The Courage of Gisèle Pelicot

On September 5, Gisèle Pelicot appeared in an Avignon courtroom to confront more than fifty men who allegedly raped her while she was sedated and unconscious as a result of drugs covertly forced on her by her then-husband for several years.

French police managed to uncover the heinous crimes after going through the electronic devices of her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, in which they found more than 2,000 photos and videos of the sexual assaults that other men inflicted on the victim. In 2020, police informed her that her husband had been drugging her for more than ten years so that other men would rape her while he recorded the repudiatory acts. Many have also been surprised that these crimes occur in a country where, supposedly, there are fewer cases of violence against women, as it seems, according to some experts, that it is not that in developed countries there are no cases of violence against women, but that they are hidden (even hidden from the consciousness of the victims themselves).

The images of a stoic Gisèle Pelicot, who in the small courtroom had to relive events she did not remember, have traveled around the world. However, the victim was quick to say that her expression should not be confused with her state of mind and mental health: “[In the recordings] I am inert, in my bed, and I am being raped. They are barbaric scenes. My world is crumbling, everything is crumbling, everything I’ve built in fifty years. Frankly, for me, they are scenes of terror.”

Many have seen in Gisèle Pelicot’s attitude of not hiding from her aggressors and the public an enormous act of courage, even more so if we take into account the massive social stigma that a woman who has been raped can suffer: the image of a being who has lost her value and dignity is perversely projected on her…even more so if the person has suffered this crime by more than fifty men.

Despite this, Gisèle Pelicot courageously decided not to exile herself from the world or to dissolve herself in the collective memory as a mistreated object; on the contrary, she wants to declare publicly something that not all people can do: “I am not one to hide or humiliate myself”. This is more than clear when she could have avoided a public trial, but decided to make it as public as possible so that, according to her lawyers, the shame does not fall on the side of the victim, but on the side of the accused.

This act of not hiding goes beyond a pure act of individual courage, as it involves a painful search for personal reconstitution. It is true that publicly confronting her rapists encourages many other women who may be suffering from abuse to be alert, as well as to fight against the power relations that can be exercised against certain people who suffer abuse without being aware of the abuse; that is, it calls for self-questioning about apparently normal relations (something that many philosophers have called “critique”). But, in addition, Gisèle Pelicot’s action aims to uncover, not only the rapists but also a memory that her ex-husband had taken away from her without her consent.

Somehow (perversely), this is the only way to recover a hidden memory that he had taken from her and that, in this way, had split her. The truth is that no one should have to go through this nightmare to recover a broken consciousness that had been manipulated – in this case, through the non-consensual administration of drugs – and split in two: on the one hand, her conscious life (covered with apparent normality) and, on the other hand, her unconscious life (forcibly hidden by her ex-husband).

And therein lies one of the issues that most frighten the millions of people who learned about the case: the fear that arises from the possibility of not knowing one’s memory imposed by someone else. This is a real nightmare for the social imaginary because it is precisely located in a chance, in a heartbreaking horizon (of consciousness), in an individualized dystopia, which cannot be confirmed or dismissed immediately because of its indeterminacy, which highlights the fragility of our safety before those others who are closest to us.

This is why the case has aroused so much indignation, because it is configured as a nefarious case of sexual abuse, at the same time that it constitutes a possibility of which not even our conscience can alert us since it implies the absence of the same conscience in the violation. And it is no longer a “repressed memory”, as it is understood in psychological terms, in which the memory performs forgetting as a defense mechanism; but rather it is a memory “snatched” by someone else (the ex-husband) and recovered thanks to the action of another (the police).

And the recovery does not restore something neat, limpid, and healthy, but rather restore a broken memory that must be restored collectively or, as Gisèle Pelicot herself put it: “inside [I am] a field of ruins; we will have to rebuild”.