This is an incident that transfixed France. Prosecutors say Dominic Perrico repeatedly drugged his wife and recruited strangers to participate in his rapes over a period of nearly 10 years. Prosecutors say she was assaulted by dozens of men as she lay unconscious, her husband filming much of the incident, including a video titled “Abuse.” The video was saved in a digital folder.
When Mr. Perico’s trial began last month, his wife, Gisele Perico, waived her right to anonymity and spoke with remarkable, withering calm. She became a French feminist hero. “We are all Gisele,” women chanted at protests in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. Perricotte pleaded guilty to all charges against him, stating bluntly, “I’m a rapist.”
But Mr. Pericot has 50 other men by his side. Most of them are charged with aggravated rape of Ms. Pericot. More than a dozen people pleaded not guilty. Some say they were tricked or told that Pericot was pretending to be asleep because she was shy.
Feminism has long been interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, and how women who are deprived of knowledge are also deprived of power. In recent weeks, we have been brutally reminded that ignorance and claims of ignorance can be convenient tools for those in power. While consent requires an effort to know the other person’s desires, rape requires complete disregard, or cancellation, of the other person, allowing him to recognize only his own pleasure. In fact, drugging a woman into complete submission seems to be a particularly obvious manifestation of a man’s desire not to be known.
“Being called a rapist is unacceptable,” one of the defendants protested in court. “I’m not a rapist. It’s more than I can handle,” he said. He went on to explain how much he has learned about consent since his arrest. “The judge told me, even if you’re married, a woman is not completely yours.” perfected. “Yes, women do not belong to men,” he replied. “I wish they would teach that in school. It took 54 years.”
One defendant said he was “devastated” when he learned what had happened. “You’ll never recover,” he told Ms. Pericot in court, as if she had been raped without either the perpetrator or the victim knowing. When pressed, he described it as “involuntary rape.”
Mr. Perricott kept detailed video evidence of most of the assaults, so the defendant cannot dispute key facts. The only defense they have is to argue that they did not know that what they were doing was rape because they did not know that Ms. Pericotte did not consent. Some say Perricott pretended to be asleep but went to the couple’s home and filmed the sex, thinking she was participating, or that Perricotte understood she could consent on the husband’s behalf. It is argued that this may be the case. (“She’s his wife. He can do whatever he wants to her,” one defendant said.) One defendant claimed he didn’t know what “consent” meant. .
A growing number of European Union countries are enacting ‘yes means yes’ sexual consent laws, but France still defines rape as a sexual act committed by “force, coercion, intimidation or surprise.” This case has restarted the debate over whether the definition should be changed. Without requiring affirmative consent, a defendant can argue – as one of the defense attorneys in this case did – that “there is no rape if there is no intent to commit it.” The system claims to spend effort trying to deduce the true intentions of a man accused of performing a sexual act on a snoring woman.
A recent Ipsos survey found that understanding of rape has come a long way since the #MeToo movement began in France, but around a fifth of French people still force their partner to have sex with them. Nearly 10 percent still said forcing a person to have sex with someone who is drunk, asleep, or otherwise unable to consent is not rape. For men between the ages of 18 and 24, the rate is closer to 30 percent. (“To me, rape is catching someone on the street,” one of the defendants reportedly said.)
It seems that it was easy for Perricott to find men willing to participate in the abuse of his unconscious wife. Many of the defendants lived within about 40 miles of their homes. Even if their numbers make them monsters, if you look at them one by one, they are sadly normal. Men with families and jobs: journalists, firefighters, nurses, civil servants. One apparently missed the birth of his daughter while in Pericot’s home. According to a report in Le Monde, 72 of the 83 men Pericot approached via the internet forum “Song Insu” or Skype said “yes.” Of the few who refused, none seemed to bother to report it to the police. They probably didn’t want to know either.
Valentine Fauré is a contributor to Le Monde newspaper.
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