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‘These men think they’ve done nothing wrong’: the philosopher who tried to understand Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists

‘These men think they’ve done nothing wrong’: the philosopher who tried to understand Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists

When 50 men went on trial in France, accused of raping a woman who had been drugged by her husband, Manon Garcia was in the courtroom – and in the prosecutors’ closing arguments. How does she make sense of what happened? ‘It is so rare, in fact it never happens, that crimes are so well documented.” Manon Garcia is the French feminist philosopher whose thinking featured so prominently in the final stages of the Dominique Pelicot trial . There are, she points out, 20,000 videos and photos of Gisèle Pelicot “being raped, unconscious, by complete strangers”. One might struggle to understand why, in the face of such compelling factual evidence against her husband Dominique and a further 50 men, prosecutors would need to bring in a philosophical argument to explain why this was wrong. But since they did, they couldn’t have found a clearer or more persuasive voice than Garcia’s, the author of We Are Not Born Submissive and The Joy of Consent. Last November, six weeks into the trial, Garcia arrived in Avignon to watch mass rape in the dock. She had intended to come for a day or two, just to see it, and then go back to her normal life. “But I was seeing things that the journalists were not seeing, because we’re not doing the same job. Also, something deeper happened. It felt like I couldn’t do anything else. My kids were three and five, and I could not be a mother, be in my daily life, while the trial was happening.” Continue reading...