Whether women rose collectively, or individually; whether they showed their face or spoke with a different name; whether their stories were about strangers, colleagues, friends, husbands, fathers, those who’d never met us or who said they loved us while assaulting us with hate – none seemed to truly… stick.
Instead, the stories were so often torn apart, prodded and poked, retold with the victim as the villain, the villain the victim. Otherwise, they were ignored and dismissed, not heard at all. The tears and the blood scrubbed away, while we swallowed down the shame. The upshot was always the same: nothing changed.
But as Gisèle’s story unfolded, it didn’t sound like the ones we’re used to hearing, like one that could so easily be erased. Her husband admitted to regularly, routinely drugging her and then inviting men to violate her. Fifty were identified – 33 weren’t – and now stand trial for rape and sexual assault (some accept their guilt, many don’t, claiming confusion around consent or not knowing she was unconscious). Gisèle Pélicot was in her own home. And each incident was video-taped, burnt onto film as a moving-image record of what was done to her body.
Maybe it’s this which has made the truth undeniable. The fact that the ‘isolated incident, just one man, just one woman’, argument dissolves when you’re faced with 83 men in a small corner of the world allegedly raping one woman because… they could.
And while even Gisèle, when she testified, faced questions on her own behaviour, what she was wearing, she dismissed them, treating them with the disdain they deserved. That they always deserve. And then she went one better – she decided much of how her story would be told and who would hear it, refusing to surrender the narrative to the men who always, always make a grab for it.
She sacrificed her own right to anonymity, her privacy, and demanded that the trial was held in public, in front of the media (who were shown videos of her assaults). A necessary “shock wave”, said her lawyer, so that the world would know the true horror of rape.
And now we know. All of us, not just women (many of whom knew already, let’s be honest), but men, too – who really must reckon with it. We know that it’s a gratuitously violent act often committed in the place we’re meant to be safest, our home. By men we love. And not by monsters, but by the most ordinary of men: a nurse, a local councillor, a plumber, a journalist, a butcher. All capable of the most monstrous of acts.
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