In mid-December, a French court convicted 51 men of sexually abusing Gisele Pelicot at the invitation of her then-husband, Dominique. Over the course of a 15-week trial, the prosecution presented evidence proving that Mrs. Pelicot’s ex-husband repeatedly and systematically drugged her into unconsciousness, after which he would film her being raped at their home by strangers he had met on internet forums.
Dominique’s methodical and persistent abuse of his wife over the course of a decade prompted some to dub him the “Beast of Avignon,” referring to the French city where the case was tried. Dominique’s co-conspirators have earned a different nickname: “Monsieur Tout-le-monde,” or “Mr. Everyman,” because of their diverse and mundane backgrounds. Gisele Pelicot was raped by “firefighters, security guards and lorry drivers,” men who lived within a stone’s throw of her and who were themselves husbands and fathers.
None of these men, nor any of the others that Dominique approached with the offer to sexually assault his unconscious wife, reported him. Instead, his crimes were only discovered when he was caught trying to film up a woman’s skirt in a supermarket.The case grabbed global attention for its mixture of horror and banality: The violence Gisele suffered was simultaneously shocking and a reminder of both the omnipresence of sexual violence in women’s lives and the fact that the source of that violence is often the men that women are conditioned to trust: their husbands, neighbors and friends.