00:00:56.000I think we're going to discuss some things that you may not be comfortable with, in which case, absolutely okay to skip this episode and listen to our next one or wait until you find yourself in the right frame of mind for this.
00:01:07.480If you want to Google the case a little bit beforehand to decide what your exact tolerance level is, we totally understand.
00:01:14.840So, Adrian, how much do you know about this?
00:01:16.680I followed it pretty closely, but it's just such a staggering trial and at such a staggering scale that I wouldn't be shocked to find out that there are entire dimensions of this that I didn't pick up on.
00:01:30.040I feel like this was covered a lot more in the European press than in the Anglophone press.
00:01:34.580I know The Guardian has done some very, very good work on it, but by and large, I don't remember seeing it that frequently in The New York Times and places like that.
00:01:43.000So I'm sure that there are large gaps and I'm both trepidatious and excited to have those gaps filled to some extent today.
00:01:50.080Yeah, so we're lucky to be joined today by Manon Garcia. Manon is a professor of philosophy at
00:01:57.520Frere Universität in Berlin. She has also taught at Harvard and Yale, and she is the author of
00:02:06.200several books, including We Are Not Born Submissive, How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives,
00:02:10.840and The Joy of Consent, A Philosophy of Good Sex. And she is here visiting Stanford University,
00:02:16.940so we're really lucky to have her. Manon, thank you so much for joining us.
00:02:21.800I'm very excited to talk about This Trial Was You.
00:02:25.100So my guess is that the knowledge base of our listeners is going to vary widely.
00:02:28.880There's going to be people who know a lot, maybe everything about this trial.
00:02:32.340There are others who may be hearing about it for the very first time.
00:02:34.880Can you give us a little bit of a, you know, 30,000 foot view of what this trial was about?
00:02:41.560Yeah, so factually, it came out in 2022, 2023 in French press.
00:02:48.960And for most people in Le Monde, that there was something that had happened in the south of France near Avignon in a small town called Mazin, where a guy called Dominique Pellico had drugged his wife, raped her through what is now called chemical submission.
00:03:09.920So use of drugs to subdue her, subjugate her.
00:03:14.200So he had raped her unconscious and he had invited a lot of men to come and rape her as well.0.99
00:03:22.080And he filmed these men raping his wife.0.74
00:03:24.760So the police found the videos or rather, should I say, he showed the police the videos because that's part of what is very disturbing about this trial is that he gave the police all the evidence.
00:03:38.640And so he had gathered 20,000 videos of his wife being raped, and the police managed to see that there were at least 70 men on these videos, and they managed to identify 50 of those men.
00:03:55.080So the trial, so there was a trial that happened last fall where 51 men were put in trial, Dominique Pelico and 50 other men, and 49 of them were present and one was on the run.
00:04:10.600So the trial is the trial of the rapes of Giselle Pelico by her husband and these 50 other men.
00:04:17.320But on top of this, and I think it's very important, there's also the fact that he took pictures of his daughter and the wives of his sons.
00:04:27.360So naked pictures, wire pictures, and in the case of his daughter, pictures where it looks like he has drugged her as well and maybe raped her.0.81
00:04:40.360But this was not part of the trial.0.76
00:04:42.000The question of knowing if there was actual rape of his daughter was not included in the trial, only the fact that he had taken pictures.
00:04:50.880And there's one more specificity is that he also went on to chemically submit and rape the wife of one of those 49 guys.
00:06:02.400And what we had been told was that all these men had been recruited through a subreddit kind of forum called Without Her Knowledge, where men were sharing pictures and videos of their partners taking Without Their Knowledge and exchanging tips about how to subdue their wives, etc.
00:06:26.300It turned out in the trial that it's not as clear as that.
00:06:30.880It looks like some men were on that forum.
00:06:33.660Some other men were just in the general forum and were recruited by Dominique Perico.
00:06:39.760Dominique Perico wanted to say that they were all completely aware that she was drugged, that she would be unconscious, that she was against it.
00:06:49.220It turned out in the trial that it doesn't seem to be that clear.
00:06:55.740Some of these men were recruited from other parts of the COCO website, you know, perhaps where they had gone seeking more plausibly consensual activity.
00:07:02.780And some were recruited from an explicitly non-consensual sexual force.
00:07:08.160Yes. So some are saying this was something like swingers recruiting a third person, that it could look like typical libertine activity that they didn't know that she would be drugged, etc.
00:07:25.740But, of course, what has made this trial so visible, so important, is that in French law, in similar cases, the victims have a right to say they don't want the trial to be public.
00:07:40.140And usually they don't want the trial to be public because they are shamed.
00:07:45.000And Giselle Pellicot had decided initially to go on with a private trial.
00:07:50.080and in order to prepare for the trial she has watched the videos and she explains that
00:07:58.180after a while she got really mad and she decided no like I shouldn't be ashamed about this
00:08:05.680and so this should be public people should be aware of what happened we should show these videos
00:08:11.480and and I shouldn't be ashamed and so she made the decision of making this trial public and so
00:08:19.180the courthouse in Avignon, they had absolutely not planned that this would happen. And so
00:08:24.540it was also very concerning the way it worked, that the courthouse was completely unprepared.
00:08:32.160There was not enough room for the audience, for the journalists, etc. And it became a worldwide
00:08:38.920phenomenon where people were talking about it, etc. I don't know, like Tarana Burke,
00:08:44.360who created the hashtag MeToo came to Paris to meet with Gisele Pelico during the trial. So
00:08:50.580this gives a sense of how big it became. So Gisele Pelico decided to make it a public trial
00:08:56.980and to require that everyone could watch the videos of the rapes. And so it means that anyone
00:09:03.200who attended the trial could see these extremely graphic rape videos.
00:09:09.980So let me make sure I understand what the rights of the victim are in this legal system in France, because my understanding was that the decision that Gisele Pellico was given was between retaining her own anonymity at the expense of not being able to publicly name the men who are alleged to have attacked her or of having their identities made public along with hers as well, and that this was her prerogative. Is that correct?
00:09:37.740I don't know exactly. I think the question is rather that a criminal trial in France is supposed to be public by default, because the idea legally is to say in a criminal trial, it's not the victim that is suing the perpetrator.
00:09:53.740It's the state. It's society that is suing for the damage that has been done to society.
00:10:00.340And so because it's society suing the accused, it needs to be public because it means that any member of society can be part of the trial, can check that things are going the way they should be going, that the law is applied in the right way.
00:10:16.400And there are exceptions that are made when there is the assumption that it could be bad for the victim, that victims would not want that anyone can see what happened to them or hear what happened to them.
00:10:30.600So minors, for instance, are in that case that systematically it's closed to the public.
00:10:36.940And in the case where the victim has a reasonable claim that it could be bad for their image and for their privacy, they can ask to have the right to keep the public out of the trial.
00:10:50.420And so when that happens, I think journalists can still come, but they are expected to not name the victim, not name the defendants, etc.
00:11:02.480When you refuse this system that's called the weak close or the closeness of the trial, then the name of the victim is public.
00:11:13.080But I don't know exactly what are the rules about naming the perpetrators.
00:11:19.140I think the idea is that until they're convicted, you're not supposed to give their name because that goes against their presumption of their innocence.
00:11:29.540So what was done is that people would use their first names and their first letter of their last names in the in the press up until the verdict where a lot of newspapers have published their whole names.
00:11:44.620But what I found interesting is that there was a discussion.
00:11:48.500So I was I had a press pass. So I was in the WhatsApp group of the journalists, et cetera. And there was a discussion about should we publish the actual names even once they're convicted? Not so much for the reputation of those men, but because the families of those men have been attacked and especially their wives and their mothers and their daughters, et cetera.
00:12:10.780And so there was a question of protecting the environment of the accused by not publishing the names and also making it then not so much an individual problem as a social problem.
00:12:24.620So you mentioned already you went to the trial yourself and the way I'm told it was in Avignon, it was clearly the courtroom had been sized for a much different trial before Giselle Pellicot decided that she wanted to have this in public.
00:12:38.160Like, I sort of stumbled over that in reading the coverage
00:12:41.280because I thought, this is 51 defendants.
00:12:43.820Like, you need a big courtroom just to fit all of them in there.
00:12:49.340Like, there was a business as usual that could have unfolded
00:12:52.840and that Giselle Pellicot was very much going against, right?1.00
00:12:57.920She wasn't sort of proceeding the way the justice system0.99
00:13:01.380clearly thought she would want to.1.00
00:13:04.320Yes, so that is interesting because then she reused1.00
00:13:07.800this slogan that had been brought forward before by feminist groups in France of saying shame must1.00
00:13:14.780change sides. And so she's not the author of this slogan, but she made it very publicly
00:13:21.160known, et cetera, by saying, look, like the institution itself is presuming that I'm going
00:13:29.040to be ashamed. And so everything, all the organization is around me being ashamed and
00:13:35.180I'm not ashamed sorry and so I think yeah one one element that I found very interesting as well is
00:13:41.940that when she explained why she made it public is also that she so she has left her husband she has
00:13:49.400left her house she moved to a completely different region and because she's a very private person
00:13:55.360she didn't tell anyone about what had happened to her so she had made a lot of friends and they knew
00:14:02.040that she something hard had happened to her, but she didn't want to talk about it. And when the
00:14:08.300first articles in the press about the case came out, people, of course, had no idea that it was
00:14:14.220about her. And they started saying, of course, this woman knew, like, how can we believe that
00:14:20.980this woman had no idea what was happening to her? That's really ridiculous. And so she saw these0.98
00:14:27.840people that were her friends that were well-meaning people that were already caught in this sort of
00:14:34.180victim-blaming attitudes. And so that was important for her. She was very aware that she was doing
00:14:40.460something politically important by making this trial public. But just to respond to your thing
00:14:46.480about the courthouse, they still put it in a very big room. So it's in a room where you can have
00:14:52.340300 people because there were these 50 guys, there are lawyers, the assistant of the lawyers,
00:14:58.560the prosecutors, the judges, and room for still like 40 journalists. It just that it ended up
00:15:05.480being that there were 350 journalists. Apparently they'd have to have the defendants queue up in
00:15:12.660front of the courtroom, which is something I read in one report, I think in the Guardian, which
00:15:16.600And it just was so striking that, like, I mean, we have seen, you know, group rape trials, but it just feels unprecedented just in its scope in the sense that, you know, we will talk about the broad range of these people and that these, you know, one of the lessons that French media clearly did take away from this is that these are not outsiders.
00:15:35.360These are pillars of their community in some way that have done this.
00:15:40.060But also just the sheer quantity seems significant in the sense that if you have to figure out how to get the number of accused into your courtroom, like, well, then that is a massive problem.
00:15:51.000Right. The sheer scale of the crime and the sheer number of defendants points, I think, to the Pellico trials stand in as really a referendum on gender violence much more broadly, right?
00:16:04.080It is or was treated as an encapsulation of this broader question of women's freedom and men's domination over women in particularly sexual life.
00:16:14.580And we might just add for our listeners who are not that familiar with the trial.
00:16:18.220So you already mentioned that the website turned out to be a bit of a red herring.
00:16:23.000The number of defendants that were not from the Vaucluse is like tiny, right?0.99
00:16:28.840So it's a website that works with geolocalization.
00:16:31.660And so the only two guys I think that were not from the region, it's because they raped Giselle Pellico during the Pellico's vacation.
00:16:42.880So it just turned out that they were just geolocalized somewhere else.
00:16:47.460I'm sorry, I'm laughing, but sometimes like I just have to laugh about this because it's so absurd and horrible.
00:16:55.220But yeah, so there's one guy that happened to be one of the guys that I was very interested in and, I don't know, fascinated by in a certain way that lived next to Paris.
00:17:09.260But it's because the Pellicos were on vacation in their daughter's house.
00:17:13.620And so he's just a neighbor of the daughter and he came to the daughter house.
00:17:18.480So if I understand this correctly, and this might just be like ironing out a little more of the details of the crime before we get more into the trial, but these rapes took place, if I'm correct, over the course of like a decade, right?
00:17:29.520Nine years, 2011. So we know what we know is from 2011 to 2020. But there are more and more cold cases coming out that look like probably Dominique Pedico has murdered women before, has raped women before.
00:17:47.620So he's a serial rapist, serial killer.0.99
00:17:53.640You mentioned his photographs of his daughter and his daughters-in-law, right?0.99
00:17:56.520He seems to have a kind of broad, like non-consensual, secretive, illicit photographing, right?
00:18:02.180You said he had like gotten cameras in the bathroom and that's how he got photos of his daughters-in-law, you know, undressed from the shower.
00:18:09.200And then he was also habitually drugging his wife.
00:18:13.320It seems like fairly regularly, like at a rate of once a week or so.
00:18:16.880yeah so it it increased over time so as in um people who watch crime shows etc
00:18:25.000know this about serial killers or or serial whatever that usually they start slowly and it
00:18:32.920becomes more and more because like their their urges become i don't know more and more regular
00:18:39.940And addiction behavior. Yeah. And so it looks like in 2011, he was probably having, I don't know, like a guy every three months or six months to come. And when he was arrested, it was more like three times a week.
00:18:56.140And what is very striking is that during these 10 years, Giselle Pelicot was aware that something was wrong with her because she started feeling very tired, having moments where she didn't remember what had happened.
00:19:15.660And so this is also part of the trial that was horrifying and disheartening is that this woman spent 10 years thinking she was dying, that she had health issues.
00:19:28.160And so she went to see a lot of doctors saying something is wrong with me.
00:19:42.180And so she was convinced she was dying.
00:19:45.760And had he not been arrested, she would have probably died.
00:19:49.700So the doctors in the trial said the dosage that he was giving her, et cetera, was impairing her more and more.
00:19:57.420And she would have probably died had he not been arrested.
00:20:01.080It's almost chemical gaslighting, right?
00:20:03.300It destroys the ability to make sense of your life in ways where you would be able to put it together and say, wait, this keeps happening when this happens.
00:20:11.700But like we all know with narcotics, like they can erase that variability.
00:20:16.380Yeah, because it started happening when they moved out of the Paris region for retirement.
00:20:22.820And so what happened then is that she was way more isolated than she was before.
00:20:27.280They were seeing their kids and their grandkids much less often.
00:20:31.300And he had more control over her because they were just the two of them.
00:20:35.440but she was also going very often to see her kids and grandkids and take care of them during school
00:20:42.260vacation etc and so part of the narrative was that when she was at her kids she would be such
00:20:50.980a good mom and a good grandma that she would exhaust herself so much that the moment she would
00:20:57.000come back home she would be unreachable by phone she would have these absences she would be so
00:21:03.020tired and that it was the result of taking care of everyone and so of course part of it was also
00:21:09.760everyone feeling guilty or making mom be so tired that when she arrives back home she's
00:21:17.020like sleeping all the time so it was very well thought through i guess it's like you're saying
00:21:26.280that i'm thinking okay well the misogynist demands of patriarchy become like an accomplice in the
00:21:32.040rape, right? Because the symptoms of her drugging and abuse get laundered into this other kind of
00:21:39.440feminine virtue of the hardworking, like domestically responsible mother and grandmother.
00:21:44.000Yeah, you're applauding her for her self-sacrifice, but it is, you're right,
00:21:49.000in some way it understands the patriarchy only too well and gets out of it exactly what it needs.
00:21:55.700But one thing that has been haunting me, of course, is that, as you said, Adrian, it's a scale that we've never heard of. But the question is, have we never heard of it because it doesn't happen?
00:22:11.760Or is it that this time we hear about it, because of the perversion of Dominique Pellico, that is the fact that he's cataloging everything and filming everything.
00:22:22.300Because it is very easy to think, oh, this is horrifying.
00:22:29.980And it's just this guy was completely insane and was doing these serial killer kind of things.0.60
00:22:36.120But as Adrian, especially you may have heard of, right at the end of the PEDICO trial, there's this investigative journalism thing in the German radio that infiltrated a telegram group of 70,000 men that were exchanging recipes to chemically subjugate their partners and rape them.
00:22:59.280So 70,000. And so there's this very long YouTube documentary about it where they show like how guys like ask each other. They're like, does she look like gone enough for you? And then the other guys are like, yes, you should do this, this and that to her, like sexual assaults, etc. And then they send pictures and the guys send likes in return.
00:23:26.600Like it's it's a horrifying kind of thing. And so what is really terrifying is to think, OK, Dominique Perico in a 50 kilometer radius from his house found those 70 men who came to rape his wife.
00:23:43.060So is it actually that in every house around where we live, these kind of things happen, but they just don't get discovered?
00:23:54.920Yeah. I mean, we might say, you know, we're recording this in the center of Stanford's campus. The number of people on this campus, probably as we're talking now, who have drugged someone and who probably are smart enough not to put it on Telegram or to videotape it, but who will just.
00:24:12.820They do have access to those chemistry labs, and it's the first thing they think to do when they get there.
00:24:16.300Yeah, you know, it's – I think we're dancing around something, which is that the Pelico trial – I'm going to sound trite, but it's like, you know, at the end of Scooby-Doo where the kids rip off the mask, and it's the same guy who they met in act one, and it was like heterosexuality all along, right?
00:24:33.200This is the rotten core of heterosexuality's eroticization of sexual force, right?
00:24:40.520And it almost sort of obviates a lot of feminist discussions about the nuances of consent, right? Because it seems to me that to the men who committed these rapes, at least in the Pellico case, the question of her consent was almost irrelevant to their participation, right?
00:25:03.680There's, like, kind of the radical feminist interpretation where the non-consent is, in fact, the source of the eroticism.
00:25:09.400And then there's, like, the feminist position or the feminist, like, proposition for heterosexuality where, like, consent and enthusiasm can be a source of eroticism.
00:25:16.680And to these guys, it doesn't seem like either.
00:25:28.540And I wanted to say that it's been my first time on Stanford campus and people may not realize this, but for someone like me, what it is to be on Stanford campus is looking at every trash can on campus and wonder, is this where Channel Miller was raped by Bob Turner?
00:25:49.000And so for me, this campus is this case of having this case in mind that has never been seen as a case of chemical submission, but in a way is like this whole thing of having all these girls, because that's how we call them.
00:26:06.700So all these women being so drunk that they can be raped by a trash can like at the end of the evening is a form of how do we use drugs to make women sexually available?
00:26:20.900And that's something that I think is very important, is that at the end of the day, chemical submission is not GHB, rape, drug, etc.0.86
00:26:31.120It's all the ways in which society uses ways to make women do what they're supposed to do or what they're asked to do.
00:26:40.940And so it can be alcohol. It can be GHB.1.00
00:26:43.540It can also be, as we have seen, those super, like Giselle Pellico, it was antihistamines and sleeping pills, you know.
00:26:51.940And actually, when I came back from one of my stays at the trial, I was really sick and I was not sleeping very well.
00:27:01.840And so at 3 a.m. I got up and I thought, OK, I'm going to try to find some cough syrup because I need to stop coughing.
00:27:09.140And I lived in the U.S. in the past, so I still have my stash of CVS stuff.
00:27:15.760And so I had this coughing syrup and I looked at it at 3 a.m.
00:27:19.320I said, oh, it says antihistamines, but it's fine.
00:27:22.580And I drank a bit of this coughing syrup and I woke up and I looked at my watch and it was 1130.
00:27:40.840So I figured I should just let you sleep.
00:27:43.740And for me, it was terrifying because in the Pellico trial, one of the few elements that made the family very worried is that one morning the grandkids had tried to wake Giselle up and they shook her and she couldn't move, etc.
00:27:59.540And so in my very French dark humor kind of thing, I told my husband, I said, well, you found a cough syrup.
00:28:07.380So if you want a pellico meat, like, it's just so easy.
00:28:23.160I'm interested in this, like, alertness you develop.
00:28:26.780I mean, like, first of all, when I came to Stanford, I had that same experience when I first got here, you know, walking around going, where did it happen?
00:28:32.660But it was this unnerving awareness of the presence. And then I came to realize that actually every time I walked past a dorm and probably a lot of non-residential buildings, I was also walking past the site of forced sex, right? And that's not just something that happens to me at Stanford or just on a college campus. It's kind of everywhere, right?
00:28:52.260Last night, I was fortunate enough to go to a man on a wonderful talk on the Pellico trial that she gave here at Stanford last night. And you said something that really stuck with me about how when you were in Avignon covering the trial, whenever you would pass a man on the street, you'd think, is that one of the 20 they couldn't identify of those 70 men, right?
00:29:08.240And it feels a little bit like this is maybe just a side effect of developing feminist consciousness, but it is like being initiated into this horrible truth about the world, right?
00:29:18.080Is that this kind of violence is everywhere and yet rendered somewhat invisible.0.99
00:29:25.640Yeah. And I have to say that actually the Avignon part was OK because it feels like you can leave Avignon.
00:29:33.640But where you're right is that suddenly my experience of the trial has become sitting on a bus and looking at the men around me and thinking, does he drug his wife to rape her?0.94
00:29:47.760Or has he done it before? Or would he be OK with it?0.94
00:29:51.680Because even the guys who are not Dominique Pedico kind of guys, what is striking is that they didn't denounce him.
00:30:01.440So these guys on this website, a few of them didn't go, but no one called the police.
00:30:07.940A few, a very small number went and left, but they didn't call the police.
00:30:14.960And even those who went and said afterwards, I felt really bad, etc., they didn't call the police.
00:30:21.820They didn't even call Pelico being like, dude, what you're doing is really wrong.
00:30:25.780it sounded like no one really saw a problem serious enough to do something to stop it
00:30:33.760and I thought you know I was at this trial and I thought okay out of the 70 guys I know that0.96
00:30:40.140guys don't talk as much as women do about what happens in their lives but there has to be some0.93
00:30:45.940of those guys that said something to some friends about what they had done and why did no one say
00:30:53.640anything it felt like this is the boys club you know in terms of of solidarity there's one of the
00:31:02.060guys who said oh yeah i told my friends about what happened and they were like dude this was a rape
00:31:08.040and i realized it was probably a rape and i thought okay but then no one did anything yeah
00:31:17.180imagine telling your buddies like i cut someone open with a chainsaw and they're like dude that0.88
00:31:21.920sounds like a murder, man. And then like, and then they drop it. Yeah. Right. This is something I
00:31:27.140wanted to ask you because, you know, in your in your talk, you talked about these women who would
00:31:30.560come to the trial who were clearly like personally, emotionally invested in the outcome. Right. Not
00:31:35.960people with a personal stake, not friends of Giselle or of the accused men, but like women
00:31:40.660who had consumed this in the media and wanted to be there and see it. Right. What did French men
00:31:45.160think about this trial? Were they consuming this media? What was their response? So, first of all,
00:31:50.180there were not a lot of men in the audience.
00:31:53.220But I was also a bit pissed because a lot of people said,
00:31:57.460oh, the entire French society is following what's happening at the Mazon trial.
00:32:04.220And my impression was that half of the entire French society
00:32:08.340was following it very closely, i.e. the women.
00:32:11.960And then the guys, I mean, some followed.
00:32:15.280And I mean, it might sound like I'm in the whole, like,
00:32:19.960old men are terrible etc I don't think old men are terrible but I think like it was two different
00:32:26.720worlds the impact of this case on all the women I I know like the way it contributed to a feeling
00:32:35.900that we're really never ever ever safe from anything at any point was completely different
00:32:43.380from those guys who were like oh my god this is really sad like this is really bad oh Dominique
00:32:48.800pedico is a monster. And I felt like for a huge majority of men, it was really easy to see it as
00:32:57.840what in French we call a fait divers. So just a random fact that has happened. Initially in my
00:33:04.360book, I had written a chapter about my dad that I ended up taking out, mostly because I was worried
00:33:11.740that he would sue me um but where he visited me and and my family and my my partner was not there
00:33:19.700during the trial I hadn't started going at the trial at that point and and my dad is just this
00:33:27.240very old school macho guy musician very cool very artsy but very macho kind of unfortunate that he
00:33:37.180had four girls but so we we torture him on a daily basis with our feminism um but he was there
00:33:44.540chilling you know like i was alone with my two very small kids uh my husband was not there he
00:33:50.680didn't put any plate in the dishwasher he didn't help in any way but then he told me like
00:33:56.620you're gonna write about the pdico trial but who cares and i was like well actually dad a lot of
00:34:05.120people care. And he's like, oh, that's really weird. I mean, you do you, whatever. And the
00:34:11.200next day we're sitting at lunch and my dad being my dad, he's decided to move to Brazil because
00:34:17.880he's a musician and he's retired now. And so moving to Brazil as an old white guy is the thing0.53
00:34:23.880to do. And I find it a bit strange. So I ask him, but is it that you have a girlfriend there? And
00:34:30.240he's like no actually I haven't found one so I just see prostitutes all the time and you know0.95
00:34:35.840like you gotta do what you gotta do and he starts like and we're like eating this donut in a Turkish
00:34:42.960snack in Berlin and I'm like this guy like he knows I'm a feminist scholar and he's just like0.99
00:34:51.800yeah you know I'm in Brazil I have to go see prostitutes and have paid sex and a part of me0.99
00:35:00.160thought at least they're getting paid for taking care of him. So maybe that's better than if it0.99
00:35:06.620were the sort of white guy going to a developing country and finding a young woman. But I'm telling0.79
00:35:14.100this anecdote because I found it so striking that in the same 24 hours, he could tell me
00:35:20.100who cares about the PEDICO trial. It's just a random, terrible thing that happened. And then
00:35:26.440he would tell me that of course he has needs and so of course he will use sex workers to fill out
00:35:33.780his needs and those needs only involve other people's consent in a very attenuated way
00:35:39.100right yeah it's it's interesting because you said that some of the men who were on trial
00:35:45.780for raping Giselle Pellico would talk in maybe tangentially similar fashions about
00:35:51.160the absence of sexual availability and and resorting to this as if it was a justified0.97
00:35:58.580thing to do as if as if like her entitlement to her body was on like a same or lower level
00:36:05.220than their entitlement to sexual service right like one guy had he was like oh well my wife
00:36:09.660gave birth recently and she hasn't been sexually available so I had to do this
00:36:14.520and it's like no you know you didn't yeah so I think that's one of the things that really
00:36:20.180made me extremely pessimistic about what it is that I'm trying to do in my life and in my
00:36:27.120scholarship. As you mentioned earlier, I wrote this book about consent. I haven't chosen the
00:36:33.660English title. I wouldn't have, like, I don't think consent is this super joyous thing that
00:36:40.260is so amazing, but that's another problem. They were playing off the joy of cooking,
00:36:44.240and I thought that was a little, like, the famous cookbook, and I was like, oh, that's a little
00:36:47.120yeah straight is it mostly french food is that why they did that yeah so actually the fact the
00:36:52.420the parallel with the joy of cooking was the parallel that i liked about the title i think
00:36:58.300the reason why they suggested this title was more the joy of sex you know like this sort of old book
00:37:04.500about sex of the 70s but what i liked about it is that i think it's interesting to think about sex
00:37:10.660as something akin to cooking and to like having skills
00:37:29.480one of the things that I'm very committed about
00:37:31.760is to say it is a mistake to say that rape is sex minus consent.
00:37:37.720like this sort of equation of you have rape you have sex it's more or less the same thing
00:37:42.520but in one case you have consent in the other case you don't have consent it's always sounded
00:37:47.660extremely bizarre to me and and there's this work of of this philosopher Susan Bryson that I really
00:37:53.860admire the book it's really a wonderful book called Aftermath about her own experience of rape
00:37:59.500and and how like what philosophy can do about this experience of rape and she says I could never
00:38:07.460tell my husband let's do these things that the rapist did to me but because i consent like it's
00:38:15.560sex she says this is absurd to compare those two experiences this is completely these are two things
00:38:21.540that have nothing in common and i was very convinced by that argument and then i went to
00:38:27.620this courtroom and i saw that for these guys there's no fundamental difference between what
00:38:35.780they do with their wife and what they did to Giselle Perico. And it sounded, so you were
00:38:43.260talking about this guy who, who touched me particularly because we're exactly the same age
00:38:50.200and we have kids that are exactly the same age. So his kid was born like my first kid in September
00:38:55.4802019. And he went on to rape Giselle Perico, I think December 27th or 28th of that year.
00:39:03.080And so, of course, like it's been particularly interesting or, yeah, I don't know. Interesting might not be the best word for me, but I really thought, OK, like what would it have been for me if my husband had gone on December 27th of that day to rape a 70 year old woman when I was still like feeling destroyed by having given birth and trying to breastfeed.
00:39:32.120and having this very new, fragile baby, et cetera.
00:39:35.480So I really wanted to understand what happened in his head.
00:39:40.320And he said, well, look, my wife had a very difficult pregnancy
00:39:46.640And then she had a very difficult delivery.0.94
00:39:49.640So that meant I couldn't have sex at that time with my wife.
00:39:54.100And it was a bit like, danda, you got to do what you got to do.0.99
00:39:58.900You know, you go rape Giselle Pelico, of course.0.85
00:40:01.400Like this is just, and that jump sounded like such a crazy jump for me.0.99
00:40:08.600I understand that it might be really hard to not have sex with your partner and go through pregnancy the way she does and that you have, you feel like you would really want.0.99
00:40:20.040But I don't know, you can masturbate, you can watch porn, you can.0.99
00:40:24.420It's the whole internet out there.0.99
00:40:25.600Yeah. There's a lot of steps you could take before I'm going to go rape a drugged stranger.0.99
00:40:32.780And I think that's in some way the terrifying dimension that you're pointing to.0.69
00:40:36.600I think the story with your dad made me think like, of course, focusing on Dominique Pelico is turning him into a serial killer, right?
00:40:43.840It's the way like, oh, the son of Sam, no one knew.
00:40:46.660Like, oh, the BTK killer, no one knew, right?0.77
00:40:49.760Well, they didn't go on message boards being like, hey, if you want to ride along, right?
00:40:55.380And those crimes were largely done in solitude, right?
00:40:58.220Exactly. Complete solitude. We're using a script that we've developed for people who truly act by themselves. That's apparently never what happened here. All these crimes are essentially social crimes. You exchange these trophies, as my guess, with other men.
00:41:14.560And then the other thing that it makes me think of is that, like, surely there are people who, wife gave birth, they had certain urges, they went on that website and were like, well, I'm not doing that, right?
00:41:28.580That number must, of course, it must likely be larger than that number.
00:41:31.660So in some way, your dad sort of has it exactly backwards.
00:41:35.180This implicates probably way more than even the 70 people, to say nothing of the 50.
00:41:40.840It implicates vast swaths of society, it seems to me.
00:41:44.560Yeah, although there's still a very big selection bias. I mean, I've been working on sex for a long time and I've been interested in sex for a long time and I had never heard of that website.
00:41:59.500And so I think there is also a question of who goes on those websites. This was a website that was very famous, apparently, for finding drugs and finding sex work. It was a sort of one foot into the dark web kind of thing.
00:42:17.440Like, I don't know how to access the dark web.
00:42:20.180And so I think there's a selection bias of who reads those kind of things.
00:43:02.520She goes, you know, most women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
00:43:05.380Right. This sense of something that is, I think, most horrifying about the Pellico trial is that.
00:43:16.060There was concerted, effortful, and widespread planning and coordination to hurt this woman over a very long time, and she was largely completely oblivious, right?
00:43:29.640And there is this strata of male life that is rendered largely invisible to women, but which can hurt them very severely.
00:43:39.860but on the one hand I agree and on the other hand I wish they would even hate her I thought it was0.69
00:43:50.320even worse than hating her is that it was never part of the equation she was completely invisible
00:43:59.260that's one of the things that I found really world-chattering in that trial is to think wow
00:44:07.840I feel like I'm inhabiting a world with men, with women, with non-binary people, and that we're making a society together, we're making a world together.
00:44:21.120But for these men, it's like we do not exist.
00:44:27.220And in a way, it's even worse than hating us, is it's not part of their equation.
00:44:34.080and on the day of the verdict so usually on the day of the verdict or even on any day of the trial
00:44:41.620you can come as your family or a friend a support person but for reasons of of space the accused
00:44:49.320were only allowed to have one person per defendant and you won't be surprised to hear that out of
00:44:57.500these 50 people who were there, I think 45 were women. And so you had these women who were there
00:45:04.100that were the wives, the mothers, the daughters, the sisters of those men who had packed these bags
00:45:13.180because the men would be going to prison, a lot of them. And for reasons of space, they were not
00:45:22.380allowed in the main courtroom, which I found really cruel, actually.
00:45:27.180They were put in a broadcast room with some members of the press, including me.
00:49:49.480we should defend the right that men have to bother women.
00:49:54.760Bothering being a metaphor for sexual assault and, yeah, sexual aggression of saying, this is just what men do and it makes everyone's lives better that we can be groped in the metro, etc.
00:50:09.640And it was a very important part of signaling that not all women were in favor of the Me Too movement, etc.
00:50:16.820It was a signal of, like, loyalty to a conception of the erotic and to sexual difference, right?
00:50:21.200And I think part of what was going on was also generational, that there were sort of women signaling, OK, like, guys, the young women might not give you a break, but we're still sexually available.
00:50:36.520So I thought there was an interesting intersection of ageism and feminism there where you could see that it was also a way for those women who were seen as too old to be sexy by French standards to be like, well, we may be too old, but we're still fine with your patriarchal ways of acting.
00:50:57.480So maybe look back at us or something like that. But it happened again with the PEDICO trial that some important intellectual women have taken the effort of writing opeds to say, it's not all men. Stop saying it's all men. Stop saying it's patriarchy. There are good men out there. Stop making men feel bad, etc.
00:51:22.160And there was, in general, a lot of discourse to try to find ways in which these men were not ordinary men.
00:51:32.440And so I found it so funny how in Germany, men were telling me, oh, this is so French.
00:51:38.980How intellectuals were telling me, there are no intellectual men there.
00:51:43.520How, like, Parisians were saying, oh, it's the south of France.
00:51:46.900so everyone was constantly trying to distance themselves from what was happening not my buddies
00:51:54.320yeah or me i guess or they are they're unlike me you know they're um it's interesting that like
00:52:01.240for women or for you it unlocked this experience of like kind of universal suspicion right because
00:52:07.400of the pervasiveness of the rape ideal that the trial unveiled and for men it just like
00:52:12.280for those who considered it at all it seemed to just evoke this like separation and shutdown as
00:52:16.760opposed to like a sort of self-critique. Yeah. And at the same time, I mean, what I find very
00:52:23.680interesting as a philosopher is that I'm sure that there are men who wouldn't have done it,
00:52:31.320you know, like, sure. There's no doubt about this, but the question is who would not have done it
00:52:40.500And why? And no one is able to give a response to this. I feel like no one is entering this discussion of thinking, OK, what is it in the way my sexual desire? What is it in the way that it's shaped? What is it in the discourse about my testosterone, et cetera, that would make it even a little bit interesting to do this?
00:53:06.820Why is it that I still decide not to do it?
00:53:10.120Like, because we know that this is an option that men live with.
00:53:15.380So what I would want is for men to really say, okay, like, what is it that makes me not do it?
00:53:22.760And there's something very akin to the Plato discussion of the Ring of Gagis, you know, like there's this thing in Plato where there's a discussion to know if you had a ring that you could put on your finger.
00:53:35.920where you're sure that this ring will make you invisible,
00:53:39.700would you commit all the crimes in the world?
00:53:42.100Or is there something that would prevent you from committing crimes?
00:53:46.280And I can think of some crimes immediately that I would commit.
00:53:50.380You have a list, but it stops somewhere is the point.
00:54:05.020And what does it say about male sexuality? That this is so obvious that if you're not going to get caught, then you're going to go for it.0.97
00:54:16.140One thing that really struck me is that among the judges that were adjudicating the case, there was one who was systematically intervening when defendants had erection problems on the videos.
00:54:31.160he kept asking why is it that you didn't have an erection why is it that it didn't work he was
00:54:38.140really curious why why would this guy not get hard and there was not once the question why did you
00:54:47.420get hard yeah why why is it that you arrived because we saw in the videos it was this small
00:54:53.500bedroom honestly very ugly there was the tv in the background it was heated up at the maximum
00:55:00.640heating so that she wouldn't wake up oh god you could hear her snore super loudly so
00:55:06.900when you were watching the video you could smell that you could smell that it was really gross
00:55:13.440you know and so the question is how did you get hard the question is not why did you not get hard
00:55:20.060yeah yeah how is this sexy how is any of this sexy yeah the the thing i keep coming back to
00:55:25.360in some way. The way you describe yourself going first through Avignon, but then going back to
00:55:31.000Berlin and going through Berlin that way, this does really remind me of like, let's say the
00:55:36.680Eichmann trial or the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1963. Like this is a question that I think a
00:55:42.840lot of, you know, a lot of Jews who fled Germany in the 1930s and then came back sort of asked
00:55:47.600themselves, like, where were all of y'all like 10 years ago, right? There's like a letter that
00:55:52.420Adorno writes to Thomas Mann where he's like, I can't stop asking that question. Every time I'm
00:55:57.060on the bus, I'm like trying to do the math, how old these people are. And there's a really0.95
00:56:02.120interesting kind of dimension here where in some way the Pelicot trial really kind of takes us out
00:56:09.080of the way rape is traditionally jurisprudentialized and pushing us towards the way we tend to think
00:56:16.560about genocide and stuff like that. And it really does feel like, you know, about the kind of
00:56:20.660structures of killing and maiming that societies are capable of is there something to that do you
00:56:26.420think that there is a kind of an element of kind of a watershed kind of where where the idea of
00:56:31.460responsibility both a collective responsibility but also channeled through just a just an immense
00:56:36.940number of perpetrators kind of gets us closer to like what they might do at the Hague than what
00:56:42.140they would normally do in Avignon yeah so that's very interesting because of course I mean as a
00:56:47.020philosopher and because a recurring theme was how ordinary these men were. Like I thought about
00:56:54.780Hannah Arendt a lot. I reread the Eichmann trial book and it kept resonating in a very terrifying
00:57:03.420way for me. And one of the questions in the trial was why did they not sue the men for a crime in
00:57:13.640friends, that is acts of torture and barbarian acts. It would have made the amount of years of
00:57:20.000prison that could be given to the men, et cetera, much higher. It would have meant that Pelico could
00:57:26.420have gotten life, et cetera, instead of 20 years as he did. And there was really something for me
00:57:34.620of wondering, is it a political crime? Is it something like genocide? Is it a desire of
00:57:42.580of destroying something of the the humanity of Giselle Pelicot like it it it was very
00:57:53.200probably the case but what was interesting is that it felt like most people could not see that
00:58:02.120that it seemed so normal in a way what was done there was this very like bizarre feeling at all
00:58:10.780times that it was like this is terrible this is destroying her humanity and at the same time
00:58:18.660it's completely mundane yeah and so for me as a feminist scholar and i think for you as well it's
00:58:26.960just a feeling that we constantly have of of this extreme contrast between the extreme gravity and
00:58:34.720seriousness of what is happening and its extreme mundanity. So how do we reconcile it? I really
00:58:41.380at times had the feeling that I was going crazy. So I put as a constraint on myself that I needed
00:58:48.340to write it live. And I ended up sending the manuscript four days after the end of the trial.
00:58:54.420That's an insanely productive work ethic that I'm very impressed by and a little intimidated.
00:58:59.420Yes, but also it was the condition of my survival.
00:59:04.760So the first time I went to the trial, I came back home to Berlin to my kids and my husband.0.99
00:59:11.440And I thought, shit, I can't inhabit the world.0.99
00:59:15.960I can't go back to my normal life.0.99
00:59:19.640I can't grade like these master theses and attend like departmental meetings, etc.
00:59:27.000Like my kids are drawing something to me and I'm thinking about those videos of Forrest Fellatio of Giselle Felicot. I can't live in this world. It became unlivable.
00:59:40.400And so writing the book very fast was a way to say, at some point, I need to get back to my normal life of lying to myself about the fact that this exists, because you can't walk in the streets.
00:59:57.900What you were saying earlier, you can't pass dorms and constantly think probably a rape happened here and a rape happened there and a rape happened here.
01:00:07.500And there is this sort of mass torture happening on people because they're women.
01:00:17.600Like, I can't live in this world with that degree of awareness at all times.
01:00:24.240I think about this a lot, right? Because on the one hand, I think that the Pellico example shows the way that rape can be like a sexual and physical domination, but also there's this element of like epistemic domination, right? It's like all these things that she didn't know, the degradation and violence being done to her that was kept from her that allowed her to go on living with this man who was treating her in such an abominable way as if they were loving.
01:00:49.580People who disproportionately also had child abuse material on their computers, another group that you can do stuff to who don't understand exactly what's happening.
01:00:57.240But then on the other hand, as feminists, and I think this is not a phenomenon that's exclusive to feminists, but it's the one I have the most intimacy with, right? As feminists, we also need to conduct a kind of muting of our own knowledge or suppression of our own knowledge in order to remain functional in a world that enables this violence and won't reckon with it, right?0.80
01:01:20.200Because otherwise, it's a situation where the exposure to truth will lead you into a kind of mental unraveling.
01:01:29.700The things that are kept from us out of cruelty and the things that we deny out of like kind of a self-mercy.
01:01:36.100There was a journalist at the trial, a female journalist, because, of course, that was something that I found very interesting, that a lot of the journalists there were women.