One of Gisele Pelicot’s rapists got 3 years in jail – it’s not enough

Dominque Pelicot. 20 years. 

Charly Arbo. 13 years.

Didier Sambuchi. Five years. 

51 men have been sentenced after being found guilty of raping Gisele Pelicot after she was drugged by her husband.  

Most have been jailed, but some, like Patrick Aron, walked free on health grounds while arrangements are made for a special jail. 

But for many people, the verdict showed us that the French criminal justice system still has much more to do. 

As a civil lawyer who has represented hundreds of victims of sexual violence in the UK, I may not have been pleased by the sentences, which were much shorter than the prosecution had asked for, but I sadly wasn’t surprised. 

Ms Pelicot insisted on a public trial because she believed it would expose how a ‘macho’ society that ‘trivialises rape’ was responsible for the crimes committed against her.  

I was pleased to see that the weeks of evidence certainly did expose this social disease, but the verdicts could have done more to cure it.  

Maximum sentences for all 51 men, would have been appropriate.  

But I’m still glad.

I’m glad that every man was found guilty. I’m glad that the judges didn’t buy the defence’s argument that under French law, sexual activity does not require consent.   

We have all been horrified by what we learned these past months – the videos submitted as evidence showing that Gisele Pelicot was choked during oral rape, that humiliating slogans were written on her body, that one man thought she was dead.

The cascade of wrongs is so depraved to be almost literally unbelievable. 

But from the shorter sentences, it seems the judges apparently found some mitigation in the testimony of the men responsible and didn’t follow the prosecution’s wishes. 

Perhaps it is because they learned during the trial that the perpetrators were in some cases themselves victims – of traumatic childhoods, loneliness, job losses or, as the defence suggested, Dominique Pelicot’s manipulations.  

Their lawyers argued this victimhood entitled them to a level of mercy. Sadly, it seems the judges agreed.  

It’s far from an ideal situation, but as Gisele has so powerfully made clear, the issues go much wider. 

As much as we need the criminal justice system to do its job and keep women safe from the predations of men who evidently think themselves blameless, this case was never going to end with a simple black-and-white ending of the bad guys being put away forever and the rest of us moving on. 

So while we need criminal justice systems, at home and abroad, to change, that is not all the change we need, and it’s not the change Gisele Pelicot asked for. 

Yes, the judges could have done a better job at recognising the true seriousness of all these men’s crimes.

But judges can’t solve the problem of why so many ‘normal’ men, men so seemingly ordinary that French media referred to them collectively as Monsieur Tout-le-Monde, or Mr Everyman, can be capable of quietly committing atrocities they mislabel ‘libertine fantasies’.  

Of the 51 men who went to Gisele’s house to rape her, only eight had relevant previous convictions, six of domestic violence, and two for sexual violence. I have to ask whether any of these men even thought raping Gisele Pelicot was a crime.  

I work at the coalface of sexual abuse, trying to find some small measure of justice for women after the damage has been done – which is vital, but not enough. 

We must steer the supertankers of law and culture on a different course, one where men just don’t want to rape sedated, drugged women, or to post pictures and videos of their unsuspecting wives and girlfriends on the kind of websites Dominique Pelicot used to recruit these outwardly normal law-abiding men. 

The big question for us now is, will men everywhere, not just in France, come to terms with the hard, but hard to escape, reality that they too are part of the culture that Gisele Pelicot fought so bravely to expose? 

We need to show that rape culture doesn’t just mean the acts Gisele was subjected to. 

We need to stand up for women, and their autonomy. 

We need to teach a boy that, when he shares an intimate photo of a girl with all his friends, he’s guilty of rejecting her autonomy, using the very same logic as so many of the men who raped Gisele.

And, in a sign of the things we need to address, she was dragged through the mud in court. 

Her motives were questioned, parts of the media called it ‘revenge’ when she insisted on an open trial and the defence insinuated that she was a bit of a swinger, somehow complicit in her own abuse because she hadn’t guessed it was happening.  

While this was profoundly untrue, it would have been irrelevant in any case. The normal processes of the law mean there is no victim irreproachable enough to deserve to be treated well.  

And as a lawyer, I know first hand how difficult this can be for victims. 

So Gisele’s case proves that we need to take every chance to change the game – a chance that the sentences failed to fully take. 

So when that game is rigged, what choice remains but to continue to loudly, proudly, demand the change we deserve? 

Without shame, and together, women and all who truly love them can make this change. 

And I hope we will.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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