CHENNAI: Between the years 2011 and 2020, a French woman named Gisele Pelicot was sedated on multiple occasions by her husband Dominique Pelicot, who would invite a total of 72 men to rape her as he filmed the crimes. These assaults became known to the police when they investigated him for taking upskirt videos at a supermarket in 2020.
Since then, Gisele Pelicot has become the central figure in a court case that has rocked France. For someone who so recently had to come to terms with a history of violence that she wasn’t even aware was happening to her (even though she was experiencing numerous trauma-related symptoms), she has shown incredible courage in taking on and testifying in such a high-profile case. “The shame isn’t ours to feel; it’s theirs,” she has been quoted as saying in court.
This shocking mass rape case (also known as the “Mazan rapes”) has received a good amount of press coverage in and beyond France, but it hasn’t felt like it has been the point of much discussion in India. There’s an argument to be made that here in India, where sexual assault is a sundry occurrence (this is not hyperbolic, for the statistics indicate it), our very homegrown horror is already too much for the bandwidths of those who feel outrage, fear or pain over it. Why be shocked about what happens elsewhere? How even be shocked, when right here there is too much?
Still, there’s something about Gisele Pelicot. Something that makes one feel awe. People can be quick to valorise some who have experienced grisly ends, as the epithet “Nirbhaya”, given to the victim of a highly notable case in Delhi in 2012, reminds us. Survivors, those who are public figures and those who are not, however, are still handled gingerly. Survivors make many uneasy, for diverse reasons. There is usually stigma attached. Moreover, there may also be pressure to perform survivorhood in ways that are palatable, and to be a role model. What Gisele Pelicot is doing today is incredible, a true-life story of public reckoning while privately dealing with betrayals and violations of mind-boggling proportions.
She has reportedly said: “I am an absolutely destroyed woman and I don’t know how I’m going to rebuild myself, get over this. At almost 72, I don’t know if I have enough life left to process everything that’s happened.”
The point of Gisele Pelicot standing up and standing out today isn’t so that there can be more Gisele Pelicots. It is so that there can be fewer, if such change is at all possible. It is so that the message that shame must be reverted back to the sender is widespread. It is so that some justice is served.
But it costs her so very much to do this, and that is where the awe that she is doing it at all comes in. Survival is a privilege only relative to victimhood. Surviving itself is horrible work, whether one does it in the shadows or in the light. Surviving and telling the tale, and to forever be known by it (and reduced to it) — that is astounding.