'Strange logic' surrounding sexuality & rape: 'This won't happen' if husband's needs are fulfilled

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00:00The French grandmother drugged by her ex-husband so she could be raped and sexually abused

00:10by him and 50 other men for years gave her closing statement Tuesday in court.

00:15Giselle Pellicot saying it was time for France's quote macho society to change the way it looks

00:21at rape.

00:22Pellicot has become a feminist hero for pushing for the trial to be held publicly to raise

00:27awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.

00:30Selina Sykes reports.

00:33Taking the stand for the last time, Giselle Pellicot did not mince her words to the dozens

00:38of men accused of raping her, including her then-husband.

00:42Calling them cowards, she said.

00:45Rape is rape.

00:46When you walk into a bedroom and see a motionless body, at what point do you decide not to react?

00:51Why did you not leave immediately to report it to the police?

00:56In her final statement, Pellicot also issued a plea for her widely followed trial to be

01:01a wake-up call, and that rape no longer be trivialised.

01:04Dominique Pellicot, who is also giving evidence for the last time, has admitted to drugging

01:09his wife and recruiting dozens of men online to rape her.

01:13He told the court on Tuesday that he did so to satisfy a fantasy, and once again emphasised

01:19the other men's responsibility for their acts, saying,

01:23I came to do what I did through people who willingly accepted what I proposed.

01:28Only a handful of the other 50 defendants admit to raping Giselle Pellicot.

01:33Dominique Pellicot will face some final questions from the defence on Wednesday, as the trial

01:38is now entering its closing stages.

01:41Civil parties will deliver their closing arguments, followed by the prosecution, before making

01:46their sentencing demands for Dominique Pellicot and the other defendants.

01:51Sentencing will take place on the 20th of December.

01:54We're going to talk more about the Pellicot case now with Katie Ebnerlander, who's a philosopher

01:59and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

02:02Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us, Katie.

02:05Now, many of the men on trial have no previous convictions, no testified history even of

02:11prior misogyny.

02:13How do you explain their behaviour, the allegations of their behaviour?

02:17I think there's two things that we should keep in mind here.

02:21One is a quarter of the men I think have experienced sexual violence as children, or I'm not sure

02:26exactly that statistic, but a large number of them.

02:29So that opens up questions about how do we understand the effects of sexual violence

02:34in our society writ large.

02:37And then with the people who have no prior conviction, I think the question that we need

02:40to ask is how did they get involved in this in the first place?

02:44And that takes us to understand very closely what the forum was online, the chatroom Coco,

02:50on which they connected with Dominic Pellicot and organised to go and rape his then wife.

02:56All right.

02:57So let's talk a bit more about that.

02:59I mean, has the internet impacted these crimes?

03:02Would you say is online anonymity to blame?

03:05Well, think about this forum.

03:08It's anonymous.

03:09You have a pseudonym and you have disappearing messages.

03:11So across the trial, when I was there a couple of weeks ago, the jury often referred to it

03:16as a dating site, but it's not a dating site.

03:19It's a chatroom where you can buy drugs or you can buy sex and where you have a whole

03:24set of forums where you can enter and do things that you would never usually do in person.

03:30The forum allows you to have a kind of invisibility and immediacy to state your desires, however

03:36strange they may be, and never confront the resistance of reality.

03:41So what's the bigger picture here when it comes to rape culture in France?

03:44I mean, at the same time, there is another trial that's on now in France of a man who

03:49was accused of raping his own teenage daughter and inviting other strangers to do so as well.

03:54I mean, how common is this kind of thing?

03:57Well, I think what we get with the possibility to connect with a whole set of people online

04:02is the scale.

04:04So I think part of the reason for why this trial has been huge, both in France and elsewhere,

04:09is that the scale is something that is almost hard to imagine before our current technological

04:14moment, that there were 80 men involved in this case.

04:17I'm not sure how many men involved in the other case, but it is a kind of extraordinary

04:21scale that if you think if someone did this in person by contacting people at bars, in

04:26local places, it would have been a significantly reduced setting.

04:30So that's one point.

04:31A second point I want to make is about how the internet kind of changes desire because

04:36it prevents us, as lots of psychologists have shown in relation to online porn, from

04:41thinking about a delay and a mentalization, a way of thinking about another person, as

04:47not being immediately there for your satisfaction.

04:50So I wonder if the way we consume online pornography, the way we exist with our desires online, shapes

04:56some of this behavior, too.

04:58So moving forward, I mean, what can be done to perhaps try and control some of what you're

05:03saying?

05:04I mean, should more legislation be put in place?

05:06Well, you would hope so.

05:07So COCO has been shut down, not only in relation to this trial, but because SOS homophobe created

05:14an inquest against it after a lot of ambushes of gay men attacked through that platform.

05:20But what's happened since is there's a replacement site called Chat, which seems to have exactly

05:24the same functionality.

05:26So I think what the legislation should do going forward is consider how do we regulate,

05:32moderate, and understand these forums, as opposed to letting them run wild.

05:36Katie, what about the whole notion of shame?

05:39I mean, Giselle Pelico has said she's got nothing to be ashamed of.

05:42That's why she wanted this trial to be public, which is incredibly rare.

05:46It is an incredibly courageous move as well.

05:48I mean, how big a problem is shaming the victim in rape cases today?

05:53Yeah.

05:54So the question of shame-changing sides, I think this trial will have an impact on.

06:00When I spoke to some LGBTQ organizations in Avignon, people said that new allegations

06:05had come forward to them almost every day anecdotally.

06:09But another thing that happened in the trial was actually that lots of the female partners

06:13of the accused were brought into a very strange logic, whereby the jury asked them, your husband,

06:21your partner seems to be satisfied with you sexually.

06:24How do you explain that he did this?

06:26And so there's still a question and an assumption of how shame works and how a kind of normal

06:32sexuality works, where if you just give your husband enough sex, something like this won't

06:37happen.

06:38Well, that's interesting, because it also brings in another notion here, which is the

06:42notion of consent, even within married couples, established couples, for example.

06:45I mean, other countries seem to have made more progress on the notion of consent when

06:50it comes to sexual interactions.

06:52Legally, what role does consent play in France, do you know?

06:56So consent is not part of the current definition of rape.

06:59But surprise is that you cannot have sex with someone under conditions of surprise.

07:04And that has historically been understood to include sleep.

07:07So in that case, we have a really clear case for rape here.

07:14What is happening in the trial is that the language of consent is coming up, where the

07:19jury is asking the accused, were you aware that it was not possible for someone to consent

07:23under these conditions?

07:24So that suggests that there is a possible opening for consent to be understood, incorporated

07:29within that definition, although I know that's a wide debate in France, and I'm not sure

07:33how that will turn out.

07:34All right.

07:35Katie, thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

07:36Katie Emner-Landy speaking to me there.

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