Men Behaving Badly Part Two

Despicable acts in another "civilized" country

I was going to incorporate the story of Gisèle Pelicot into my observations about “Men Behaving Badly” last week, but the subject proved so compelling, and often nauseating, I wanted to learn more—and was occasionally driven to the point of complete revulsion. If you are at all squeamish about deviant sexual behavior, skip this one.

Pelicot with her lawyers

For nearly a decade, between the years 2011 and 2020, Gisèle Pelicot, a diminutive French woman in her 60s, was repeatedly raped by her husband, Dominique, and dozens of other men while she was unconscious, mostly in the couple’s home in the south of France. Dominique filmed the encounters and was not caught and arrested until after he’d been taken into custody for “upskirting” women in a local supermarket. (This is a new term to me, and means capturing images of underwear or genitalia under s subject’s clothes—how it’s accomplished without the subject’s consent is beyond me.)

The videos of the rapes surfaced when police searched Domique’s computer, and the case against him and 50 other men came to trial in 2024, attracting worldwide publicity and hundreds of supporters to the town of Avignon in the fall of 2024. For her exemplary courage and dignity throughout the very public ordeal, Gisèle Pelicot earned a huge fan base, cover stories in magazines, and the French Legion of Honor, the country’s highest civilian accolade. Her husband is in jail for 20 years, while the others earned lighter sentences.

Gisèle told her story in an affecting memoir, A Hymn to Life, whose details are so brutal I had to put it aside from time to time. For decades, the two Pelicots, who were both born in 1952 and met as teenagers, seemed to enjoy a more-or-less happy marriage and family life. There were bumps in the road—each had affairs, Dominique had problems finding steady work, they divorced at one point to protect their assets—but all seemed harmonious after Gisele retired from her management job with the state electricity company. They moved to Mazan in southeastern Franch and rented a house with a swimming pool, where their three children and grandchildren visited. Gisèle joined a choir and Dominique played at the local tennis club.

The rapes started while they were still living in a suburb outside Paris. “The doctor had been prescribing lorazepam, Viagra and zolpidem to my husband, who must have been complaining about having trouble sleeping and getting an erection because of stress over our financial problems,” Gisèle writes. When he recruited others, he drugged his wife, adding a powerful muscle relaxant. In many of the recordings, she was unconscious and, at points, snoring. Her husband sometimes positioned her body and directed the men while filming. She had no recollection of the assaults and believed her fatigue and memory problems were due to other health issues, or were perhaps signs of Alzheimer’s. But the violation was brutal; Gisèle lost a crown from her mouth because of “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into my slack mouth.” And she complained to her husband of a “strange leakage” from her vagina.

The medical profession during these years of abuse turned a blind eye: “I spent a decade having endless….examinations,” she writes. “Blood tests. Scans. Multiple courses of vagina pessaries. Ten years of going to see doctors who looked at me as if to say that at my age a woman can’t expect much anymore, she ought to just relax and let time do its demolition work.”

Dominique found the other rapists on the dark web through messages that reportedly said things like he was “looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife who’s been put to sleep.” If any showed an interest, he then moved the conversations to private chat or sometimes Skype to discuss details.

That this could go on for so long beggars the imagination, but Gisèle’s memoir makes it clear that the bonds of trust were strong, even in the bumpy years when she had an affair, and so did he. Both were big believers in the bedrock of family life, though those ties were strained throughout the time of Dominique’s arrest and trial. In particular the daughter went through hell when police discovered photos of her asleep, taken by her father, who claimed never to have violated her. But she lived (and maybe still lives) with formidable doubts.

Pelicot supporters outside the Avignon courthouse in 2024

Several years ago, while having dinner with a group of women friends, we somehow got on the topic of rape and four or five admitted they had been violated one or more times in their lives. I was appalled. I never worried much about this possibility, even when living in the chaotic metropolis of New York, perhaps because I’m tall and look like I can hold my own. But the stats on rape are mind-boggling: “Nearly 1 in 5 women and more than 1 in 6 men in the U.S. experience contact sexual violence in their lifetime, with over 1 in 5 women experiencing completed or attempted rape,” says Wikipedia. “Approximately 60% of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, and 9 out of 10 victims are female.” Writing about the banning of her memoir Jesus Land in the newsletter “Literary Hub,” Julia Scheeres notes that “[o]ne in 16 women report that their first sexual encounter was rape. More than 50 percent of women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. And teen girls face the highest risk, with 66 percent of sex abuse victims younger than 18.”

Which helps explain why so many rallied to Pelicot’s cause during the trial. Because of the grilling the victim so often endures, few will come forward to report the crime. Her grace under pressure was another reason she received such an outpouring of support.

Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists are a far cry from the high-profile men implicated in the Epstein files. The creeps recruited by her husband (nearly 70 were implicated) ranged in age from 26 to 74 and came from within a 40-mile radius of the Pelicot home in a tiny provincial town in southern France (“the south of France” will never again sound quite so idyllic to me). Their professions were all over the place: a hairdresser, truck drivers, farm workers, an IT specialist, a former DJ and nightclub manager, a retired firefighter, a journalist, and on and on (according to Wiki, “A 26-year-old soldier…missed the birth of his daughter while assaulting Pelicot”).

Some claimed, during the trial, that they thought the sex was consensual. Jesus. When has sex with a nearly comatose woman ever been consensual? And what is the appeal of a nearly comatose woman?

Though I realize the many differences, these crimes relate to Epstein’s cohort in the grotesquerie of their behavior. But when I go looking for answers, I come up short of any truly credible explanations. In Pelicot’s case, professional psychologists who considered the evidence blamed Dominique: “He framed the situation as consensual,” says my friendly chatbot, “He gave instructions and reassurance. He normalized the behavior for newcomers.” And there’s much, much else from psychologists about this bunch.

Experts in crimes of sexual violence will claim that rape is motivated by anger, not lust or desire. In the case of the Epstein malefactors, a friend who is an emeritus philosophy professor speculates that “these nerdy, brilliant guys never got the hot girls in high school or college, especially high school. They’re fixated on bedding, finally, the girls the jocks got.” I wonder how much fears of sexual inadequacy push men into deviant behavior (remember that the porn star Stormy Daniels’s nickname for Trump was “Tiny.”)

When I turn to some of the pop social theorists, it’s the patriarchy that gets blamed, “the way that men are taught through violence to reject their emotions and become cold-blooded and distant, which allows them to commit violence on others,” says one review of bell hooks’s treatise The Will to Change. A wonderfully wacky book called What is Wrong with Men, by Jessa Crispin, uses the trope of Michael Douglas’s screen performances of the last half-century to document the decline of men: “The ‘liberal, tolerant and clueless’ characters Douglas played in his 40s and 50s, rife with midlife crisis, mirror onscreen the mild pleasures and vague discomforts white men felt — and continue to feel — when women and racial minorities encroached on their long-held turf,” writes the Times’s Alexandra Jacobs in her review. (I loved this book, by the way.)

I don’t have any easy answers to the abusive behavior of men toward women (nor of women toward men, of which I’m sure there is plenty). Possibly the younger generation will be able to sort this out, as one report indicates that Gen Z, who range in age from 14 to 29, isn’t much interested in romantic attachments of any sort.

Or maybe we should all aspire to the example of the Shakers portrayed in the mind-numbingly noisy movie The Testament of Ann Lee: Give up fucking and start dancing.