Episode 154 - Living with Men with Manon Garcia Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:22] David: The podcast where two philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:26] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:28] David: And I'm David Peña Guzmán.

[00:00:29] Ellie: I wanna give a content warning for this episode. We are gonna be talking at length about rape, sexual violence, and incest, including some graphic descriptions. The topic of today's episode is what's known as the Pelicot trial because the feminist philosopher of Manon Garcia has recently written a book on this called Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial.

So we will be talking with Manon in just a little bit about the philosophical implications of this particular case. I know many of our listeners are probably already familiar with this case as it was pretty high profile earlier in 2025. However, whether or not you know a bit about it already, David, you're gonna tell us some facts about this so we can have a necessary background before talking about the philosophical dimensions.

[00:01:18] David: Yeah, and the details are really important, not only for us to get a sense of what happened in the trial and the case, but also because Manon Garcia's book goes into great detail also about some of these details and in. Interprets them through a philosophical and feminist lens. And so the first thing to note about the Pelicot affair, as it's sometimes called in France, is that it has become one of the most widely publicized and covered trials in French media in recent decades.

It has been all over the media has been all over the news, and it has been followed by French people and others also internationally with great interest because it has become this litmus test for thinking about how the law responds to extreme forms of sexual violence. Now, the case is also unique in a couple of ways.

First and foremost, because the woman at the center of the trial, a woman by the name of Giselle Pelicot, who lives in the south of France, where the crimes took place, is in her seventies, and has been married for 50 years to her husband, now, ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, who was the perpetrator of these crimes.

What happened is that for the past 10 years, Dominique orchestrated the rape of his wife by drugging his wife to the point that she was unconscious throughout the night and then inviting dozens and dozens of men. The records indicate that about 70 men came to the Pelicot residence

[00:02:50] Ellie: Over the course of the ten year period.

[00:02:52] David: Over the course of the 10 year period.

[00:02:53] Ellie: One at a time.

[00:02:55] David: Exactly and Dominique found these men in a website called Coco FR, where he would tell men that he wanted them to come over and have sex, i.e. rape his unconscious wife, and for 10 years, all these men came over to the residence and engaged in all kinds of sexual acts with an unconscious Giselle, and all of this was recorded.

There were about 20,000 photos and videos of these incidents spanning a decade, and the case also was publicized because it raises an interesting question, which is what do we do and how do we deal with situations where due to the nature of the crime, the victim is entirely unaware of what has happened to her.

So what Pelicot, Dominique, would do is he would mix in an anti-anxiety and sleeping medication into his wife's drinks and dinner, and she would pass out, would not gain consciousness until the next day, at which point she would wake up often feeling very bad. She complained of memory loss, weight loss.

She also suffered from mental fogginess and incoherence. And for the longest time she thought that she was ill. She thought that she had a brain tumor, that something was deeply wrong with her, but she had no way of knowing what had been happening to her. And so this trial really captured the French Public's imagination.

Also because of the seeming normality of her husband, by all accounts, including her own, he was a loving husband who would help around the house, who would help with the kids, who at no point really showed any clear signs of being a sexual deviant or perpetrator of sexual crimes. But when the evidence came out, of course it became undeniable that he was having his wife be essentially gang raped for 10 years without her knowledge.

[00:05:00] Ellie: Yeah. And one of the things that has been really powerful about this case, which is just utterly horrific and unimaginable, is that Giselle Pelicot forfeited her right to have the trial in private and wanted to have this trial publicized in order to draw attention to the horrors that she faced, and in order hopefully to revolutionize the way that sexual violence is understood in France and beyond.

So that there could be a prevention of this happening in the future. And I recently gave a commentary in response to a paper by the fellow feminist philosopher Cressida Hayes at the SPEP conference in 2025. And Hayes has also written a bit about the Pelicot case and in general about cases where the victim is unconscious at the time of their rape, and talked about the power of counter narrating after the fact.

And she says that through her counter narration, through publicizing the trial and also insisting that she shouldn't be the object of shame, Giselle Pelicot said, shame. Has to change sides. So this was very famous in France as well. She's like, I shouldn't be ashamed of what happened to me. These men should be ashamed of what they did.

And Hayes reads that as challenging dominant structures of affect by insisting on counter narrating, humiliation and shame in the most testing of circumstances where subjectivity was absent from the very start. And so there's something very powerful in that idea of forcing shame to change sides because victims of sexual violation are so often women, you know, we're speaking about here.

Vast majority of those who are the victims of sexual violation, although certainly not all, they're often forced to feel shame and humiliation and Pelicot by refusing that in part through the counter narration, is really insisting on a new kind of gendered order. And so it, you know, is unsurprising of course, that this case has captured the attention of feminist worldwide as extraordinarily powerful.

[00:07:00] David: And she was largely successful in shifting that narrative, which is what has allowed the case and the media to really focus on the men, their actions, the shamefulness, the criminality, and the fact that all of these men lived within a 50 kilometer radius of the Pelicot residence. So one of the observations that really captivated me from Manon Garcia's book is she says, look, this guy was able to find in a random French website, 70 men who were willing and ready to rape an unconscious 70-year-old woman, if given the opportunity so either this part of France magically has a super high concentration of sexual criminals, which is unlikely, or we live in a culture of rape and patriarchy, that means that a lot more men than any of us really want to face would be ready to take this step if they were given the opportunity.

And that opportunity came with the promise, or at least with the hope of impunity and, in particular in relation to the men. Ellie, like the shifting of the shame to the men. There was a lot of discussion in French media about the diversity of men who were implicated. In this case we're talking about 50 men, 51 who were brought to trial and all convicted.

[00:08:28] Ellie: Yeah, so it was over 70 total, but they weren't able to identify all of them, and so it was fifty men plus Dominique Pelicot himself, who were brought to trial and all of whom were found guilty.

[00:08:37] David: And they were men of all social classes. So no clear economic classes are determinant also of different races and of very different age brackets. In fact, the men spanned five decades in their ages. The youngest was in his twenties at the time that the crimes occurred, and the oldest was in his seventies.

So we're talking about men of all walks of life who jumped at this horrendous opportunity.

[00:09:05] Ellie: And this brings to mind some classic claims from second wave feminists, especially during what's known as the sex wars. So for instance, the feminist, Andrea Dworkin is sometimes attributed with the quote that all heterosexual intercourse is rape because gender domination so deeply structures heterosexual intercourse.

And now she didn't actually say that quote, but something like it is really in the work of feminists such as Dworkin, such as Catherine MacKinnon, and a lot of feminists since I think including Garcia herself. Garcia's taking up this legacy in describing the way that heterosexual intercourse, while not necessarily rape itself, is so steeped in what we have come to as rape culture, that something as unimaginable as what happened to Gisele Pelicot starts to seem tragically more banal because as you mentioned, Dominique was able to find so many men within an immediate vicinity.

And so Garcia talks a bit about Hannah Arendt's notion of the Banality of Evil, which is another book that's written by a philosopher about a particular trial. In thinking of a tradition of philosophers who write books about high profile trials, what something that comes to mind for me is the book Djamila Boupacha, which Simone de Beauvoir co-authored with  Boupacha's lawyer, a very well-known French feminist lawyer named Gisele Halimi.

And there's also, you know, a number of philosophers who have written books and articles about certain trials. And I think what ties these different works together is the sense that trials such as these that really provide a sort of cultural watershed moment, reveal a lot about our understanding of the world, about our legal system and in general about things that are important for philosophers to consider.

[00:11:03] David: Manon Garcia is a philosopher and professor at Freie Universität Berlin. She's a specialist in the philosophy of Simone De Beauvoir and sexual ethics and the author of several books, including The Joy of Consent, and We Are Not Born Submissive. Today she'll be discussing with us her latest publication, living with Men Reflections on the Pelicot Trial.

[00:11:25] Ellie: Manon, welcome to Overthink. We're so happy to have you.

[00:11:29] Manon: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:11:31] Ellie: So I wanna start by asking about how you're seeing what happened to Giselle Pelicot in the context of a more general gendered system of oppression. Because although what happened to her as unimaginable, you argue that it is not an aberration. As you point out, Dominique Pelicot was able to find at least 70 other men living in a 31 mile radius to rape a drugged and unconscious woman.

And most of these men were seemingly normal from the outside, so to speak, including Giselle's husband, Dominique himself. So what does this say about how many men might be willing to do this if given the chance? And how do we, as you put it, live with men knowing that something like this is all too common?

[00:12:15] Manon: Yeah, so I don't know if I would say that Dominique is just normal because I really think, so now there are suspicions that he was also a serial killer and I think he's not normal. . I think in his family it was particularly bad what was going on when he was a child and so on. But the other guys overall are very normal guys that have nothing else in common than being guys who have raped Giselle Pelicot.

And I found it really, really scary and really interesting to look at that very carefully, also to look at that in person, because I'm a specialist of sexual violence and I am interested in these issues. But when I arrived at the courthouse and suddenly, you know, I saw these men and, and it took me a while, as I explained in the book at the beginning, I didn't understand that these guys I was seeing in the courthouse were actually accused in the trial.

So there was, especially this guy that was honestly pretty hot and exactly the kind of guy I would've dated when I was 17. And, and when I then understood that this guy who was my age, who I could find hot was a rapist, I mean, I know in theory that rapists are everyone and men next door, et cetera. But the sort of feeling was very scary.

And to go back to a, not like first person analysis, I think what was very disturbing is also that during the trial there was this investigation journalism group in Germany that infiltrated a telegram group in which 70,000 men were sharing recipes to chemically subdue their partners and pictures of their partners while they were raping them, and so on and so forth.

And so I really, created this feeling that, yeah, it's not one person, it's not five people. It's at least 70, in the case of Giselle Pelicot and, and suddenly 70,000 on telegram and this summer in Italy, there was a 30,000 men Facebook group sharing naked pictures of their wives. And so on the one hand, of course not all men, and on the other hand.

It seemed like it was much more than just random monsters here and there that do horrible things and these guys they could not understand, like you could see during the trial that they genuinely could not understand what they had done wrong. Because one thing that is specific to the French criminal justice system is that if you show some remorse, if you show that you've understood what you've done, it impacts positively your sentencing.

Like you go to prison for less long. And in this specific case, on top of it, if they recognize their crimes, the public would not see the videos of the rapes. So they had a double incentive to recognize, and yet they couldn't, they didn't think they had done anything wrong.

[00:15:28] David: Yes. This was a really shocking thing for me to read as I was moving through your book. The extent to which these men sometimes even openly appealed to this idea that the husband had said that it was okay. Therefore, there had been no crime with some of them, even invoking this idea that the husband can make decisions over the autonomy of their partner's body.

But you also pointed out that marital rape was only recognized when both Giselle and Dominique were already in their thirties. Right? So like, we often forget this, but they belong to a generation where the idea of marital rape was something that came halfway through their lives.

[00:16:12] Manon: Yeah, they had been together for 13 years because they married when they were 18, so they had been married for 13 years when it became forbidden for Dominique to rape gisel and, and just that. It's really crazy, and I think this is something that we need to remember because this is the case in France, but in the US it was a little bit earlier on, but I gave an interview recently in Switzerland and they were like, oh yeah, marital rape is punished in Switzerland since 2004.

And you know, I thought it's been only 21 years that you're not allowed to rape your wife in Switzerland. That seems, yeah, that seems really crazy. So I talk about this, about the fact that they invoke the consent of the husband, but retrospectively I don't know exactly what they think about this.

Because on the one hand they say this and it seems coherent with a history of curvature and a history like, like it used to be the case that you owned your wife that way.

[00:17:19] Ellie: Yep.

[00:17:20] Manon: But on the other hand, what is very striking in the videos, because yeah, as I say in the book, I saw some of the videos, is that the moment she moves like one millimeter, they're ready to run away and they're, constantly like ready to run away, like in one second.

So that means that they know very well that it's absolutely forbidden. So they don't think, oh yeah, it's fine. We have the consent of the husband, like we can do whatever. They don't think that whatsoever. They know that it's forbidden and there are some of them who have followed her in the supermarket to see if they found her, I don't know, appetizing enough or something like that, but they didn't talk to her.

So this is something that keeps recurring in the trial of saying, okay, like if you really thought she could be wanting this or something, why didn't you just talk to her?

[00:18:16] David: Yeah. And I think you do a wonderful job as a philosopher commenting on the specificities of the trial, right? Like the testimony, the events, the reporting. So first of all, I really enjoyed that aspect of the book. You showed your jobs as a journalist, not just as a philosopher, but I wanna ask you about your take on the trial now as a philosopher, because you draw this conclusion that the trial will not be the answer to the problem of rape under patriarchy. And that's something that speaks to maybe the need for social reforms, social change, social movements. And so I wanna hear you say a little bit more about why the criminal trial as a kind of mode for engaging with sexual violence will never be enough.

Because you do point out in the book that in some ways this trial, all things considered, went as well as we could have expected. It led to convictions, there was a lot of support for the victim, and yet there is clearly something that is missing here in terms of people's hope that this trial or other trials might curb this epidemic of sexual abuse and violence.

[00:19:31] Manon: Yes. So I think there are two sides to this answer. The first one has to do with criminal law in general, that criminal law criminalizes things that are seen as rare. And I think, you know, like typically a murder, we perceive it as a disruption in the social fabric that is extremely serious, but which seriousness is intertwined with its rarity.

And I think initially was rape. It was thought to be that way because there was a very narrow understanding of rape that was historically understood as a threat of the husband's property and inheritance rights, right? So the rape was only married woman who could be raped and of certain social classes, if you were a prostitute or a working class woman, you couldn't be raped.

And so the problem is that, on the one hand, now we recognize how broad and how much of an epidemic if you want, as, as you said, sexual violence is. But we're using tools that are based on it being exceptional and horrifying. And we know that everyone seems to pretend that sexual violence is horrifying, which I believe, but then everyone acts as if sexual violence is something that just happens.

You know, there's this anecdote from the trial that I find so telling. So one of the guys told us that the day after he raped Giselle Pelicot, he talked to his friend about it and they told him like, dude, it was a rape. That's really bad. And he tells this. And I remember being so relieved, you know, really thinking, oh, finally someone who's using the right terms.

And, but then, I don't know, he keeps talking about it. And you could see from the way he told this anecdote that probably lasted like five minutes. You know, his friends were like, dude, this was a rape. Do you want a sandwich for lunch? And so on and so forth. And then I thought, okay, let's just do this thought experiment of imagining he had told his friends, oh yeah, yesterday I cut the arm of a guy with an ax.

Like, something completely different would've happened. The friends would've been horrified. Maybe they would've called the police, or at least they would've tried to find a guy. But in, in the rape case, no one called GI Pico. No one called the police. So you could say maybe they had reasons to be scared of the police, but you can cut little things from the newspapers, little letters and send her an anonymous letter to tell her she's being drugged and raped.

Like, you know, it costs the price of a stamp.

We have all accepted the fact that men do sexual violence to other men and to women, especially women, and that boys will be boys. And I think this is something that makes it impossible to rely on the criminal justice system. But then there's a sheer question of numbers. Like in France, there are 70,000 people in jail at the moment.

So I think 95% are men. And it's estimated, I think, to figures, is that it's estimated that last year there were 55,000 rapes and there are no good reason to believe that they're done by the same people. And so you would have to double the carceral population basically the first year if we could suddenly put all rapists in jail.

Right. And but so that would mean we would need to build courthouses in every single little piece of the country. We would need to build prisons. We would need to devote like more than half of the state budget. So we can't rely on that system because we just don't have the means and don't want to invest the means for it.

[00:23:31] Ellie: Well, and I think that leads us to the question of how this kind of normalization of rape, it exceeds the legal system because it's baked into our very culture. Your book explores in detail how what is known as rape culture is scaffolded by all these social scripts about masculinity and femininity. One of them being the idea that men always want sex and that they're craving for it sometimes overwhelms their rationality, which then becomes some way of justifying the idea that it leads to things like the brutal rape of an unconscious woman. And I was really struck by your point about a certain contradiction in the trial that I think speaks to the way that these social scripts operate.

On the one hand, the defendants were cast as stereotypically masculine in the sense of desiring to dominate a woman, the idea that they're sort of naturally stronger and more powerful than women, and therefore that men are in some sense justified in raping, and you know, they should hold back, but who can blame them for not doing so?

But then on the other hand, you also note that much of the defense operated by pointing out the weakness of the rapist, especially their lack of intelligence, education or maturity. And you say the majority of the accused ended up pleading diminished mental capacity. And so we see there that it's almost as though they weren't guilty because they didn't know any better in spite of the fact that they're at the same time extraordinarily strong and powerful.

And so I'm curious what you make of this contradiction. What does it reveal about how our culture, excuses men's behavior, no matter how heinous it is?

[00:25:05] Manon: Yeah, so I think it's very interesting because I had not seen that contradiction that clearly before, and suddenly it really like burst into my face in a certain way because they kept saying, so there was this lawyer who was saying, oh yeah, you know, as this comedian says, God has given a man a penis and a brain, but not enough blood to irrigate both.

So this sort of like hardcore, like yeah, dumb jokes. And on the other hand, you really could see that these guys felt entitled to sex and that they felt like, okay, one of the recurring excuse was to say, well, my wife at that moment for x and y reason couldn't have sex with me. So what is a man supposed to do?

So there are several layers in this because one other thing that I find terrifying and so interesting for me as I work on sexual consent is that it means that for them, the sex they have with their wife, it's fungible with raping an unconscious old lady. And so I'm, I am deriving a little bit here, but I think it's so important to think about this because in my book on consent, I was saying, look, it's not true that rape is sex minus consent.

This is pretending that, you know, if you're a rape victim, it's like, as Susan Brison says, you know, she says, I can't tell my husband, do me what the rapist did, but with my consent, she says, these are two experiences that are completely different and radically experientially different. But with these guys, what we see is that.

At least what they say about their sex lives, is that sex and rape, like whatever, you know, like their wife or a complete stranger in a coma, whatever. And I found this really fascinating. So extremely scary of course, but also it made me interrogate masculinity. Also, insofar as I could tell that some of the judges and the lawyers understood that very well and took that for granted.

So there's this, judge for instance, because there are several judges at that trial. The trial is a bit complicated, but one of them is very silent, like 95% of the time, except that the three or four times that there are videos that show one of these guys not having an erection. He tells them what happened, why couldn't you get hard?

What happened to you in that moment? Exactly. And what I found fascinating is that there's not one moment where he asks what happened? Why could you get hard? And that's the question for me. You know, like, why are you in this tiny, super overheated room with an old lady snoring and, and having saliva out of her mouth because of how comatose she is?

And you think it's really super hot. I wanna know that. But so there was this question, there was this sort of masculinity, is this like mystery, masculine desire is this thing that we don't even wanna look at, but we know that they're weakened strong through it. And you are right. It's so bizarre, this thing that they're both like the sort of stallions and animals that can't control themselves.

But actually when you think about it, this is something that is recurring in society, that you have these guys that are strong enough and well organized enough to be CEOs or managers or this and that, but really to schedule doctors appointments for their kids, they can't do this to start the washing machine.

Like, how are you supposed to understand this? And so there is this, you know, this weaponized incompetence. I think it's not just that, it's also a sort of calling for women's complicity. By saying, look at how I need you because I'm so clueless, but at the same time, not believing this for one second.

[00:29:29] David: Well, no, and I think the question that you just asked of how could they get hard and sexually aroused is really intriguing because you do point out that there is actually a really blurry line here between having sex with a comatose or a drugged individual and necrophilia like she is so out of herself that she might as well be a corpse.

And so there is a kind of erotic cessation of her very inertia of her lack of life that maybe does tell us something about the darkness of this expression of male desire. And it, I think this potentially connects to another aspect of the book that I want to talk to you about and ask you about, which is the role of incest in this case.

I first heard about the Pelicot case through my partner who is French and who like a lot of French people followed the case very closely. And when we found out that you would be on the show, I went to my partner and I asked him, Rabih, is there something about the case that you would like me to ask our expert about?

Is there something that lingers in your mind that was unresolved? And he said to me, actually, yes, there is something that I never could square off in my mind and that still bugs me to this day. And that is. Giselle Pelicot's own lack of support for her daughter's claim that she too was victimized by her father, by Dominique.

And so my partner was really torn between his empathy for Giselle and also his frustration at what he perceived as her lack of empathy for her own daughter. And so then I started reading your book and I got to chapter two, and the answer was right there in that chapter where you talk about the role of incest in this case.

And so I want to hear you say what role incest played in this legal trial, which was not officially a trial of a case of incest. It was a trial about the rape of Giselle Pelicot. But you do point out that incest was sort of hovering in the background from the very beginning to the very end of the trial, like an unwelcome ghost.

[00:31:43] Manon: It's complicated. On the one hand, the way it works in France is that you have a judge that decides on the basis of the police investigation and the investigation they do themselves, what are the things that will be trialed? And the judge had decided for a variety of reason that what was the most important was to bring the thing to trial as fast as possible.

And that at some point she decided to stop investigations thinking, Dominique Pelicot might kill himself or die, Giselle Pelicot might kill herself or die. We should move and get the trial to happen. And one question is, what happened to Caroline, the daughter of Giselle and Dominique Pelicot? Because there are two. So there are some stolen pictures of her, like of her sisters-in-law.

But there are two pictures where she looks a little bit like her mother in the sense that she's asleep with lingerie that apparently is not hers. It's not completely sure on her bed. And she's convinced that the same thing happened to her then that happened to her mother. And the problem is that it's already bizarre what happened to Giselle Pelicot because we're having a crime without the victim knowing that the crime that happened in a way, so she had the videos, she's seen all the videos, but she has no memory of the crime. So usually the victim is the person who knows the best, what happened and she doesn't know. But there are the videos and there's the avowal of her husband. So there's material elements.

But in the case of Caroline, there are just those two pictures and Dominique Pelicot won't talk about it. He says this thing that as a French person, a bit trained in psychoanalysis, I find very interesting that he says, I do not know the person who took these videos. He doesn't say, I didn't take these videos.

He says, I do not know the person that took these videos. But what we find out during the trial and in the first of Caroline's books is that there has been incest happening on so many levels in this family that actually Dominique Pelicot's mom first had two kids was the brother of Dominique Pelicot's dad.

Then Dominic Perico's dad, we understand the trial, very probably abused his own daughter then had an adoptive daughter that he ended up living with after the death of his wife. He also raped and tortured kind of his wife in front of his kids. So, you know, Dominique Pelicot comes from this world that is very, yeah, troubled.

But then when you read about incest, it's very often like that, that families are completely, how do you say?

[00:34:42] David: Complicit or silent?

[00:34:44] Manon: No like, traversées par l'inceste, comment-tu dirais?

[00:34:48] David: Yeah. They've been crisscrossed or they've been shaped.

[00:34:51] Ellie: interwoven.

[00:34:52] Manon: They're permeated by these wrong relationship. So for instance, I don't think it's by accident that one of the two Pelicot's son is or was married to a woman that has been incested by her grandfather and brought her grandfather to trial.

And so there is also suspicions during the trial that Dominique Pelicot may have at least tried to abuse his grandchildren. So there are these webs, to be honest, I think this is a fact. And so in a way, there was incest from Dominique Pelicot in any case, because the very fact of taking naked pictures, naked sexual pictures of your daughter, if you penetrate her or not, like you've incested her.

But, during the trial, what really struck me is that the lawyers of Gisele Pelicot, the lawyer of Gisele and Caroline, the lawyer of Dominique, the judge, everyone begged Dominique Pelicot to say something about what he had done to his daughter. So even Gisele, like she wanted him to recognize. But I think there's also another phenomenon, which is that Pelicot kids, and in particular Caroline found themselves in a situation where their mother became an icon.

Where they were in this very traditional family in the sense that the mother was so subservient and taking care of everyone, and suddenly she kind of withdrew and decided that she had to live with her own trauma, you know? And so it was very clear in the trial that they were a bit mad at their mother, that she was so self-absorbed.

And on the other hand, you're a bit like there were 20,000 videos of her being raped by 70 different guys. That would make a lot of us self-absorbed when you realize, because you also have to imagine, we don't talk about it that much anymore. But for 10 years, Gisele Pelicot thought she was dying. So she woke up every morning thinking something was terribly wrong with her.

 She would die, abandoned her kids, her grandkids, her husband that like, she went to a lot of doctors. She was really in pain of that existential terror of abandoning everyone and of being on the verge of dying. And so I think she had a thing of self-protection and probably a bit of self-absorption, and that her kids got really mad at her for that.

And honestly, at the trial it felt a bit unfair. They would say some things like, yeah, already we lost our dad, and we also lost our mom because she stopped taking care of her kids during school vacation because she was focused on herself. And you be like, guys, you know, and, and same they kept wanting to say during the trial, this is the trial of a family, we're all victims. This group we're the group of victims and so on and so forth. And what Caroline denounced as her not supporting her daughter, was her saying, look, no, it's my trial. And she said several times, I really hope there is gonna be a trial for what happened to Caroline, but this is my trial.

And I don't know, that doesn't seem like a horrible thing to ask for. I mean, you have to imagine this woman. So first of all, for 10 years she thought she was dying. Then one day she accompanied her husband to the police station, only to be brought to her little room where she was told that it had been 10 years that he was raping her and drugging her and having men raping her.

She never saw him again until the trial. She emptied her house the next day, left her house with just one suitcase and her dog, and had to rebuild everything from scratch, I mean, and then she had decided that she didn't wanna watch the videos, et cetera. In the end, she decided, okay, I need to prepare for this trial.

I need to watch every single thing. She watched every single thing and she decided I shouldn't be ashamed of this. And so, although I have the right to have a private trial, this is gonna be a public trial, and I want the world to know, and I want this to never happen again. I'm in awe with her.

[00:39:38] Ellie: Yeah, and I think just hearing you talk about it in those terms drives home how unimaginable it is, not only to discover how your past has been shaped by these rapes that you were unaware of. But then also how in the interim between the discovery and the trial, there was a sort of aloneness.

And I, you know, I think some might say too, there's a sense in which mothers are always encouraged to put their children first. And so that's not to say, like you mentioned, that Caroline's right to her own trial or right to have her voice heard is illegitimate at all. But just to say, I think we wanna be a little bit careful about that quick move that goes from saying, okay, this is about the mother to, this should be about the daughter.

 I wanna switch gears a little bit and think about the visual or spectacular elements of this trial because I think that is something that's really interesting to consider given the legacy of feminist philosophy, much of which has focused on sexual objectification and the way that the specular or visual, like the idea of the male gaze, shapes women's oppression.

Because it seems to me that so much of this trial hinges on what is seen. As you mentioned, Gisele was completely unconscious during all of her assaults. And so her way of relating to these assaults is through the medium of the videos, right? That's the way that she knows about what happened there. And so too, were the videos watched by the public audience at the trial, including yourself, and you talk in the book about how those videos had a visceral effect on you and many other viewers.

And you also discussed the suspicion that some of the attendees at the trial sometimes had toward each other wondering whether, oh my gosh, is this person here because they are secretly turned on by these videos. And so there's this kind of suspicious element between members of the public.

And then of course there's the voyeuristic aspect of Dominique Pelicot's crimes themselves.

He enjoyed watching his wife be raped by other men and recording those rapes. And so I'd love to hear you talk a bit about the specular feature of this trial and the assaults themselves in relation to eroticized gender domination, which so often trades on this element of the visual.

[00:42:02] Manon: So I think the first thing is that some people have argued, oh yeah, like at the end of the day it was sort of homoeroticism of the guys looking at each other, raping her. But I think there are good reasons to be very wary of this because actually what is more heterosexual than men enjoying looking at each other fucking the same woman, like the more objectified she is, the better. And so in a way, there's something as a sort of celebration of. Hetero heterosexual manhood in the way they look at each other and they, like, he films them. And one thing, I mean, sorry for listeners, but Dominique Pelicot, re-raped Gisele every time after the guys left, so as a way of re-owning her.

 And he films this re-owning every time. So there is very much a sort of heterosexual consumption of the woman as an object. And then of course, there's the biggest question is why did he make these videos? Because he said, I used them as a safety measure in case people were trying to denounce me, et cetera.

But they're so well ordered, you know, like, so he had his this hard drive on which he put them by date, by name, well by, by nickname of the guys. And then he labeled every single video with what they had, the duration, et cetera. So it was a sort of collector masterpiece, if one could say. And when the police came after they got his phone, et cetera, and thought something went wrong and they came to search the house.

They didn't find a hard drive and he told them, wait, wait, wait, did you find a hard drive in the office? And they were like, oh no. He was like, there's a hard drive there. And he said, did you find the medication in the hiking shoes in the garage? And they hadn't found them so his account of this is to say he was so relieved that he got caught and that he would be stopped, et cetera.

 But something that really made me extremely uncomfortable throughout the trial is to what extent are we doing exactly what he wants from us? To what extent, you know, all of us being in this room, looking at these videos of his wife, where he pretends because he was very, like, he was acting, you know, holding his head like this every time the videos were shown to show how horrified he was by the suffering he caused to his one and only love.

And so there was something really theatrical about this, and I think I'm gonna make an extremely strange parallel, but it sounded to me like the worst possible opposite of what we read in feminist theory about BDSM as catharsis. It was kind of the specular of that. It was replaying things, but for them to get worse, it was instead of replay to undermine the power relations, it was replay to make them so much stronger.

[00:45:37] David: Yeah, it reminds me of the aspect of the concluding chapter, I believe, of your book where you talk about how a lot of this felt almost like a masterpiece of a male martyrdom narrative, where Dominique, in some ways, by confessing to the crime, he never denies it, he collaborates with the investigators, gets to present himself not only as a man who owned his wife in the videos and who was able to exercise this exorbitant sexual power over her, but as the ultimate martyr because he, in the end, saves her from himself.

And so he sort of self effaces in this way as the savior of Gisele. And it happens that the trial plays out as that, right? That the reason why the trial was successful in many ways is because he never denied anything. And when the other men tried to deny certain aspects of their participation, it was he who stepped in to say, no, we did this to my one and only. And so I, I also found that really troublesome, very difficult to think through as I was reading your book, that he maintained his love while also affirming his guilt and that he saw no tension between those two things.

[00:46:58] Manon: Yes, but I think this is something very important that it's tempting to think what he did is completely contradictory with his love. But I think it's a very extreme example of how men's way of loving has often to do with destroying the object of their love, and that you see in a way when he says, my goal was to submit an unsubmissive woman and when he keeps calling her his saint, et cetera, his one true love. You see that in a way, I'm not saying this to make her guilty of it in any way, but he is so overwhelmed by how much he loves her and how he puts her on a completely disincarnated pedestal as a saint that he needs to destroy the icon.

Like it's two parts of the same dialectic of the mom and the whore, the evil and the saint, the extraordinary and the thing you need to destroy. And I think this is a very common tapas of masculine love of, you know, this figurine the beauty you adore of feminicide, et cetera. Like all the acid murders, et cetera.

There's something like this of women being destroyed for being guilty of the love they produced by their extraordinary character.

[00:48:39] Ellie: I think this book is so powerful and so meaningful and I'm really grateful to you for being on the show, Manon.

Thank you so much.

[00:48:47] Manon: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:48:52] David: Ellie, so what are your thoughts about our interview with Manon Garcia?

[00:48:57] Ellie: Yeah. Well, I loved hearing her perspective on it. I think the book is beautifully written, which seems like a weird thing to say about such a difficult to read book, but I think it really shows a beautiful blending of the personal and the philosophical. One thing I wanna highlight, because we didn't have a chance to talk about this so much in the interview, which was rich on its own in many, many ways, is the way that consent operated in the trial itself.

Because as we mentioned earlier, Garcia's last book was called The Joy of Consent, and she and I have both written about the way that consent understood as a kind of permission giving is a very problematic idea. Now, she notes that the French penal code does not actually include consent as part of the definition of rape, and so there has been a call on the part of many French people, especially feminists, to include consent in the definition of rape or sexual assault in the French penal code. And although Garcia thinks like, okay, yeah, I mean it's currently defined more in terms of coercion or surprise, and so adding consent would really highlight the agency of those who are sexually violated and could improve the situation.

She's also skeptical that this will significantly change things because as she talked about in the interview, the main problem for her is the broader cultural scaffolding of rape, which is a term that comes from Nicola Gavey. She says, at one point I found this very interesting. It's from page 20, if you want to check out the book.

[00:50:25] David: I do want too.

[00:50:26] Ellie: She says, the trial did its job. The judges demonstrated a clear and precise understanding of what sexual consent is, and of the role played by asking for consent in establishing the material and intentional elements of rape. And so actually the trial indicated a move forward in the sense that contrary to the French penal code itself, there was a big interest on the part of the judges and those involved in the trial in establishing that Gisele very, very clearly had not consented to this.

And they weren't just understanding consent in a narrow permission giving way, but in a more nuanced fashion. At no point she says, did the court presume that Gisele Pelicot had consented? But the problem that this highlights. It's not that the courts of the law failed to take consent into account, which is really what a lot of the feminists have been saying for a while in France, but rather on Garcia's view that the men examined in the trial, hadn't understood what consent is, and had assumed that they could do without it, so long as they did not get caught.

This is a social problem that cannot be solved by a wave of magic wand and a new law.

[00:51:30] David: Yeah, I really like that she takes these men's testimony at face value, especially when they say that they didn't think they did anything wrong. In other words, it's not just something that they're doing as a way of defending themselves before the judges. It's really a reflection of how they related to the acts that they committed.

And one particular observation from the book that really stuck with me is when she noted that the men came up with all kinds of narratives that they told themselves and others as to why they did nothing wrong, including that. Well, she was asleep anyway. So no harm, no foul. The idea that, well, the husband opened the door to us and invited us.

So she must have known in some way. The idea that there is no way she could have truly been unconscious during the rapes. And so maybe in some way she was participating and was part of the orchestration of the crimes. But finally, there was also one particular defense about consent here that for me, brought into focus the politics of class.

So at one point, at least, one of the defendants made the claim that they lived in a really nice house, like a kind of middle class environment.

[00:52:44] Ellie: had a garden

[00:52:45] David: With a nice garden. And so the idea was that. Whatever happens here because of the class scaffolding, the class standing of the family couldn't possibly be a crime.

So this sense that for a lot of the men rape really seem to maybe fit that stereotype that we have of stranger danger, of like people attacking men, attacking women like in the middle of parks that they don't know. And that just was inconsistent with this scenario that the husband Dominique orchestrated that happened in a middle class family that for many men was just a sexual fantasy.

[00:53:24] Ellie: Yeah, and it raises questions too about who is considered rapeable, you know, I think, which is a question that many feminists have asked because as Manon mentioned in the interview, sex workers have generally not been considered relatable. Married women have generally not been considered rateable.

And so we have both like the relationship status and the class status and the working status shaping who we understand. And Garcia notes that in many ways actually Gisele was the perfect victim in the sense that she was actually quite well off and she was white, you know, able-bodied, albeit older. And I think that, you know, that helped draw attention to the trial.

And I think Gisele herself seemed to understand that the way that she could leverage that privilege. But we also see here that it in a sense, like at least by one of the perpetrators, she was considered too privileged to be relatable, at least if her husband was there.

 We'll end it here. I know we've got our Substack bonus segment coming up next. I want to talk there about sort of what we do with this, especially in sexual and romantic relationships with men. So yeah, see you over there for those who are supporters.

If you're not, we encourage you to consider supporting our work. And we thank you so much for listening.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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