French women are protesting in the thousands to support Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband is on trial for inviting more than 50 men to rape her.
They line up in front of a courthouse in southeastern France, from morning to evening, and have gathered in the thousands in cities across the country. They hold signs reading, "one rape every six minutes," "not all men but always a man," and "giving in is not consenting."
They chant: "Rapist we see you, victim we believe you."
Women across France are rallying in support of Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old reluctant icon whose husband is on trial in the city of Avignon for systematically drugging her and inviting dozens of men, 50 of whom are now his co-defendants, into their home to rape her over nearly a decade.
The shocking case has sparked what many women in France call a long-overdue reckoning over "rape culture" and systemic sexism in the way the judicial system handles sexual violence.
Allegedly, they didn't. Multiple men were contacted through a swingers website, and allegedly led to believe she was a willing participant pretending to be asleep, instead of what she really was, the victim of a disgusting monster, drugged and undressed without her knowledge, for the pleasure of a sick monster.
To the point where one of her abusers, fully aware of what he did, wrote to her to apologize from jail, realizing what he had done under false pretenses, and aware that by not doing his due diligence, he raped her in the literal sense of the word.
Yeah, I feel sympathy for those deceived. With kinks like that due diligence is critical, but they were unknowingly and unwillingly party to harm. I imagine that that’s going to haunt some of them forever.
It’s definitely important to keep the focus on the primary victim, what was done to her is the stuff of nightmares, but I can definitely feel sympathy to all who were deceived here.
This is making me really angry. They knowingly and willingly had sex with her without getting her consent because they didn't believe it was important enough. They had no problem with someone else speaking for her. This is part of what she is trying to bring attention to and you are pretending these men are victims. I am disgusted. Due diligence? Really? This is rape not a fucking business transaction. The fact that they could be so careless about her bodily autonomy and need no consent from her is damning of them and of you for defending them. Fuck everything about this.
You’re right. At times, such as there, I drastically overapply Hanlon’s razor. Failure to get her confirmation that she wanted what her husband said was not excusable in any way for any of them. There is no lens by which it’s an acceptable misunderstanding.
So would I, and I also wish nobody did meth. A lot of dangerous things have been normalized by many people, to the point where they get so used to them, that they seem normal and relatively harmless to them, only because their "normal" is so fucking far from the socially acceptable normal.