At the Mazan rape trial, the masterful pleadings of the civil celebration | EUROtoday

“Ttransform the mud into noble material. » Make of these sordid weeks, of this terrible dive into the “labyrinth” of Mazan, one thing that’s as much as the problem. Finding which means, discovering legitimate causes to hope in a matter which, in actuality, “is nothing but a torrent of tears”. M^e Antoine Camus is the primary to plead for the civil celebration, this Wednesday, November 20. Like his colleague M^e Stéphane Babonneau after him, he delivers a robust, easy and dignified argument – ​​like Gisèle Pelicot and her household.

“We know of course,” he stated within the preamble, “the expectations and hopes aroused, outside this room and well beyond, by this trial which, in advance and without delay, is described as historic – because we collectively, viscerally, urgently want it to be. » By choosing to renounce the closed session, by defending a screening of the videos in the presence of the public and the press, says M^e Camus, “Gisèle Pelicot invited the entire society to take up the issue to collectively reflect on the questions it poses.”

A “mass rape” over practically ten years

So, what can we are saying who can take part within the “work of justice and truth” that’s being carried out right here? “This question has been obsessing me and my colleague for several weeks because the matter is so dense, to the point that it would almost come to submerge us, to engulf us. » “To do the work of justice and truth”, would to start with, maybe, “underline the insufficiency of the legal qualifications with which the court is seized to apprehend this case in the fullness of its horror – as if there had a form of blindness to our law which would not have pushed the imagination of the abject so far.”

ALSO READ The cost of Gisèle Pelicot on the “trial of cowardice” The similar fees had been roughly retained for every of the accused: gang rape with use of chemical submission. “But isn’t what Gisèle Pelicot is the victim of rather a “mass rape” dedicated over practically ten years on the instigation of her husband? Everyone, leaving this home, understood that others had handed earlier than them and that others would nonetheless go. None noticed match to report the details, even anonymously. There have been greater than 200 rapes in ten years. Everyone, to their extent, at their degree, contributed to this monstrosity and allowed the continuation, for ten years, of an ordeal which even a lawyer on the protection benches conceded bordered on torture and barbarity. . It is the banality of Hannah Arendt’s evil, which right here took on the face of a rape of alternative. »

What qualification, furthermore, for these stolen years of life, for Gisèle Pelicot’s nagging anguish within the face of her reminiscence loss and her absences? What qualification for the struggling suffered by Caroline Darian and her sisters-in-law?

“The Perfect Crime”

“Doing work of justice and truth” would even be, continues M^e Camus, to not let or not it’s stated that Dominique Pelicot would have “recognized everything, and that he would have willingly lent his assistance to this audience”. “He never recognizes anything spontaneously, never anything completely: what he recognizes, he has no other choice but to recognize because irrefutable proof is waved under his nose. » There is everything that the civil parties had to learn. Everything that still remains mysterious. Everything they fear they will have to discover one day. “Our customers find it a little hard to believe that between 1999 and 2011 Dominique Pelicot went to play mahjong or learn sewing. Unfortunately, they exclude nothing and they expect everything. »

ALSO READ At the Mazan rape trial, the “master” and the “disciple” “To carry out justice and truth” would even be to measure the extent of the phenomenon of chemical submission; the face that rape takes when it’s dedicated utilizing the household drugs cupboard, on the initiative of a seemingly loving, thoughtful, caring partner. Stop the astonishment typically tinged with suspicion, continues M^e Camus, who continues to encompass Gisèle Pelicot: is it doable to be the sufferer of such a criminal offense with out ever realizing it? “What this file brings to light is another blind spot in our legal arsenal: when it occurs in an intra-family context at the initiative of relatives, chemical submission is nothing other than the modus operandi of the perfect crime . »

“Who are we to dare tell Gisèle Pelicot how to keep moving forward? »

“Do work of justice and truth”, says M once more^e Camus, this might encompass enthusiastic about the best way wherein in France, in 2024, we defend rape. To take inventory of the violence that, day after day, Gisèle Pelicot endured on the benches of the civil celebration. These express and insidious reproaches made to her: her liberated sexuality, her lack of hatred in the direction of her husband, her refusal to ascertain a “podium” of the most effective and worst co-accused, her method of reaffirming that no, she was not below the affect of her ex-husband.

“Even if she were in denial and not resilient, which I don’t believe, what exactly do we regret on the defense side? That Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t shoot herself in the head, because only then would she be a good victim? Who are we to dare tell him how to keep moving forward and standing? Is it not precisely our role as auxiliaries of justice to do our part of introspection, to recognize that there is sometimes unnecessary and gratuitous violence, to admit that some of these defense strategies no longer have their merit? place in a judicial enclosure in France in the 21st century^e century ? »

“Doing justice and truth,” concludes M.^e Camus, it might be, on the a part of the court docket, “to put the church somewhat back in the middle of the village by some powerful, clear and firm principles on the notion of consent. »

Against a “right to make mistakes”

“The means to commit rape are not going to disappear,” M stated afterwards.^e Stéphane Babonneau. What should, nonetheless, change is the concept, anchored in a sure masculine creativeness, that the lady’s physique is an object of conquest. No one says that males are intrinsically poisonous, however they’re extra uncovered to the danger of rape than girls, and that is largely linked to the representations wherein they’re constructed. » This trial, he says, is certainly the trial of “rape culture” – and this affair, its excellent, its horrible illustration.

ALSO READ Charly A., the accused who doesn’t know why he got here to the Pelicots six instancesSo, M^e Babonneau takes up, one after the other, the technique of protection used throughout these eleven weeks of debate. The repeated “I did not intend to rape” advert nauseamnotably. “What the defendants are pleading,” he stated, “is a simple and banal error of judgment. “I listened to her husband”, “it was her husband who consented…” Don’t some immediately go as far as to argue that there was an alteration in discernment? Don’t they declare to have been probably drugged by Dominique Pelicot himself? “We heard it argued, sometimes very vehemently, that they had the feeling of being victims in this affair,” recollects M.^e Babonneau, and that their place would fairly be on the bench of the civil events. Day after day, Gisèle Pelicot attended this litany. »

But there arises, for the court docket, the query of a societal alternative, underlines the lawyer: ought to we “adjust the expectation that we can have of the behavior of an individual to its lowest level”? “If you accept here a right to error, what will prevent others, later, from saying that, when a woman told them no, they understood that in reality she was saying yes and that Were they wrong too? »

The right to make mistakes is not new in this area, recalls M.^e Babonneau. It is even historical: was it not produced, in 1978, at the Aix-en-Provence rape trial? A defense lawyer, in his pleading, put forward precisely this argument in terms cited by Gisèle Pelicot’s counsel: “Couldn’t these boys have misunderstood the girls’ attitude? Were these people able to understand their freedom of morals? »

“The good victim would be the one who does not speak”

“Here we are in 2024, forty-eight years later, hearing again that rapists are victims, and even victims of their victims,” continues M^e Babonneau. The good sufferer can be the one who wouldn’t communicate. The injury is completed, what’s the level of destroying one other life, that of kids, of the spouse, of aged dad and mom? This imaginative and prescient should cease. The man who rapes is not any extra a sufferer than is the driving force who, driving drunk, causes an accident the place he causes harm to himself. »

No one has ever requested a street accident sufferer to acknowledge the perpetrator as a sufferer in flip, factors out M^e Babonneau, any multiple would consider reproaching him for having taken his automotive. “Forty-eight years later,” continues the lawyer, “we have heard again that rape could be the result of a misunderstanding. Forty-eight years later, we heard again that if a woman is raped, it is a little bit her fault. »

ALSO READ “It wasn’t fun”: on the Mazan trial, the parable of rape “without pleasure” Beginning his pleading, Stéphane Babonneau returned to what the day of November 2, 2020 represented for Gisèle Pelicot. On this pulverization, in a couple of minutes, of a lifetime. Of the 4 years that handed afterwards, “4 years of an uninterrupted fall, right into a nicely which she thought would by no means contact the underside, of which she is just not certain that it was completed. » Being knocked down by every new revelation and making an attempt to stand up once more. Seeing your youngsters devastated and typically discovering your self incapable of remaining with them. Trying to rebuild a life, below one other title, in a village the place nobody knew its historical past. And then, from the summer time of 2023, start to listen to within the press and from her new mates about this atrocious, this not possible affair of the Mazan rapes, to witness the debates that she aroused amongst those that didn’t know who she was. was.

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Kangaroo of the day

Answer

As the listening to approached, this “tsunami” that she feared, Gisèle Pelicot determined that “she no longer had any reason to hide”. She wished this affair to develop into helpful to others. This trial, the judgment that your court docket will render, can be a “testament, a legacy passed on to future generations who will discover Gisèle Pelicot, her courage, the price she paid to change society. »

“Madame Pelicot,” he stated, turning to his consumer as he completed his pleading, “I’m sure that you’ve completed your a part of the work. You went above and past what might be anticipated of you. I encourage you immediately to go on the torch. » At court docket: “The time has now come to position their historical past, their hope, their future in your palms. » At the exit of the courtroom, behind the hedge of cameras and microphones awaiting Gisèle Pelicot and her counsel, there’s a guard of honor. Denser and extra resolved than ever.