‘Neither before nor after did they ask themselves the question of Gisèle Pelicot’s consent’

On September 12, 2020, Jean-François Mayet, on call at the prosecutor’s office in the southeastern French town of Carpentras, was informed about the arrest of a man called Dominique Pelicot, who had been caught filming up supermarket customers’ skirts. At the time, Mayet had no idea that, four years later, alongside his colleague Laure Chabaud, he would be standing up in court to request sentences for 51 defendants an extraordinary rape trial, before the local, national and international press. In the nearby city of Avignon, on the first of two days of closing arguments from the prosecution, on Monday, November 25, the prosecutors’ tense bodies, at times choppy elocution and gazes fixed on the typed sheets laid out before them were revealing of the daunting magnitude of their task.

The prosecutors lacked the vigor you could rightly expect of them, as they spoke on behalf of society. The previous week’s closing arguments by Gisèle Pelicot’s two lawyers, Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau, had set a high bar, in terms of both form and substance. It was not surpassed. However, the two prosecutors’s studious austerity fundamentally echoed the tone of this hearing, which has been dominated from start to finish by the plaintiffs. Indeed, Mayet’s first words were for Gisèle Pelicot, praising her “admirable resilience” in insisting on an open trial, against the initial advice of the prosecutor’s office.

“It was out of a protective approach that we had called for a trial behind closed doors,” he explained. “But we were unaware of your strength of character, no doubt increased tenfold by the violence of the crimes. And you were right, Madame.”

“This trial,” continued the prosecutor, “has shaken up our society in its relationship with the other. It highlights the shortcomings of certain human beings in terms of their needs and desires, and in terms of understanding the desires of others. It reveals the inability of some men to be symmetrical with women. Everyone here went to [the Pelicot home in] Mazan to have easy sexual intercourse, to satisfy a need, a desire in which the other’s place was non-existent. Neither before nor after, did they ask themselves the question of Gisèle Pelicot’s consent.”

Some hundred aggravated rapes

Chabaud then took on the role of opening the closing arguments against the 50 defendants (the 51^st is on the run) gathered in the courtroom – or rather, against 49 of them plus one, Dominique Pelicot, “the keystone of this case.” He himself, she underlined, is responsible for around 100 aggravated rapes, stretching from 2011 to 2020, “committed alone, others in coaction” and speaking to “a will to submit, to debase her, who is perhaps the person he cherishes most.” Yet also, she recalled, a “perversion that goes beyond his relationship with his ex-wife,” and one which has led to Dominique Pelicot’s being prosecuted for possession and distribution of images violating the privacy and integrity of his daughters-in-law and his daughter, Caroline.