years. Neither article makes any mention of the victim’s behavior before, during, or after the violation, nor is there any mention of the presence or absence of consent. “Violence, constraint, threat, or surprise” all refer to the actions of the aggressor, not the response of the victim. France’s nineteenth-century definition of rape was, in fact, based on a consent statute — in which the victim’s perceived behavior is paramount. Rape in this context was a misdemeanor; punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and tried before a correctional rather than criminal tribunal. Not until 1980 — after the lawyer Gisèle Halimi’s work on 1978’s Tonglet-Castellano case — did France re-qualify rape as a crime to be tried before the Assize Court. At that time consent was excluded from the definition. In theory, a victim could “consent” to being raped like one could “consent” to being mugged or murdered. 

If the victim’s behavior might be absent from the Penal Code, it resonated when Gisèle Pelicot was quoted on the stand as saying she felt that she was the one being treated like a criminal. If her unwavering responses have won our reverence, less examined were the judicial mechanisms that participate in making her assessment a familiar one. The attempts to pierce her credibility in court were broadcast throughout France and then around the world. Couldn’t it be possible, defense attorneys asked to no magistral objection, that she, Gisèle Pelicot, was maybe a bit of an alcoholic? a bit of a disavowed exhibitionist? implying here some tacit “consent.” Or else, that a perfectly understandable misunderstanding on the matter might be possible. It’s a line of questioning more or less familiar, and dissuasive, to us now; to women who have been through court themselves as well as to those who have contemplated and decided against pressing charges. To see it happen to Gisèle Pelicot – Nils Christie’s  “ideal victim” at seventy-two years old, rescued by the state, the crimes against her overwhelmingly in evidence – was confirmation of what many women already believe about rape proceedings. If the lawyers could cast aspersions on her, the  “ideal victim,” then surely no woman could hope for a reputation sterling enough to avoid being dragged through the mud for daring to exercise her rights. When defense attorneys use this sort of rhetoric  — consent-centric rhetoric — they are willfully distracting from the fact that such insinuations have nothing whatsoever to do with the law. Highlighting the plaintiff’s good behavior — in court and in the media, as in the crime itself — has the effect of naturalizing the dissection she’s subjected to; distracting from its violence. So it’s a particularly perverse kind of irony when the arguments for “change” catalyzed by the Pelicot case should result in an inclusion in French law of the very notion — consent — famously leveraged against victims in court. Especially where France has committed itself to protecting the victims of gendered violence from secondary victimization by the justice system, but has yet to encode a single rape shield statute into law.

My lawyer had forewarned me not to expect any particularly high-minded arguments in the days to follow, but I hadn’t realized they’d be crass. Before the jury the next day, the President of the Court resumed the defendant’s statements in a question.  Was it true, “Ma’am,” as the defendant claimed time and time again in depositions, that I had been “in heat”? I asked if this sort of language didn’t generally refer to female animals in French as it did in English. The President of the Court nodded solemnly, the question stood. “No,” I heard myself answer into the small microphone on the stand before me. “I was not in heat.” I was for an instant stupefied by the words I had just been compelled to utter in the country’s highest court of criminal law. Such bad-faith invocations of consent – or estrum, as it were – are the defense’s favorite strategy.

Is the French legal system’s failure to adequately prosecute violence against women an instance of culture having far surpassed the glacial pace of codified law — in which case changing the law might be a solution — or is its institutionalized misogyny the logical consequence of a benighted culture? Behind the opacity of our institutions, after all, are individuals, shielded here by a bureaucracy subject to little oversight. What is in fact at issue might be less the verbiage of the French penal definition than the manner in which France’s Penal Code and its Code of Penal Procedure are wielded and applied by judicial actors themselves.

Nowhere does France’s Code of Penal Procedure obligate plaintiffs to submit to psychological or psychiatric evaluation, but doing so is  in the adjudication of sexual violence in particular. I would read the investigative judge’s ordinance for my evaluation for the first time pending appeal in 2024, my lawyer having cautioned me: “I don’t like giving the dossier to my clients. Sometimes you drown in it.” Having read others since, I believe it to be more or less standard. It mandated the following points, among others:

  •   To note aspects of the complainant’s personality ; […]
  •   To determine the complainant’s level of intelligence ;
  •   To determine psychological or psychopathological anomalies in the complainant; disturbances or deficiencies liable to disrupt their psychic equilibrium or contact with reality or to influence their behavior; and, in the affirmative, to describe and specify the conditions responsible ;
  •   To indicate, at the time of events, the complainant’s level of sexual maturity and understanding ; [sic]
  •   To analyze the circumstances surrounding the complainant’s bringing of charges; to seek and describe potential factors influencing the complainant’s statements, notably elements indicating a suggestibility that may have influenced the circumstances in which preliminary statements were collected and in general, making any relevant psychological and psychopathological observations regarding the complainant’s life history and the charges at hand ; […]

When I arrived at the psych evaluation in 2021, the court-appointed expert looked me up and down and said, “You’re very conventional.” It wasn’t a word, conventionnelle, that I’d heard much, and I apologized: French was my second language, I wasn’t sure what she meant. “You present well.” It was winter, and I was wearing a grey coat. I had brushed my hair in anticipation of the appointment. Unsure how to respond, I thanked her, and sat. Two hours of biographical narrative and q&a followed. Finally, she pointed to a box on a small side-table and instructed me to open it. “Are you familiar?” she asked brightly. Peering up at me was a multi-colored abstraction; skeletal, I thought. “It’s an ink-blot test,” I answered. I wondered why my lawyer hadn’t mentioned this. She nodded, “I’d like you to tell me what you see on the cards.” In spite of myself I let out a thrum of nervous laughter as I thought this is a fucking joke, but “Okay,” I said, ever conventional. I reiterated, first, that French was my second language. Could I please keep a French-English dictionary open on my phone. She pursed her lips and nodded. I looked at the first card on the deck. “A buffalo skull,” I said. Buffle, in French, is buffalo, but as I contemplated the monochrome form on Card 1 the word “buffle” as an utterance struck me as ridiculous. I was misremembering it. I asked if I could check the dictionary. In her report, sent six months later she had written that my reiteration that French is my second language was an act of“further resistance” to the evaluation. “Since she has no trouble at all in this regard.”

 On the afternoon of September sixth, 2024, court-appointed expert psychologist Bruno Daunizeau testified before the court in Avignon. He had been mandated by the investigative judge to carry out Gisèle Pelicot’s psychological evaluation. As this court-appointed psychologist recounted, during their meeting in December 2020 he had passed Gisèle Pelicot a sheet of blank paper and asked her to sign it. Ms. Pelicot had obliged, thus failing Mr. Daunizeau’s so-called “blank page test.” This, he said, was the mark of “a disposition toward following directions unquestioningly.” According to Daunizeau himself, quoted by L’Express, ninety-eight percent of those to whom the test is administered sign the paper. The outcry was brief. Bruno Daunizeau maintained that this test is the product of much clinical experience. No movement to restrict such psychoanalytic testing within the judicial system is at work. But the effectiveness of such restrictions is well established: in the twenty years that followed California’s 1981 ban on the compulsory psychological evaluation of victims of sexual violence, the number of victims bringing charges doubled.

It was after dark when my lawyer called again to inform me that we would reconvene for the verdict in a half an hour. Considering that the facts herein declared consistent by the court and its first jurors constitute crimes provided for and reprimanded by the articles 222-23, 222-23 subsection 2 – a slew of legislation follows; a line break in the court minutes here is followed by “condemns.” The President of the Court read off the length and rehabilitative clauses of the sentence and declared the hearing’s dissolution. The buzzer that went off at the beginning and the end of each audience and recess sounded once again and I rushed to stand. Pavlovian, I thought, annoyed.

My vigilance turned on itself in the days that followed. When I put on clothing that I hadn’t worn in court and caught my reflection in the mirror the sense of non-identification was a kind of discreet abyss. Having been vindicated by a jury of my peers — an outcome I’d heard was vanishingly rare — my disquiet shifted from what will they think of me to what would they have thought of me — if. If I had narrated myself differently; seemed less “conventional” in my winter coat and brushed blond hair. Was that what felt like cheating?Or else was it the frame that narrative, and testimony, is: its necessary exposition and description of the inciting incident; its regretful gaze, and the rough edges that it slices off or staples under. To tell the whole truth about my self would mean I knew it, and I did not. Article by single article I swapped garments into and out of the outfits I’d worn in court, until I could put on a pair of jeans or sneakers without the nagging impression that I was out in the open in a perilously untested image of my self. I knew it was paranoid. I spoke of this warped mirror stage to no one until it passed.

I would briefly be relieved, and then embarrassed of the feeling, that my proceedings had ended before I’d ever heard of Gisèle Pelicot; before I saw the outpouring of support before the courthouse in Avignon and all the unfamiliar women who waited for a stranger outside the courthouse every day. At first I was envious, but then I imagined emerging from cross-examination to flowers and applause and couldn’t square it with the setting. Who, I wondered, did it serve to portray a woman’s exercise of her (limited) rights as an act of heroism? What are we whispering to ourselves when we elevate, a woman who survives and testifies to her experience, if not that such a fate is reserved only for a privileged few? For whom are such conclusions opportune?

 Kind, well-meaning people close to me told me in those years that all of it was “brave,” but I never did manage to appreciate the sentiment. I would try to keep the edge out of my voice as I responded as politely as I could. “Destitute all I did was / stand up straight,” writes Dionne Brand in Nomenclature for the Time Being. Some days I would loop it in my mind for a little while; feeling resentful, desperate — braced in my resolve, perhaps — but not brave. Gisèle Pelicot said as much herself: this wasn’t courage, what she was doing, but determination. Today her denegation can be found in bold font atop an article in Paris Match, a French tabloid magazine devoted to celebrities and high society gossip. In the photograph, clearly posed, she angles toward the camera, expression serene. “I want women who have been raped to think, ‘Ms. Pelicot did it, we can do it, too.’” If the sentiment of solidarity is moving, we might pause before personalizations of such scale. Open court audiences for rape are held across the country on a weekly basis, though few have ever been as well attended to as the Pelicot hearings. Few crimes are as unconscionable, few police investigations as successful, and few plaintiffs and their dossiers as unimpeachable or mediatized. Thus in the immediate aftermath of the guilty verdicts pronounced for Dominique Pelicot and the fifty other defendants by the panel of six magistrates in Avignon, media and social attention skipped from the performance to the punishment. As for the victims ushered into the courtroom in her wake, and Gisèle Pelicot herself upon appeal? With legislation pending, their fates will be determined in part by the judicial legacy the case will leave behind, and if those changes work for the exception and the rule.

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