There have been so many horrors since September 2. And now peace. “The criminal hearing is adjourned,” Roger Arata, the presiding judge at the criminal court in Avignon, said on Thursday, December 19.
After three months and 17 days, the courtroom emptied. The area around the courthouse was cleared for traffic. The feared outbursts did not occur.
The few hundred feminist activists who had come with oranges to throw them at the defendants – they were confiscated by law enforcement – sang their last songs, shouted their last cries of support for Gisèle, then left with their placards.
Silence and calm suddenly returned. The verdict was clear. Fifty-one defendants, 51 convictions – 49 for aggravated rape or attempted rape, two for sexual assault. All guilty.
The criminal court agreed with Gisèle Pelicot’s counsel: There is no such thing as “the right to err, to rape without intention, to rape by accident, to rape involuntarily, to rape by stupidity, to rape by lack of culture,” lawyer Stéphane Babonneau had argued.
“All have, in a way, made a choice,” his colleague Antoine Camus had hammered home, including those who claimed to have been deceived by Dominique Pelicot. “All made the choice to take advantage of a body none of whom could seriously fail to perceive as incapable of expressing consent. They all chose to impose their vision of what constitutes consent in sexual matters. The ‘manipulation’ necessarily stops at the bedroom door.”