No moral high ground on sexual violence: The lesson from Gisele Pelicot’s rape trial, Epstein files
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“Without her knowledge”. This was the name of the chatroom on the website Coco.fr where men of all ages – from 22 to 70 – signed up to rape Gisele Pelicot while she was drugged unconscious. This grotesque, monstrous theatre was engineered by her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot.
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In a piercing, moving but remarkably poised interview to The New York Times, she outlines her trauma. She decided to go public and reveal her identity because the world would never see the faces of the perpetrators: “regular” men, like her husband, whom women interact with every day. Pelicot’s decision to go public revealed that many more men are capable of horrific violence against women, but refuse to acknowledge their acts as violent, or even to see themselves as capable of violence.
This sordid saga could be viewed as an unusually terrible episode showcasing the depths to which a few sick minds can fall, had it not coincided with the unmasking of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s vast network. The US Department of Justice has six million pages of evidence, of which some three million have been released, containing 180,000 images and 2,000 videos.
Epstein, along with his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, ran a massive sex ring for decades involving...