Residents of Mazan, where Gisèle Pelicot was allegedly drugged and raped, hope the case will raise awareness of sexual violence
Residents of Mazan, where Gisèle Pelicot was allegedly drugged and raped, hope the case will raise awareness of sexual violence
Fifty other men are on trial for alleged rape alongside Pelicot. They are accused of travelling to commit rape at night at the Pelicots’ house, which sits tucked away on a dead-end lane at the edge of the village, with a swimming pool in its garden. Aged from 26 to 74, the men include a prison warden, a journalist, a nurse, a fire officer, a soldier, truck drivers and shop workers.
Life in the village changed when Dominique Pelicot was stopped by a security guard for filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in the nearby Vaucluse town of Carpentras one afternoon in September 2020. French feminists say that filming up skirts is sometimes not treated with the seriousness it deserves but in this case the security guard acted fast and contacted police, and the women pressed charges.
The case has raised serious questions in France about consent, online chatrooms, pornography and the scale of sexual violence. Some of the men had argued during police questioning that “if the husband was present it wasn’t rape” and “it’s his wife, he can do what he wants with her”. Gisèle Pelicot, now 72, told the court she could not have consented as she was in a comatose state.
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