Episode 58: The Pelicot Trial with Manon Garcia

I really at times had the feeling that I was going crazy.

So I put as a constraint on myself that I needed to write it live.

And I ended up sending the manuscript four days after the end of the trial.

Wow.

That's an insanely productive work ethic that I'm very impressed by and a little intimidated.

Yes, but also, it was the condition of my survival.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Waver Donnegan.

Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrienne, today we are going to be talking about a sensational and really quite disturbing trial in France, the trial of the attackers of Giselle Pellico.

Before we get started, just a very obvious, gigantic trigger warning.

This one really deserves it.

I think we're going to discuss some things that you may not be comfortable with, in which case, absolutely okay to skip this episode and listen to our next one, or wait until you find yourself in the right frame of mind for this.

If you want to Google the case a little bit beforehand to decide what your exact tolerance level is, we totally understand.

Just take care of yourselves.

So, Adrian, how much do you know about this?

I followed it pretty closely, but it's just such a staggering trial and at such a staggering scale that I wouldn't be shocked to find out that there are entire dimensions of this that I didn't pick up on.

I feel like this was covered a lot more in the European press than in the Anglophone press.

I know The Guardian has done some very, very good work on it, but by and large, I don't remember seeing it that frequently in the New York Times and places like that.

So I'm sure that there are large gaps, and I'm both trepidatious and excited to have those gaps filled to some extent today.

Yeah, so we're lucky to be joined today by Manon Garcia.

Manon is a professor of philosophy at Freu Universität in Berlin.

She has also taught at Harvard and Yale, and she is the author of several books, including We Are Not Born Submissive, How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives, and The Joy of Consent, a philosophy of good sex.

And she is here visiting Stanford University, so we're really lucky to have her.

Manon, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

I'm very excited to talk about this.

trial with you.

So my guess is that the knowledge base of our listeners is going to vary widely.

There's going to be people who know a lot, maybe everything about this trial.

There are others who may be hearing about it for the very first time.

Can you give us a little bit of a

30,000-foot view of what this trial was about?

Yeah, so factually,

it came out in 2022, 2023 in French press, and for most people in Le Monde, that there was something that had happened in the south of France near Avignon in a small town called Maison,

where a guy called Dominique Pellico had drugged his wife, raped her through what is now called chemical submission, so use of drugs to subdue her, subjugate her.

So he had raped her unconscious, and he had invited a lot of men to come and rape her as well.

And he filmed these men raping his wife.

So the police found the videos, or rather, should I say, he showed the police the videos,

because that's part of what is very disturbing about this trial, is that he gave the police all the evidence.

And so he had gathered 20,000 videos of his wife being raped.

And the police managed to see that there were at least 70 men on these videos, and they managed to identify 50 of those men.

So the trial, so there was a trial that happened last fall where 51 men were put in trial, Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men,

and 49 of them were present and one was on the run.

So the trial is the trial of the rapes of Gisel Pelico by her husband and these 50 other men.

But on top of this, and I think it's very important, there's also the fact that he took pictures of his daughter and the wives of his sons, so naked pictures, voyeur pictures, and in the case of his daughter, pictures where it looks like he has drugged her as well and maybe raped her, but this was not part of the trial.

The question of knowing if there was actual rape of his daughter was not included in the trial, only the fact that he had taken pictures.

And there's one more specificity: that he also went on to chemically submit and rape the wife of one of those 49 guys.

So it was also that rape.

So it's this enormous trial with 51 accused men.

Some of them came only one time to rape Giselle Pedico, some two, three, four, five, the maximum, I think, being six.

Those rapes

happened between 2011 and 2020.

The accused were aged, I think, between 20 or 22 and 75.

So

very

large age range.

And

yeah, I think that's

the gist of it.

What was interesting is that initially in the press, they said all these men had been recruited on this website called Coco.

So Coco is a website that works a bit like Reddit.

So now it's closed, but that used to work a bit like Reddit.

Plus, Plus was a chat function.

And what we had been told was that all these men had been recruited through a sub-reddit kind of forum called Without Her Knowledge, where men were sharing pictures and videos of their partners taking without their knowledge and exchanging tips about how to subdue their wives, etc.

Turned out in the trial that it's not as clear as that.

It looks like some men were on that forum, some other men were just in the general forum and were recruited by Dominique Pericot.

Dominique Pericot wanted to say that they were all completely aware that she was drugged, that she would be unconscious, that she was against it.

It turned out in the trial that it doesn't seem to be that clear.

Yeah.

I guess that's some of these men were recruited from other parts of the COCO website, you know, perhaps where where they had gone seeking more plausibly consensual activity.

And some were recruited from an explicitly non-consensual sexual force forum.

So some are saying this was

something like swingers recruiting a third person,

that it could look like typical libertine activity, that they didn't know that you would be drugged, etc.

But of course, what has made this trial so visible, so important, is that in French law, in similar cases, the victims have a right to say they don't want the trial to be public.

And usually they don't want the trial to be public because they're ashamed.

And Giselle Pericot had decided initially to go on with a private trial.

And in order to prepare for the trial, she has watched the videos.

And she explains that after a while, she got really mad and she decided: no, like, I shouldn't be ashamed about this.

And so, this should be public.

People should be aware of what happened.

We should show these videos, and I shouldn't be ashamed.

And so, she made the decision of making this trial public.

And so, the courthouse in Avignon, they had absolutely not planned that this would happen.

And so, it was also

very concerning the way it worked: that the courthouse was completely unprepared.

There was not enough room for the audience, for the journalists, et cetera.

And it became a worldwide phenomenon where people were talking about it, et cetera.

I don't know, like Tarana Burke, who created the hashtag Me Too, came to Paris to meet with Giselle Pelicot during the trial.

So this gives a sense of how big it became.

So Giselle Pelicot decided to make it a public trial and to require that everyone could watch the videos of the rapes.

And so it means that anyone who attended the trial could see these extremely graphic rape videos.

Aaron Ross Powell, so let me make sure I understand what the rights of the victim are in this legal system in France, because my understanding was that the decision that Giselle Pelico was given was between

retaining her own anonymity at the expense of not being able to publicly name the men who are alleged to have attacked her, or of having their identities made public along with hers as well, and that this was her prerogative.

Is that correct?

I don't know exactly.

I think the question is rather that a criminal trial in France is supposed to be public by default.

Because the idea legally is to say in a criminal trial, it's not the victim that is suing the perpetrator, it's the state.

It's society that is suing for the damage that has been done to society.

And so because it's society suing the accused, it needs to be public because it means that any member of society can be part of the trial, can check that things are going the way they should be going, that the law is applied in the right way.

And there are exceptions that are made when there is the assumption that it could be bad for the victim, that victims would not want that anyone can see what happened to them or hear what happened to them.

So, minors, for instance, are in that case, that systematically it's closed to the public.

And in the case where

the victim has a reasonable claim that it could be bad for their image and for their privacy, they can ask to have the right to keep the public out of the trial.

And so, when that happens, I think journalists can still come, but they are expected to not name the victim, not name the defendants, et cetera.

When you refuse this system that's called the recluse, so the closeness of the trial, then the name of the victim is public.

But I don't know exactly what are the rules about naming the perpetrators.

I think the idea is that until they're convicted, you're not supposed to give their name because that goes against their presumption of their innocence.

So what was done is that people would use their first names and the first letter of their last names in the press up until the verdict where a lot of newspapers have published their whole names.

But what I found interesting is that there was a discussion.

So

I had a press pass.

So I was in the WhatsApp group of the journalists, et cetera, and there was a discussion about should we publish the actual names even once they're convicted, not so much for the reputation of those men, but because the families of those men have been attacked, and especially their wives and their mothers and their daughters, etc.

And so there was a question of protecting the environment of the accused by not publishing the names and also making it then not so much an individual problem as a social problem.

So you mentioned already you went to the trial yourself and the way I'm told it was in Avignon, it was clearly the courtroom had been sized for a much different trial before Giser Pelicot decided that she wanted to have this in public.

I sort of stumbled over that in reading the coverage because I thought this is 51 defendants.

Like you need a big courtroom just to fit all of them in there.

There's something interesting there, right?

Like

there was a business as usual that could have unfolded and that Pelicot at Gisel Pelicot was very much going against, right?

She wasn't sort of proceeding the way the justice system clearly thought she would want to.

Yes, so that is interesting because then she reused this slogan that had been brought forward before by feminist groups in France of saying shame must change sides.

And so she's not the author of this slogan, but she made it very publicly known, et cetera, by saying, look, like the institution itself is presuming that I'm going to be ashamed.

And so everything, all the organization is around me being ashamed, and I'm not ashamed.

Sorry.

And so I think, yeah, one element that I found very interesting as well is that when she explained why she made it public, is also that she, so she has left her husband, she has left her house, she moved to a completely different region.

And because she's a very private person, she didn't tell anyone about what had happened to her.

So she had made a lot of friends and they knew that she, something hard had happened to her, but she didn't want to talk about it.

And when the first articles in the press about the case came out, people of course had no idea that it was about her.

And they started saying, of course, this woman knew, like, how can we believe that this woman had no idea what was happening to her?

That's really ridiculous.

And so she saw these people that were her friends, that were well-meaning people, that were already caught in this sort of victim-blaming attitude.

And so that was important for her.

She was very aware that she was doing something politically important by making this trial public.

But just to respond to your thing about the courthouse, they still put it in a very big room.

So it's in a room where you can have 300 people because there were these 50 guys, their lawyers, the assistant of the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judges, and room for still like 40 journalists.

It just ended up being that there were 350 journalists.

Apparently, they'd have to have the defendants queue up in front of the courtroom, which is something I read in one report, I think, in The Guardian, which it just was so striking that like, I mean, we have seen group rape trials, but this feels unprecedented just in its scope in the sense that

we'll talk about the broad range of these people and that these, you know, one of the lessons that French media clearly did take away from this is that these are not outsiders.

These are pillars of their community in some way that have done this.

But also just the sheer quantity seems significant in the sense that if you have to figure out how to get the number of accused into your courtroom, like, well, then that is a massive problem.

Aaron Powell, right.

The sheer scale of the crime and the sheer number of defendants points, I think, to the Pelliko trial's stand-in as really a referendum on gender violence much more broadly, right?

It is, or was treated as an encapsulation of this broader question of women's freedom and men's domination over women in particularly sexual life.

Aaron Ross Powell, and we might just add for our listeners who are not that familiar with the trial.

So you already mentioned that the website turned out to be a bit of a red herring.

The number of defendants that were not from the Vaucluse is like tiny, right?

Everyone was within.

Yes, so it's a website that works with geolocalization.

And so the only two guys I think that were not from the region, it's because they raped Giselle Pelico during the Pelicos vacation.

So

it just turned out that they were just geolocalized somewhere else.

I'm sorry, I'm

I'm laughing, but sometimes like I just have to laugh about this because it's

absurd and horrible.

But yeah, so there's one guy that happened to be one of the guys that I was very interested in and

I don't know, fascinated by in a certain way

that lived next to Paris, but it's because the Pedicos were on vacation in their daughter's house.

And so he's just a neighbor of the daughter.

And he came to the daughter's house.

So if I understand this correctly, and this might just be like ironing out a little more the details of the crime before we get more into the trial, but these rapes took place, if I'm correct, over the course of like a decade, right?

And Nine years.

2011.

So we know what we know is from 2011 to 2020.

But there are more and more court cases coming out that look like probably

Dominique Perico has murdered women before, has raped women before.

So

he's a serial

rapist, serial killer.

You mentioned his photographs of his daughter and his daughters-in-law, right?

He seems to have a kind of broad, like non-consensual, secretive, illicit photographing, right?

You said he had like gotten cameras in the bathroom, and that's how he got photos of his daughters-in-law, you know, undressed from the shower.

And then he was also habitually drugging his wife, it seems like fairly regularly, like at a rate of once a week or so.

Aaron Powell, yeah, so it

increased over time.

So, as in

people who watch crime shows, et cetera, know this about serial killers or serial

whatever, that usually they start slowly and it becomes more and more because like their urges become, I don't know, more and more regular.

Addiction behavior, yes.

And so it looks like in 2011, he was probably having, I don't know, like a guy every three months or six months to come.

And when he was arrested, it was more like three times a week.

Oh my gosh.

And what is

very striking is that during these 10 years, Giselle Pelicot

was aware that something was wrong with her because she started feeling very tired, having moments where she didn't remember what had happened.

And so this is also part of the trial that was horrifying and disheartening is that this woman spent 10 years thinking she was dying, that she had health issues.

And so she went to see a lot of doctors saying something is wrong with me.

Her family was very concerned.

Dominique Perico brought her to a lot of those doctor appointments saying, you need to help my wife.

She's really struggling.

And so she was convinced she was dying.

And had he not been arrested, she would have probably died.

So the doctors in the trial said the dosage that he was giving her, et cetera, was impairing her more and more.

And she would have probably died had he not been arrested.

Aaron Ross Powell, it's almost chemical gaslighting, right?

That's like it destroys the ability to make sense of your life in ways where you would be able to put it together and say, wait, this keeps happening when this happens, right?

Like we all know with narcotics, they can erase that variability.

Yeah, because it started happening when they moved out of their Paris region for retirement.

And so what happened then is that she was way more isolated than she was before.

They were seeing their kids and their grandkids much less often.

And he had more control over her because they were just the two of them.

But she was also going very often to see her kids and grandkids and take care of them during school vacation, etc.

And so part of the narrative was that when she was at her kids, she would be such a good mom and a good grandma that she would exhaust herself so much that the moment she would come back home, she would be unreachable by phone.

She would have these absences.

She would be so tired.

And that it was the result of taking care of everyone.

And so, of course, part of it was also everyone feeling guilty or making mom be so tired that when she arrives back home, she's like sleeping all the time.

So it was very

well thought.

through, I guess.

It's like you're saying that.

I'm thinking, okay, well, the Saj's demands of patriarchy become like an accomplice in the rape, right?

Because the symptoms of her drugging and abuse get laundered into this other kind of feminine virtue of the hardworking, like domestically responsible mother and grandmother.

Aaron Powell, yeah, you're applauding her for her self-sacrifice, but it is, you're right.

Like in some way, it understands the patriarchy only too well and gets out of it exactly what it needs.

Aaron Powell, but one thing that has been haunting me, of course, is that, as you said, Adrian, it's a scale that we've never heard of.

But the question is, have we never heard of it because it doesn't happen?

Or is it that this time we hear about it because of the perversion of Dominique Pericot, that is the fact that he's cataloguing everything and filming everything?

Because

It is very easy to think, oh, this is horrifying.

This is horrible.

and it just, this guy was completely insane and was doing these serial killer kind of things.

But as Adrian, especially, you may have heard of, right at the end of the Pedico trial, there's this investigative journalism thing in the German radio that infiltrated a telegram group of 70,000 men that were exchanging recipes to chemically subjugate their partners and rape them.

So 70,000.

And so there's this very long

YouTube documentary about it where they show how guys

ask each other, they're like, Does she look like gone enough for you?

And then the other guys are like, yes, you should do this, this, and that to her, like sexual assaults, etc.

And then they send pictures and the guys send likes in return.

Like, it's a horrifying kind of thing.

And so, what is really terrifying is to think, okay, Dominique Perico, in a 50 kilometer radius from his house, found those 70 men who came to rape his wife.

So is it actually that in every house around where we live, these kind of things happen, but they just

don't get discovered?

Yeah.

I mean, we might say, you know, we're recording this in the center of Stanford's campus.

The number

of people on this campus, probably, as we're talking now, who have drugged someone and who probably are smart enough not to put it on Telegram or to videotape it, but who will just...

But they do have access to those chemistry labs, and it's the first thing they think to do when they get there.

Yeah, you know, it's, I think we're dancing around something, which is that the Pelico trial.

I'm going to sound trite, but it's like, you know, at the end of the Scooby-Doo where the kids rip off the mask, and it's the same guy guy who they met in Act One.

And it was like heterosexuality all along, right?

This is the rotten core of heterosexuality's eroticization of sexual force, right?

And it almost sort of obviates a lot of feminist discussions about the nuances of consent, right?

Because it seems to me that to the men who committed these rapes, at least in the Pelico case,

the question of her consent

was

almost irrelevant to their participation, right?

There's like kind of the radical feminist interpretation where the non-consent is in fact the source of the eroticism.

And then there's like the feminist position or the feminist proposition for heterosexuality where consent and enthusiasm can be a source of eroticism.

And to these guys, it doesn't seem like either.

It just seems like it was irrelevant, like they didn't particularly care if she was willing or not.

I might be getting this wrong, Menel.

No, I think it's true.

They just didn't care.

And I wanted to say that it's been my first time on Stanford campus.

And people may not realize this, but for someone like me, what it is to be on Stanford campus is looking at every trash can on campus and wonder, is this where Channel Miller was raped by Bob Turner?

And so for me, this campus is this case of having this case in mind that has never been seen as a case of chemical submission, but in a way is.

Like this whole thing of having all these girls, because that's how we called them.

So, all these women being so drunk that they can be raped by a trash can, like at the end of the evening, is a form of how do we use drugs to make women sexually available.

And that's something that I think is very important: is that at the end of the day, chemical submission is not GHB, rape, drug, etc.

It's all the ways in which society uses ways to make women do what they're supposed to do or what they're asked to do.

And so it can be alcohol, it can be GHB.

It can also be, as we have seen, those super, like Giselle Périquet was antihistamines and sleeping pills, you know?

And

actually, when I came back from one of my stays at the trial, I was really sick and I I was not sleeping very well.

And so at 3 a.m., I got up and I thought, okay, I'm going to try to find some cough syrup because I need to stop coughing.

And I lived in the US in the past, so I still have my stash of

CVS stuff.

And so I had this coughing syrup.

And I looked at it at 3 a.m.

I said, oh, it says antihistamines, but it's fine.

And I drank a bit of this coughing syrup.

And I woke up and I looked at my watch and it was 11:30.

And so I went to see my husband.

I said,

What happened?

He said, Well, the kids have tried to wake you up, but we couldn't make you move.

So I figured I should just let you sleep.

And for me, it was terrifying because in the Petico trial, one of the few elements that made the family very worried is that one morning, the grandkids had tried to wake Giselle up and they shook her and she couldn't move, etc.

And so in my very French dark humor kind of thing, I told my husband, I said, well, you found a cough syrup.

So if you want to pilly coat me, like it's just so easy.

It's discoughing syrup.

And so this is the reality.

You go to CVS and you can find 15 different ways over the counter to drug your wife into submission.

Yeah, I'm interested in this like alertness you develop.

I mean, like, first of all, when I came to Stanford, I had that same experience when I first got here, you know,

walking around going, where did it happen?

But it was this unnerving awareness of the presence.

And then I came to realize that actually every time I walked past a durham and probably a lot of non-residential buildings, I was also walking past the site of forced sex, right?

And that's not just something that happens to me at Stanford or just on a college campus.

It's kind of everywhere, right?

Last night, Menon, I was fortunate enough to go to Menon's wonderful talk on the Pelliko trial that she gave here at Stanford last night.

And you said something that really stuck with me about how when when you were in Avignon covering the trial, whenever you would pass a man on the street, you'd think, is that one of the 20 they couldn't identify of those 70 men, right?

And it feels a little bit like this is maybe just a side effect of developing feminist consciousness, but it is like being initiated into this horrible truth about the world, right?

Is that this kind of violence is everywhere and yet rendered somewhat invisible.

Yeah.

And I have to say that actually the Avignon

was okay because it feels like you can leave Avignon.

But where you're right is that suddenly my experience of the trial has become sitting on a bus and looking at the men around me and thinking, does he drug his wife to rape her?

Or has he done it before?

Or would he be okay with it?

Because even the guys who are not Dominique Pericot kind of guys,

what is striking is that they didn't denounce him.

So these guys on this website, a few of them didn't go, but no one called the police.

A few, a very small number, went and left, but they didn't call the police.

And even those who went and said afterwards, I felt really bad, etc., they didn't call the police.

They didn't even call Perico, being like, dude, what you're doing is really wrong.

It sounded like no one really saw a problem serious enough to do something to stop it.

And I thought, you know, I was at this trial and I thought, okay, out of the 70 guys, so I know that guys don't talk as much as women do about what happens in their lives, but there has to be some of those guys that said something to some friends about what they had done.

And why did no one say anything?

It felt like this is the boys' club, you know, in terms of solidarity.

There's one of the guys who said, oh yeah, I told my friends about what happened and they were like, dude, this was a rape.

And I realized it was probably a rape.

And I thought,

okay, but then

no one did anything.

Yeah.

Imagine telling your buddies, like, I cut someone open with a chainsaw and they're like, dude, that sounds like a murder, man.

And then like, and then they drop it.

Yeah.

Right.

This is something I wanted to ask you because, you know, in your, in your talk, you talked about these women who would come to the trial who were clearly personally and emotionally invested in the outcome, right?

Not people with a personal stake, not friends of Giselle or of the accused men, but like women who had consumed this in the media and wanted to be there and see it, right?

What did French men think about this trial?

Were they consuming this media?

What was their response?

So, first of all, there were not a lot of men in the audience.

But I was also a bit pissed because a lot of people said, oh, the entire French society is following what's happening at the Amazon trial.

And my impression was that half of the entire French society was following it very closely, i.e., the women.

And then the guys,

I mean, some followed.

And

I mean, it might sound like I'm in the whole, like, all men are terrible, et cetera.

I don't think all men are terrible, but I think like it was two different worlds.

The impact of this case on all the women I

know,

like the way it contributed to a feeling that we're really never, ever, ever safe from anything at any point was completely different from those guys who were like, oh my god, this is really sad.

Like this is really bad.

Oh, Dominique Perico is a monster.

And I felt like for a huge majority of men, it was really easy to see it as what in French we call a fait ver, so just a random fact that has happened.

Initially in my book, I had written a chapter about my dad that I ended up taking out, mostly because I was worried that he would sue me.

But where he visited me and my family and my my partner was not there during the trial.

I hadn't started going at the trial at that point.

And

and my dad is just this very

old school macho macho guy, musician, very cool, very artsy, but very macho.

Kind of unfortunate that he had four girls, but so we torture him on a daily basis with our feminism.

But he was there chilling, you know, like I was alone with my two very small kids.

My husband was not there.

He didn't put any plate in the dishwasher.

He didn't help in any way.

But then he told me, like,

you're going to write about the pity coat trial, but who cares?

And I was like, well, actually, dad, a lot of people care.

And he's like, oh, that's really weird.

I mean, you do, you, whatever.

And the next day, we're sitting at lunch.

And my dad being my dad, he's decided to move to Brazil because he's a musician and he's retired now.

And so moving to Brazil as an old white guy is the thing to do.

And

I find it a bit strange.

So I asked him, but is it that you have a girlfriend there?

And he's like, no, actually, I haven't found one.

So I just see prostitutes all the time.

And, you know, like, you got to do what you got to do.

And he starts like,

and we're like eating this duna in a Turkish snack in Berlin.

And I'm like, this guy, like,

he knows I'm a feminist scholar.

And he's just like, yeah, you know, I'm in Brazil.

I have to go see prostitutes and have paid sex.

And a part of me thought, at least they're getting paid for taking care of him, so maybe that's better than if it were the sort of white guy going to a developing country and finding a young woman.

But

I'm telling this anecdote because I found it so striking that in the same 24 hours, he could tell me who cares about the petico trial.

It's just a random, terrible thing that happened.

And then he would tell me that, of course, he has needs.

And so, of course, he will use sex workers to fill out his needs.

And those needs only involve other people's consent in a very attenuated way.

Right.

Yeah.

It's interesting because you said that some of the men who were on trial for raping Giselle Pellico would talk in maybe tangentially similar fashions about the absence of sexual availability and resorting to this as if it was a justified thing to do, as if like her entitlement to her body was on a same or lower level than their entitlement to sexual service, right?

Like one guy, he was like, oh, well, my wife gave birth recently and she hasn't been sexually available.

So I had to do this.

And it's like, no, you know, you didn't.

Yeah, so I think that's one of the things that really made me extremely pessimistic about what it is that I'm trying to do in my life and in my scholarship.

As you mentioned earlier, I wrote this book about consent.

I haven't chosen the English title.

I wouldn't have.

Like, I don't think consent is this super joyous thing that is so amazing, but that's another problem.

They were playing off the joy of cooking, and I thought that was a little like the famous cookbook.

And I was like, oh, that's a little strange.

Is it mostly French food?

Is that what they took that?

Yeah, so actually, the fact the parallel with the joy of cooking was the parallel that I liked about the title.

I think the reason why they suggested this title was more the joy of sex, you know, like this sort of old book about sex of the 70s.

But what I liked about it is that I think it's interesting to think about sex as something akin to cooking and to like having skills and sharing good things and how we communicate about sharing good things.

So my Frenchness was happier with the parallels, the joy of cooking, than with the joy of sex.

But

in my book about consent, one of the things that I'm very committed about is to say it is a mistake to say that rape is sex minus consent.

Like this sort of equation of you have rape, you have sex, it's more or less the same thing, but in one case you have consent, in the other case you don't have consent.

It's always sounded extremely bizarre to me.

And there's this work of this philosopher, Susan Bryson, that I really admire.

The book, it's really a wonderful book called Aftermath about her own experience of rape and and how, like, what philosophy can do about this experience of rape.

And she says, I could never tell my husband, let's do these things that the rapists did to me, but because I consent, like, it's sex.

She says, this is absurd to compare those two experiences.

This is completely, these are two things that have nothing in common.

And I was very convinced by that argument.

And then I went to this courtroom and I saw that for these guys,

there's no fundamental difference between what they do with their wife and what they did to Gisele Pericot.

And it sounded, so you were talking about this guy who

touched me particularly because we're exactly the same age and we have kids that are exactly the same age.

So his kid was born, like my first kid, in September 2019, and he went on to rape Giselle Pericot, I think December 27th or 28th of that year.

And so, of course, like it's been particularly

interesting or, yeah, I don't know, interesting might not be the best word for me, but I really thought, okay, like, what would it have been for me if my husband had gone on December 27th of that day to rape a 70-year-old woman when I was still like feeling destroyed by having given birth and trying to breastfeed and having this very new, fragile baby, et cetera.

So I was, I really wanted to understand what happened in his head.

And he said, well, look,

my wife had a very difficult pregnancy during which we couldn't have sex.

And then she had a very difficult delivery.

So that meant I couldn't have sex at that time with my wife.

And it was a bit like, then, da, you got to do what you got to do, you know, you go rape Giselle Pelico, of course, like this is just.

And that jump

sounded like such a crazy jump for me.

I understand that it might be really hard to not have sex with your partner and go through pregnancy the way she does.

And that you have, you feel like you would really want, but I don't know.

You can masturbate, you can watch porn, you can.

There's the whole internet out there.

Yeah.

There's a lot of steps you could take before I'm going to go rape a drugged stranger.

And I think that's in some way the terrifying dimension that you're pointing to.

I think the story with your dad made me think, like, of course, focusing on Dominique Pelicot is turning him into a serial killer, right?

It's the way, like, oh, the son of Sam, no one knew.

Like, oh, the BTK killer, no one knew, right?

Well, they didn't go on message boards being like, hey, if you want to write along, right?

Right.

And those crimes were largely done in solitude.

Exactly.

Complete solitude.

We're using a script that we've developed for people who truly act by themselves.

That's apparently never what happened here.

All these crimes are essentially social crimes.

You exchange these trophies, as my guess, with other men.

And then the other thing that it makes me think of is that, like, surely there are people who...

Wife gave birth, they had certain urges, they went on that website and were like, well, I'm not doing that, right?

That number

must likely be larger than that number.

So

in some way, that sort of has it exactly backwards.

This implicates probably way more than even the 70 people, to say nothing of the 50.

It implicates vast swaths of society, it seems to me.

Aaron Powell, yeah, although there's still a very big selection bias.

I mean,

I've been working on sex for a long time, and I've been interested in sex for a long time, and I had never heard of that website.

And so I think there is also a question of who goes on those websites.

This was a website that was very famous apparently for finding drugs and finding sex work.

It was a sort of

one foot into the dark web kind of thing.

Like, I don't know how to access the dark web.

And so I think there's a selection bias of who reads those kind of things.

And this is what the guys have said.

Like,

it's difficult to go to the police and say you were on that website because that's already an admission of you did something wrong.

And what if the police talks to your wife and tells her that you're being unfaithful?

And so.

So it's not, it's not a subreddit.

This is a little bit more.

But it's also like it had enough of a traffic that he was able to get.

You know, I kept thinking throughout when I was.

consuming coverage of this trial, I kept thinking of that line from Jermaine Greer.

And like, you don't have to hand it to Jermaine Greer, but I just had this line.

She goes, you know, most women have very little idea of how much men hate them, right?

This sense of

something that is, I think, most horrifying about the Pelletko trial is that

there was concerted, effortful, and widespread planning and coordination to hurt this woman over a very long time, and she was largely completely oblivious.

And there is this strata

of

male life that is rendered largely invisible to women, but which can hurt them very severely.

But

on the one hand, I agree.

And on the other hand, I wish they would even hate her.

I thought it was even worse than hating her.

It's that it was never part of the equation.

She was completely invisible.

That's one of the things that I found really world-chattering in that trial is to think, wow, like I feel like I'm inhabiting a world with men, with women, with non-binary people, and that

we're making a society together, we're making a world together.

But for these men, it's like we do not exist.

And in a way, it's even worse than hating us,

it's not part of their equation.

And on the day of the verdict, so usually on the day of the verdict, or even on any day of the trial, you can come as your family or a friend, a support person.

But for reasons of space, the accused were only allowed to have one person per defendant.

And you won't be surprised to hear that out of these 50 people who were there, I think 45 were women.

And so you had these women who were there that were the wives, the mothers, the daughters, the sisters of those men who had packed these bags because the men would be going to prison, a lot of them.

And

for reasons of space, they were not allowed in the main courtroom, which I found really cruel, actually.

They were put in a broadcast room room with some members of the press, including me.

So the room was divided in two.

You had these women, these support people, and journalists on the other side.

And

it made the verdict even more excruciating for me because,

first of all, for every

person that the judge was sending to prison, you would hear screams and you would like, there's this woman who came out to throw up and so we were really seeing what it meant for these women but even before the verdict started so I was waiting at the coffee machine and there was this young woman who was crying and crying and sobbing

and it was her dad next to her and and he was like

it's gonna be okay like he was a bit embarrassed he said like

Don't be overreacting like this and she was trying to give him coffee from the coffee machine.

And you could tell that she thought maybe it's the best coffee he will be having for the next 10 years, and she felt so bad that she didn't have enough coins, etc.

And

the way he was reacting to her absolute despair, you could tell that A, it had never occurred to him,

it was never part of the equation, the impact it could have on his daughter, that he would be in this trial, etc.

And that in a way, you could see that she would have a price to pay for this, for visiting him in prison, preparing things for him, carrying the burden of loving him, even if he did something really bad, etc.

And again, like it felt like these women in this room were completely invisible.

They were expected to do care work,

but They were invisible as individuals.

There were images,

you know, the saint, the mother, the daughter, but they were not people made of flesh.

And in a way, I think this is what struck me also

in this anecdote about my dad, is that I thought the fact that he can share with me so easily that, of course, he goes to see sex workers, etc., when he knows that I'm a professor of feminist philosophy,

because I know that he's not being mean to me in the moment that he says this.

It's just he has no care for what it's going to do to me.

Like, it's just not part of the equation.

Yeah.

There's something so interesting, right?

Like, I feel like Me Too had a somewhat different kind of trajectory in France than it did in the United States or in Germany, for instance.

At the same time, it's also so interesting that this kind of non-engagement, the Pele Co case, is the platonic ideal of something that

those who would always try to sort of throw up objections, get the attention back onto the accused, you know, try to relativize what has happened, right?

This is where they hit their limit, right?

This man taped everything.

It's all in chats.

She couldn't have asked for it because she literally didn't know what was happening.

She is the absolute ideal.

And so the reaction is to just not engage, to just sort of to replicate what he did, what Péticot did, and to just treat it as a nothing in some way, right?

And I think that's, it's, it's obviously easy to ignore the trial because it's just so off-putting.

On the other hand, I think it's not an accident because it is basically, it's a battle that the patriarchy can only lose, and so it just chooses not to engage at all.

Yeah, and that was very interesting to see the reaction.

So the same way you had, you know, this sort of de Neuve oped in the moment of the mitou movement in France.

We were just talking about that earlier, yeah.

We should maybe say for our listeners, Catherine Deneuve co-wrote this op-ed at the height of me to move.

Something like 50 signatures.

100 women who signed an op-ed.

So she didn't write it, she signed it, but Catherine Millet co-wrote it and other women.

So Catherine Millet is a very famous art person in France.

In which they said, we should defend the right that men have to bother women, bothering being a metaphor for sexual assault and yeah, sexual aggression of saying

this is just what men do and it makes everyone's lives better that we can be groped in the metro, etc.

And it was a very important part of signaling that not all women were in favor of the mito movement, etc.

It was a signal of like loyalty to a conception of the erotic and to sexual difference.

And I think part of what was going on was also generational that there were sort of women signaling, okay, like, guys, the young women might not give you a break, but we're still sexually available.

So, I thought there was an interesting intersection of ageism and feminism there, where you could see that it was also a way for those women who were seen as too old to be sexy by French standards to be like, well, we may be too old, but we're still fine with your patriarchal ways of acting.

So, maybe look back at us or something like that.

But it happened again with the Pedico trial that some

important intellectual women have taken the effort of writing op-eds to say, it's not all men.

Stop saying it's all men.

Stop saying it's patriarchy.

There are good men out there.

Stop making men feel bad, etc.

And there was, in general, a lot of discourse to try to find ways in which these men were not ordinary men.

And so I found it so funny how in Germany, men were telling me, oh, this is so French.

How intellectuals were telling me, there are no intellectual men there.

How like Parisians were saying, oh, it's the south of France.

So everyone was constantly trying to distance themselves from what was happening.

Not my buddies, yeah.

Or me, I guess.

Or they're unlike me.

You know, they're,

it's interesting that like for women, or for you, it unlocked this experience of like kind of universal suspicion, right?

Because of the pervasiveness of the rape ideal that the trial unveiled.

And for men, it just like for those who considered it at all, it seemed to just evoke this like separation and shutdown as opposed to like a sort of um self-critique.

Yeah, and at the same time, I mean, what I find very

interesting as a philosopher is that I'm sure that there are men who wouldn't have done it.

You know, like,

there's no doubt about this.

But the question is

who would not have done it and why?

And no one is able to give a response to this.

I feel like no one is entering this discussion of thinking, okay,

what is it in the way my sexual desire,

what is it in the way that it's shaped?

What is it in the discourse about my testosterone, etc., that would

make it even a little bit interesting to do this?

Why is it that I still decide not to do it?

Because we know that this is an option that men live with.

So what I would want is for men to really say, okay, like, what is it that makes me not do it?

And there's something very akin to the Plato discussion of the ring of Geiges, you know, like there's this thing in Plato Plato where there's a discussion to know if you had a ring that you could put on your finger where you're sure that this ring will make you invisible, would you commit all the crimes in the world?

Or is there something that would prevent you from committing crimes?

And I can think of some crimes immediately that I would commit.

You have a list, but it stops somewhere, is the point.

So, the question is, where does it stop?

And the feeling that this trial gave is that if men think they're not going to be caught,

then

they rape.

And what does it say about male sexuality?

That this is so obvious that if you're not going to get caught, then you're going to go for it.

One thing that really struck me is that among the judges that were adjudicating the case, there was one who was systematically intervening when defendants had erection problems on the videos.

He kept asking, why is it that you didn't have an erection?

Why is it that it didn't work?

He was really curious.

Why would this guy not get hard?

And there was not once the question, why did you get hard?

Why is it that you arrived?

Because we saw it in the videos.

It was this small bedroom.

honestly very ugly.

There was the TV in the background.

It was heated up at the maximum heating so that she wouldn't wake up.

You could hear her snore super loudly.

So

when you're in the day, watching the video,

you could smell that it was really gross, you know?

And so the question is,

how did you get hard?

The question is not, why did you not get hard?

Yeah.

Yeah.

How is this sexy?

How is any other sexy?

Yeah.

The thing I keep coming back to in some way, the way you describe yourself going first through Avignon, but then going back to Berlin and going through Berlin that way, this does really remind me of like,

let's say, the Eichmann trial or the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1963.

Like, this is a question that I think a lot of, you know, a lot of Jews who fled Germany in the 1930s and then came back sort of asked themselves.

Like, where were all of y'all like 10 years ago, right?

There's like a letter that Adorno writes to Thomas Mann, where he's like, I can't stop asking that question.

Every time I'm on the bus, I'm like, I'm like trying to do the math, how old these people are.

And there's a really interesting kind of dimension here where, in some way, the Pelico trial really kind of takes us out of the way rape is traditionally jurisprudentialized and pushing us towards the way we tend to think about genocide and stuff like that.

It really does feel like, you know, about the kind of structures of killing and maiming that societies are capable of.

Is there something to that?

Do you think that there is a kind of an element of kind of a watershed kind of where the idea of responsibility, both a collective responsibility, but also channeled through just an immense number of perpetrators kind of gets us closer to like what they might do at The Hague than what they would normally do in Avignon?

Yeah, so that's very interesting because of course, I mean, as a philosopher and because a recurring theme was how ordinary these men were,

like I thought about Hannah Arendt a lot.

I reread the Aishman trial book and it kept resonating in a very terrifying way for me.

And one of the questions in the trial was why did they not sue the men for a crime in France that is acts of torture and barbarian acts?

It would have made the amount of years of prison that could be given to the men, etc., much higher.

It would have meant that Perico could have gotten life, etc., instead of 20 years as he did.

And there was really something for me of wondering,

is it a political crime?

Is it something like genocide?

Is it a desire of

destroying

something of

the humanity of Gizél Pericot?

It was very probably the case.

But what was interesting is that it felt like most people could not see that.

That it seemed so normal in a way what was done.

There was this very bizarre feeling at all times that it was like, this is terrible.

This is destroying her humanity.

And at the same time,

it's completely mundane.

And so for me as a feminist scholar, and I think for you as well, it's just a feeling that we constantly have of

this extreme contrast between the extreme gravity and seriousness of what is happening and its extreme mundanity.

So how do we reconcile it?

I really at times had the feeling that I was going crazy.

So I put as a constraint on myself that I needed to write it live.

And I ended up sending the manuscript four days after the end of the trial.

That's an insanely productive work ethic that

I'm very impressed by and a little intimidated.

Yes, but also it was the condition of my survival.

So

the first time I went to the trial, I came back home to Berlin to my kids and my husband.

And I thought, shit, I can't inhabit the world.

I can't go back to my normal life.

I can't grade like these master thesis and attend like departmental meetings, etc.

Like my kids are drawing something to me, and I'm thinking about those videos of Forrest Fellasho, of Giselle Felico.

I can't live in this world.

It became unlivable.

And so, writing the book very fast was a way to say,

at some point, I need to get back to my normal life of lying to myself about the fact that this exists.

Because you can't walk in the streets.

What you were saying earlier, you can't pass dorms and constantly think probably a rape happened here and a rape happened there and a rape happened here.

And there is this sort of mass torture

happening on people because they're women.

Like,

I can't live in this world with that degree of awareness at all times.

I think about this a lot, right?

Because on the one hand, I think that the Pelico example shows the way that rape can be like a sexual and physical domination, but also there's this element of like epistemic domination, right?

It's like all these things that she didn't know, the degradation and violence being done to her that was kept from her, that allowed her to go on living with this man who was treating her in such an abominable way.

By and by women who disproportionately also had child abuse material on their computers, another group that you can do stuff to who don't understand exactly what's happening.

But then on the other hand, as feminists, and I think this is not a phenomenon that's exclusive to feminists, but it's the one I have the most intimacy with, right?

As feminists, we also need to conduct a kind of muting of our own knowledge or suppression of our own knowledge in order to remain functional in a world that enables this violence and won't reckon with it, right?

Because otherwise it's a situation where the exposure to truth will lead you into a kind of mental unraveling.

So I think about this a lot, right?

The things that are kept from us out of cruelty and the things that we deny out of like kind of a self-mercy.

Aaron Ross Powell, there was a journalist at the trial, a female journalist, because of course that that was something that I found very interesting, that a lot of the journalists there were women.

And she said that, you know, she had to go back to Paris every now and then for the

Conference de Redactions, so I don't know, like the staff meeting of the journal.

And she passed a colleague, a male colleague, who said, oh, you're covering the Pedicu trial.

I couldn't have done it.

It would have broken me.

And she was like, fuck him.

You know, like, yes, you get to not live this, but I don't get to not live this.

You know, people were like, oh, you're being brave.

It's really brave that you're going, et cetera.

And I don't know, is it bravery or just a duty?

What is our position?

How do we then lie to ourselves about the fact that it happens?

Like, I can't,

I couldn't maintain this constant awareness.

And at the same time,

like, none of my male colleagues lost sleep in the last few months, the way I've lost sleep, you know, like those images are burnt into my retina forever.

I don't know.

I gave an interview for CNN, and my husband and my mom were with my kids, and I think they they wanted my kids to be proud of me.

So they showed the interview.

They were like, oh, let's look at the interview with Mamo.

And so they sent me a picture like one minute before going live being like, we're all watching.

And you know, my kids are three and five.

And I was like, what do you mean you're all watching?

So I was very careful during the interview of not saying like bad things.

And then my five-year-old, for two weeks, every time there was a picture of an old lady, she said, Mamo, is this Giselle Pericot?

And I was like, Do I want her to know who Giselle Pericot is?

And

like, I want her to believe in a world without this at the same time, like, it's not going to happen.

But I don't know.

This question of

who gets to not know

and how do we have to

force ourselves to temporarily not know in order to keep leading a life because then I also become annoying, right?

Like, I saw in the Christmas vacation,

people were asking me questions about the trial, and it was killing the vibe at every single dinner, right?

Because I was like, oh, yeah, you know, like the moment he force rape her mouth, etc.

And, you know, people are like, this is really horrible.

Taking feminist buzzkill to a whole new level.

And said, Merry Christmas.

Yeah, I can ruin your party.

But so then you're the angry, mad feminist that is ruining everyone's fun.

And your repetition of facts is activism, which is something that we're learning so much these days, that like just to say things that happened in the world is apparently a form of activism.

And yeah, I think it's always good to turn that around and be like, what is it that you gain out of not having this said out loud?

The other thing that I think about, you know,

for our US listeners, I didn't know that France had this other crime, which would have sort of taken account of the more systemic nature of what was happening here.

And I was thinking about the fact that, like, you know, I'm a cis dude.

When I walk across campus, I clearly walk across a different campus from my female students, for instance.

They have to do very different math.

They may not want to be in certain parts of campus at certain times of night.

They certainly, if they leave campus, they don't want to be at certain places that I would probably not think twice about walking through late at night.

It always strikes me that that's also why we have hate crimes legislation, right?

Because hate crimes are ultimately about telling an entire group of people you cannot participate fully in the public sphere, right?

There will be risks for you that don't exist for other people, right?

And yet we never charge rapes as hate crimes, even though ultimately they do the exact same thing as a burning cross.

They tell you where you can't go, where you can't be, how you can't participate, and what you can't say at a Christmas party.

I mean, it's going to sound really weird what I'm going to say, but

we're still asked to see it as an act of love in a certain way.

Wow.

Like these guys, they would tell you, it's because

I love women so much, I want to have sex.

You know, like there is a way where the hate and the love

are working together in misogyny and in

it's a hatred that is using a wicked understanding of, I loved you so much and you didn't want me, and that's the last resort I had.

And in a way, it's very clear that Dominique Pericot, he started doing what he did to Giselle Pericot when they moved away from Paris, but it also coincided with a period

where she started refusing things he wanted sexually,

where she was a bit like, I've done all these things you wanted for so long, but I really don't care for them.

So please let's stop.

You can go do it with other people, but let's just stop.

And where she would leave him alone for extended period of times to go to take care of the grandchildren.

And so he says his motive was to submit an unsubmissive woman.

So part of it is I had to rape you because you wouldn't do it voluntarily.

And you put me in that situation.

So this is the typical so gaslighting.

Look what you made me do.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what you made me do of domestic violence, of yeah, of rape.

And so that's also why we have such a hard time understanding it as a hate crime.

It's because

how can love be a hate crime?

Yeah.

Oh my God.

I'm sorry, this is really depressing.

Manol, thank you so much for being with us.

This was absolutely wonderful.

Thank you.

In Bedwith, I'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.