If there is such a thing as a perfect rape victim, it must surely be Gisèle Pelicot. To even frame it in those terms feels wrong, reducing a decade of drug-induced violation at the hands of over 50 strange men to a form of contest, as though competitive victimhood were a sport. But as any woman who has ever experienced sexual violence and sought to talk about it will know, comparison is inevitable.
Where were you? What were you wearing? How many sexual partners have you had? How much had you had to drink? Did you lead him on? Why were you so stupid to think you could trust him?
The harrowing details of Pelicot’s story elevate her above such interrogations designed to chip away at a victim’s credibility. She was in her own bedroom, wearing lingerie that was not her own and that she had never seen before. Excluding the men who turned up to rape her, she had had only two sexual partners. She had drunk nothing, but been drugged with strong sedatives without her knowledge. She did nothing to lead them on, for all that many protested during the trial that they believed her comatose body to be complicit and consenting. As for why she thought she could trust the main perpetrator, the man who drugged her and invited strangers from the internet to rape her night after night – well, she had been married to him for 47 years.
We know all this because Pelicot, in an act of astonishing bravery (though she herself rejected the word, telling the court “it’s not bravery, it’s will and determination to change society”) waived her right to anonymity to ensure that her assailants would be named and forced to face what they had done.
The trial lasted over three months and was watched across the world. In addition to Gisèle’s husband Dominique, all 50 of the defendants were convicted; their names, ages, professions, sentences and notes including prior convictions and justifications for their crimes are neatly listed on Wikipedia. Had Pelicot not decided to go public, there is little chance that page would exist. It is unlikely we would know that Romain Vandevelde, a retired forklift driver, raped Pelicot on six occasions without using a condom despite knowing he was HIV-positive (he claimed her husband’s consent was sufficient), nor that Omar Douiri, a mechanic and bus cleaner, told the court he was not concerned about violating a woman’s unresponsive body because “It was my first threesome and I didn’t know how it worked”.
It has been just over a year since those details came to light in the trial. Now, Pelicot is in the news again with the publication of her book A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides. The subtitle is a reference to the quote she gave during the trial, “la honte doit changer de camp”: the assertion – excoriating in its lucidity – that the shame of a sexual assault belongs not to the victim, but to the perpetrator. How could it be otherwise? And yet, it is a message that resonated across the world not because of its validity, but because the almost unique circumstances of the case made it virtually inconceivable for the messenger to be dismissed or blamed for her own violation.
Most victims are not granted such grace. For those whose experiences do not make such perfect narratives – who weren’t drugged by their life partners, or whose pasts include a smattering of promiscuity, or where there isn’t hard, incontrovertible video evidence of the crimes committed – any trace of ambiguity becomes a gloss applied in heavy brushstrokes to distort the picture. Maybe it wasn’t rape rape. Maybe it’s more complicated, less black-and-white. Maybe we don’t know the full story. Maybe the victims deserved it.
This is how we see crimes of sexual violence and abuses of power justified, again and again. The cast and the scenery change; the narratives do not. The young girls systematically abused by rape gangs across the country are painted as runaways, delinquents and child sex workers. The aspiring actresses assaulted by Harvey Weinstein should have known what they were getting themselves into – after all, didn’t they get cast in the end? The victims raped and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. Their testimony is born of regret and worth nothing. They should be ashamed. It takes years, decades even, for the pressure to build up enough for the dam to burst and their voices become unignorable. And even then, victims must rehearse their pain in public before a succession of audiences – the police, the press, the public – in the hope of achieving justice.
And then a victim comes along who is impossible to ignore, who can declare that shame must change sides and be listened to, because surely she of all people had nothing to be ashamed of. That was the theme of the trial: a victory for feminism, for women everywhere.
Yet Pelicot’s memoir forces us to confront a more complex reality. The defendants objecting to the use of the word “rape” on the grounds that they had not been violent. The mayor of Mazon, the town where the Pelicots and many of the assailants lived, minimising the scale of the crimes committed on the grounds that “no one died”. The suggestion submitted to the court that perhaps Dominque’s depravity was motivated by an affair Gisèle had had years affair beforehand (his own multiple affairs need not trouble us). The lawyers’ arguments that she can be seen moving in some of the videos: proof she was conscious, proof she was enjoying it.
Gisèle Pelicot has rightly become an icon for women everywhere, her bravery a rallying cry for victims to come forward and for law enforcement to change the dynamics of how cases of rape are investigated and prosecuted. But the same culture of excuses and scorn that shapes how we view so many cases of rape and assault can be seen darkening the edges of her story, even now. What we have in the Pelicot case is not the definitive, indisputable signal that shame has changed sides. It is evidence that there is no crime of sexual violence so clearly documented and uncontestable, no victim so blameless and exemplary, to deflect the impulse to paint shame upon them.
[Further reading: Inside the decision to pause the puberty blocker trial]
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