There were two rooms at the Pelicot mass-rape trial in Avignon: the courtroom for the press, and a live-feed room for the public. From the day it began, in early September, women lined up outside the courthouse before 7 A. Two retired women were always at the front: Bernadette and Brigitte. Bernadette came, she said, to see how justice worked; Brigitte because this was a live version of the crime shows she liked to watch on TV. Among the other spectators were a family—grandmother, mother, and two daughters—from Bordeaux.
There was a woman whose daughter had been raped and who had come to learn how such a trial worked. There was a woman in her seventies who had been raped years ago by the father of one of the fifty-one defendants—making the trial, for her, a paltry chance at remedial justice. Every day, a few men joined the line. They were looked at with suspicion. The rumor was that more of them tended to come toward the end of the week, when the videos of the rapes were shown. When the doors opened every morning, at eight-thirty, the press, the plaintiffs, and the lawyers filed through: well-dressed professionals, a vision of Paris at work, sauntering in front of the waiting provincials.
Avignon is the prefecture of Vaucluse, a heartland of the far-right Rassemblement National party, and one of the poorest regions in the South. Meanwhile, an official gave the public instructions about how to behave in the salle , where a screen at the front projected a view of the courtroom. If we left—for lunch, or to go to the rest room—we would lose our place. The only exception to this rule, the official said, would be when the videos of the rapes were shown.
At that point, we could step out, as the official did every time. She was, she said, a woman, too. By , they had three children, several grandchildren, and were living in the suburbs of Paris. Two years later, when the couple retired to Mazan, a small town in Vaucluse, Dominique began inviting men to their home to rape his wife while she was sedated. After his primary portion concluded, in September, fifty of the eighty-three men whom he had solicited to rape his wife while he filmed them were tried in batches of six or seven per week.
In France, rape trials are usually held in camera, in part to preserve the anonymity of the victim. Cities are now daubed with feminist graffiti. Instead, the mystery was why the men had done what they did. One of the answers that emerged from their discussions was sexual trauma. A quarter of the accused claimed to have been sexually abused as children, as Dominique himself says he was; of the seven defendants being tried one week, three had been victims of incest or rape.
