This book, along with its timing, is a gift. Not all gifts are easily received, and while it is at times difficult to read, it is an important rejoinder to those who question the CNN exclusive report (which fails to have become the global scandal it should be) about the online “rape academy” that received 62 million visits in February. Men going to that site were looking for advice on how to commit the same crimes Gisèle Pelicot endured at the hands of her husband as well as the 51 convicted rapists now in prison (and others still at large because they were never identified).
At one point during a trial that she courageously insisted on making public, Gisèle Pelicot told the court: “Every day people thank me for my courage. I want to tell them this is not courage, but a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.” She says they were words “I would never have uttered before.”
It is that same patriarchal society that produces the unending genocide against the Palestinian people, the carpet bombing of Iran and Lebanon, the brutality of ICE raids, detentions, and deportations, Mark Carney’s garrison state militarism that slashes programs that would help end male violence against women all the while he boosts the male-dominated structures of global capitalism and extractive violence.
As the raving of Trump leads many to say he should be removed from office as a demented old man, I find such a diagnosis unhelpful both because he has always behaved this way as a grossly ignorant and entitled man who always gets what he wants, and because there is always a whole gallery of enablers, all of whom are acting out the illogic of a system of domination, coercive control, and violence. All these men and their enablers and their system have to go too.
It is that same foundation which produced a legal system that never seems up to the task of providing justice for its victims.
For years, Gisèle Pelicot did not want the trial to be public, but then, when she thought of being in a room with the 51 accused and their lawyers, she realized that “their voices would be louder than mine. And all their eyes would be on me as they stood shoulder to shoulder, like a wall,” even though the evidence against them was overwhelming and unprecedented. It was during a long walk that she realized that “shame has to change sides.”
She says that had she been 20 years younger, she likely would not have requested an open court trial. “I would have been too afraid of the looks: those damn looks women of my generation have always had to contend with; those damn looks that make you waver in the morning between a dress and trousers, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you or embarrass you; those damn looks that seem to tell you who you are or what you’re worth, only to forsake you as you age.”
Her arrival in court confirmed her decision as she describes a flock of lawyers in black gowns surrounding the rapists, “presenting a united front with the accused and seeming to take up all the space in the room….As I sat down on the bench reserved for us, they felt uncomfortably close. Not one lowered his eyes. The accused men stared at me defiantly. They would all be pleading not guilty.”
Again, that male entitlement in a courtroom where video evidence of their crimes confirmed their guilt, seeming to me on the same spectrum of male violence that allows Pete Hegseth and Trump and his cabal of entitled men to take pride in videos showing drone assassinations of Caribbean fishing boats or hitting an Iranian girls school, smugly claiming the law was on their side and they have done nothing wrong. That refusal to see and hear the pain of those who suffer, for only the spotlight on their own self-appointed glory and celebrations of toxic masculinity is what is deemed worthy.
The celebratory violence of the Trumpists and Netanyahus and Carneys are symbols of a system that continues on regardless of who is in charge. (Yes, Carney is included for crowing about committing half a trillion dollars to war while women and children cannot find safe spaces to flee from the domestic terror in their own homes and he pushes Canadian weapons abroad where they are similarly used to produce terror in the lives of civilians everywhere).
Pelicot writes about how the defendants in her trial found a male bonding camaraderie in the court hallways, the café across the street, the bar where they bought each other beer, their laughter.
“They bonded with each other simply because they were convinced they had done nothing wrong.” The chilling observation is replicated in an April 2026 survey of Canadian and American men that found 95.1% reported having recently used on average 8 coercive strategies “to get a woman to have sex who they knew did not want sex and had not consented. Most of these occasions (65%) resulted in successfully forcing the woman into sex.”
Pelicot’s words for the enablers of such a system are sharp, focused, truthful. She talks about the ludicrous claims made by the “defence” lawyers, who “made a request that the word ‘rape’ not be used, in order to preserve the presumption of innocence. One proposed ‘sexual relations.’ One of the judges suggested ‘sex scene’. I was fuming inside, but from the bench where I sat, I wasn’t allowed to react. I had to restrain myself. All the time….Restrain myself when a female lawyer sneered at a medical examiner testifying to the gravity of my physical condition, ‘Oh, let’s weep for Madame Pelicot, shall we?’ I will not record her name here, nor those of her colleagues, nor those of the defendants. Not out of any consideration for them – their identities are easy enough to find online or in the court records – but so that they will be remembered only for what they are: parrots, deplorable mouthpieces, violent, cowardly little people. I want all that remains of them to be the words they used to trample over me, to reduce one woman – and therefore all women – to absolute submission in the name of male domination.”
There is so much to think about and ponder and act on in this story of a life marked by crimes that are beyond words. Pelicot shares a life story that is riddled with patterns of male violence, some obvious at the time, others only becoming clarified with time, within which she clings to moments where she can recall a sense of happiness and accomplishment, moments she refuses to discard.
She gives a heartfelt thanks to the “honour guard” of supporters who welcomed her each day in court, the survivors who have written her notes, the international sentiments of solidarity, which ultimately remind her, as she shares this healing journey with her readers: “Love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness, Now it is my strength.”
