The Chat Room Behind the Pelicot Rape Trial

There were two rooms at the Pelicot mass-rape trial in Avignon: the courtroom for the press, and a live-feed room for the public. From the day it began, in early September, women lined up outside the courthouse before 7 A.M. in order to secure one of sixty seats in the latter, the salle de retransmission. Two retired women were always at the front: Bernadette and Brigitte. Bernadette came, she said, to see how justice worked; Brigitte because this was a live version of the crime shows she liked to watch on TV. Both admitted that, once they started coming, they couldn’t stop.

Among the other spectators were a family—grandmother, mother, and two daughters—from Bordeaux. There was a woman whose daughter had been raped and who had come to learn how such a trial worked. There was a woman in her seventies who had been raped years ago by the father of one of the fifty-one defendants—making the trial, for her, a paltry chance at remedial justice. Every day, a few men joined the line. They were looked at with suspicion. The rumor was that more of them tended to come toward the end of the week, when the videos of the rapes were shown.

When the doors opened every morning, at eight-thirty, the press, the plaintiffs, and the lawyers filed through: well-dressed professionals, a vision of Paris at work, sauntering in front of the waiting provincials. (Avignon is the prefecture of Vaucluse, a heartland of the far-right Rassemblement National party, and one of the poorest regions in the South.) Meanwhile, an official gave the public instructions about how to behave in the salle, where a screen at the front projected a view of the courtroom. If we left—for lunch, or to go to the rest room—we would lose our place. The only exception to this rule, the official said, would be when the videos of the rapes were shown. At that point, we could step out, as the official did every time. She was, she said, a woman, too.

Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot got married in 1973, when they were both in their early twenties. By 2011, they had three children, several grandchildren, and were living in the suburbs of Paris. Gisèle worked at the state electricity company; Dominique was an electrician by trade. That year, Dominique began to slip Gisèle drugs that rendered her unconscious, then rape her as she slept. Two years later, when the couple retired to Mazan, a small town in Vaucluse, Dominique began inviting men to their home to rape his wife while she was sedated.

Dominique’s crimes were discovered after police apprehended him in 2020, when he was caught filming up the skirts of three women in a supermarket, and authorities confiscated his phones, hard drives, and a laptop. He and his co-defendants’ trial commenced four years later. After his primary portion concluded, in September, fifty of the eighty-three men whom he had solicited to rape his wife while he filmed them were tried in batches of six or seven per week. I first attended in November, when I saw the trial of Romain Vandevelde, a former forklift driver; Omar Douiri, a mechanic who cleaned buses; Cendric Venzin, a restaurant manager; Saifeddine Ghabi, a truck driver; Paul-Koikoi Grovogui, a food-processing worker; Ludovick Blemeur, a warehouse worker; and Cédric Grassot, a man who worked in I.T.

In France, rape trials are usually held in camera, in part to preserve the anonymity of the victim. Gisèle rejected this norm, claiming that she wanted “to insure that society could see what was happening.” The trial consequently landed front and center in the French national debate, with daily news coverage. Cities are now daubed with feminist graffiti. In the public discourse, the mystery of the case was not really what had taken place: in court, Dominique confessed, and the co-defendants’ actions had been captured in meticulously labelled video recordings.

Instead, the mystery was why the men had done what they did. In an immortal parody of Simone de Beauvoir, delivered during his confession, Dominique argued that “one is not born a pervert, one becomes one.” But what was it that perverted him and the others? During the months of proceedings, the court heard testimony from the defendants themselves, from character witnesses, and from mental-health professionals who had conducted interviews with the defendants, including an enquêteur de personnalité (akin to a social worker), a Freudian expert psychologue, and a more medically oriented expert psychiatre. One of the answers that emerged from their discussions was sexual trauma. A quarter of the accused claimed to have been sexually abused as children, as Dominique himself says he was; of the seven defendants being tried one week, three had been victims of incest or rape. In one proceeding, a witness declared that, if it weren’t for the convicted pedophile Fabrice Motch, who had raped Blemeur when he was twelve, Blemeur would not have been there. (Earlier, in a telling slip of the tongue, the witness had confused the two men in his testimony.) But, if these accounts were harrowing, they were not universally convincing—some observers felt that the defense lawyers were enlisting a casual determinism to explain away their clients’ responsibility. After all, not all people who are subjected to such events end up committing rape.

Several of the defendants’ lawyers asked questions of the psychiatrists and psychologists to attempt to better comprehend another set of terms that had been circulating throughout the trial. If the presence of an abusive childhood would not be sufficient to explain these men’s behavior, perhaps a better understanding of their approach to sex would. How, one lawyer asked, should we understand “fantasy”? What is “paraphilia”? When is sexuality “deviant”? What counts as “curiosity”? In France, trials for crimes punishable by up to fifteen to twenty years in prison are judged by a jury of professional magistrates. At the Pelicot trial, the president of the jury often invoked the “famous norm” of sexuality—what did that actually mean? The more, however, that the lawyers gleaned from these questions, the less explanatory power the answers seemed to possess. Many people have fantasies, experience atypical kinds of arousal, or are sexually curious and experimental but do not act on these impulses in a way that infringes upon the law. Though multiple explanations for the defendants’ actions were offered at the trial, nothing quite fit. That is, apart from a much mentioned, though little analyzed, site called Coco.

In a memoir, “Et J’ai Cessé de T’appeler Papa” (“I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again”), Dominique and Gisèle’s daughter, Caroline Darian, recounts the process her father used to recruit men to rape his wife. He would first log on to Coco. The site required no membership, provided little to no moderation, and had the unusual feature that message histories were not saved after a user logged off. All users needed to provide was a pseudonym, an age, a location, and an indication of their gender. Anh P., the co-founder of the Avignon branch of a trans-rights organization, told me that typical themes for the discussion groups around which Coco was structured included trans meetups and porn, hentai, B.D.S.M., sex work, zoophilia, and date-rape drugs (some of which were hidden under other names). Groups without sufficient activity would be closed by the system. The forum that Dominique used was called “Without Her Knowledge,” and was active for at least ten years. His opening gambit, Darian recounts, was to ask chat-room entrants whether, just like him, they enjoyed “rape mode.”

Throughout the trial, the jury kept referring to Coco as a “dating site”—something that made many people in the crowd wish that a set of older magistrates had not been chosen to decide on this case. In fact, Coco, which was shut down this past year, was not a dating site but a platform for anonymous chat rooms—a place where stating your desire, no matter what it was, could be done without fear of the usual consequences. In Anh’s words, “operating behind a screen masks moral limits, and certain people overcame the hurdle of reality.”

The most canonical theory of invisibility’s effect on behavior is perhaps the Ring of Gyges: the invisibility device mentioned in Plato’s Republic. When Gyges realizes that with a twist of a ring he can disappear, he rapes the king’s wife, kills the king, and takes over the kingdom. On Coco, the psychology of invisibility met the power of the crowd. Users were not only invited to speak free from scrutiny—they were also introduced to people speaking the same way, at the same time. It is as if, when Gyges turned his ring to become invisible, he suddenly met others who were invisible, too, who would nurture his desires.

You might assume that the powerful feeling of invisibility ends when you close your computer screen. But, throughout the years, users of Coco repeatedly performed the unsavory things that they had discussed on the platform. The public prosecutor’s office in Paris reported that, between January, 2021, and May, 2024, Coco was named in more than twenty-three thousand criminal cases. Several of these were related to a wave of violent ambushes of gay or trans people, which were orchestrated by predators who arranged meetups with their victims online. According to a 2023 documentary produced by Mediapart, three hundred people were attacked in this manner in the course of five years, equating to at least one attack a week. Though attacks associated with online platforms like Coco have dramatically increased recently, the history of this kind of crime stretches back to the days of Minitel, an early French online network. Coco made things much worse. Véronique Godet, a former co-president of the L.G.B.T.Q. organization SOS Homophobie, told me that ninety per cent of the ambushes reported to them were organized on the platform. Prompted by SOS Homophobie, the French government conducted an investigation of Coco and, this past June, closed the site. In early January, Coco’s founder, Isaac Steidl, was indicted in France on charges including hosting a site that allowed gangs to plan violent ambushes. But other platforms, such as Chaat, still exist, and have a similar functionality.

What happens to a person’s psychology in a chat room? There is a certain kind of language in the testimonies of Coco ambush victims that was echoed in the Pelicot trial. A man who was attacked by twelve people in Besançon in 2018 said that it felt like “a game” to his aggressors, only one of whom ultimately acknowledged his guilt. “It did not seem at all like they were committing an act of violence,” the victim said. Many defendants at the Pelicot trial similarly expressed the feeling that the scenes they lived through were fictional. Ghabi and Venzin said that they thought their visits were, respectively, a “scenario” and a “fantasy.” Vandevelde, who went to the Pelicot house six times between 2019 and 2020, described himself as “a self-directed zombie.” Related to the fictionality was a perceived lack of agency. Douiri, one psychologist said, did not see himself as a subject, “but as an object which responded to impulses.”

The defendants’ avowed lack of consciousness of their actions would seem to go far beyond what one might ordinarily expect from criminal defendants. To psychologists, this mind-set accords with research about other kinds of Internet use. Writing about online pornography, the clinical psychologist Alessandra Lemma has made the case that, compared with porn distributed via traditional media, online porn represents not a difference in scale but a difference in kind. This is in part due to how the Internet has reshaped the basic structure of desire. The Internet has shifted society, Lemma argues, from a “3(D)” model of desire, entailing “Desire, Delay, and Delivery,” to a “2(D)” model, which goes straight from desire to delivery. In this new model, we gratify our desires so readily that we do not have time to question them. Bypassing delay, we bypass a chance to interrogate ourselves.

Lemma concludes that the Internet can unleash “more primitive psychic states.” Is it possible that, when desires explored on the Internet move offline, these states persist? That the virtual extends out into the real?

Something seems to be happening here that distinguishes anonymous chat rooms from other spaces in which social taboos can be lifted: the carnival, the festival, the rave. These are spaces of pleasure and play, but ones in which we still act with intention. In contrast, the chat room is not only an anonymous space in which you can say whatever you want but also one that, because it exists online, introduces a mechanism by which you can disassociate from your actions. It both enables repressed desires to be freely spoken and facilitates an engagement with reality in which those desires can be more easily carried out. (Notably, although just under half of the accused in the trial had criminal records, the majority of those were for smaller crimes, such as drunk driving or drug possession—only eight had prior records of sexual or domestic violence.)

In the French press, one term that people have used to understand the trial is Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” or la banalité du mal—a translation which promptly generated the pun la banalité du mâle, which brings together evil, ordinariness, and men. Are these men themselves ordinary? In November, slightly more than halfway through the trial, the psychiatrist Laurent Layet, who testified multiple times, devoted part of his time to challenging the way that the defendants had been presented in the press, either as monsters beyond the realm of normal human feeling or as ordinary men. According to Layet, the personalities and character traits of the defendants generally fell within the norm, even if their acts projected them outside of it. We should not think that any man could commit these acts, he said—but nor should we see these men as being fully outside of our moral world.

If this case is about men who moved between states, then, to borrow Arendt’s framing, we need to know what made possible the state of exception in which these men could carry out these actions. For Arendt, the banality of evil required the apparatus of the Third Reich; for the men in the Pelicot case, it seems to have required something as seemingly innocuous as a chat room.

Aurélie Crea, the president of an L.G.B.T.Q. association in Vaucluse, who spent several days at the trial, described her reaction to it by saying, “C’est lunaire”—it is dreamlike, moonlike, outlandish. The majority of the rapes at issue took place after Gisèle was sedated at dinner, and Crea’s phrase picks up on the role of night in the case. One cannot help but contrast the night world of the crimes, first conducted in the dark space of the chat room and then carried out when one person was sedated, with a waking world where things seemed to be normal. (Throughout the years, Gisèle experienced memory loss. She sought medical advice; she considered that she was experiencing the onset of Alzheimer’s. She did not suspect that she was being drugged by Dominique. As their daughter writes, “I saw nothing, understood nothing. Nor did she. Not a trace, not the slightest recollection.”) The proximity of the two points to the horror of the case: that it could be happening to anyone while they carried out their regular life. The most uncanny moments of the trial were when the two worlds intersected. One afternoon in the courtroom, faced with Blemeur, Gisèle got her lawyer to ask her ex-husband whether he had been invited that evening, after they’d had a nice dinner with their friends. Yes, Dominique replied. But, even then, it felt hard to piece the two spheres together: to imagine that both things had happened in the same world. It was only when he saw himself onscreen, Venzin said, that he woke up to what he had done.

The trial was, of course, prompting the men to come to exactly this kind of realization. The prosecution wanted them to avoid forms of analysis such as Grassot’s “It’s terrible,” or Blemeur’s “I am a collateral victim,” or Vandevelde’s “This thing simply happened to me.” It wanted them to see that they’d had agency.

Part of this aim involved the prosecutors’ cutting through the common claim that the accused were scared of Dominique. (The defendants often referred to his corpulence, and described the bewildering experience of being with a naked, masturbating man who was giving them orders.) The jury, though, fell into shakier territory by trying to find other targets for blame. This was most troublesome in relation to the primary character witnesses: the defendants’ current and former girlfriends, wives, and partners. Several times, the president of the jury carried out a bizarre line of questioning that undercut the feminist victory the trial supposedly incarnated. “What was your husband’s sexuality like?” he asked one witness. “Was it normal?” Very demanding, or slightly demanding? Did he have fantasies? If so, was he able to ask you to fulfill them? “How do you explain that he looked for a relationship, outside of your own?” One slogan that has become associated with the trial is that we must stop victim-blaming, that “shame must change sides.” But shame sticks. Somehow, in the rape trial of the century, women were still made to explain themselves, and made to bear the implication that, if you give your husband the right kind of sex, something like this simply will not happen.

The jury’s approach to the defendants’ testimony revealed how far sex stretches beyond what the law is capable of regulating, and how ill-equipped society at large is to discuss it. Vandevelde was critiqued for the variety of his porn consumption, and for his hope that he would develop social connections by using the chat room, which the lead prosecutor argued was delusional. Laurent Layet, the psychiatrist, named one “risk factor” in relation to many of the accused: a preference for “impersonal sex.” But what is normal sex, and what is perversion? Before Dominique’s crimes were discovered, Mazan’s Wikipedia page listed only one notable name: de Sade. For the concierge of the Marquis de Sade’s old château, now a boutique hotel, the question is not even worth posing. As we walked into the library in the basement during a recent visit, she told me that the hotel guests are often people who are inspired by de Sade’s practices. We know, she said with a wink, because they leave things in their rooms afterward. Given that many people can brush such kinks under the rug, surely we can shrug off impersonal sex as an element of our societies, too.

One kind of analysis that might have been expected but hasn’t emerged much in the discourse surrounding the trial is the question of class. In this regard, we might more easily say that these men are ordinary. Attendees waiting outside the courtroom described the defendants as coming from “a low social class” and as men of “little intelligence.” Some of the defendants’ lawyers described how their clients were impressed by Dominique’s big house, with its clean floors, and with the claim he occasionally made that he was a doctor. Of the fifty defendants tried alongside Dominique, several are nonwhite. The press has not substantively covered the racial dimensions of the case, owing perhaps to France’s race-blind approach (in which collecting demographic statistics on race, for example, is prohibited by law), but they do exist. They emerge in Dominique’s own racial profiling, which involved searching for Black and Arab men on Coco, labelling the videos of these men with their race as well as their names, and using offensive language in the videos. They also emerge in the defendants’ own acknowledgments of their marginalized position. When asked about his biography, Grovogui told what appeared to be an all-white jury that he was from Guinea, “a country colonized by France.”

Despite his co-defendants’ impressions of him, Dominique was a financial failure: a man whose projects never came to fruition, and who was afflicted by debt, borrowing money from his children. (One of the things that most surprised his daughter about her father’s behavior was that he didn’t charge his co-conspirators.) Ghabi, on the other hand, was someone who, having arrived from Tunisia at the age of fifteen, found his way: he was close to owning his house, he had three kids, a wife, and a stable job. With all these ingredients in place—with this happy vision of bourgeois ascendancy—why did he do it, the president of the jury asked. Solitude and boredom, Ghabi replied. From the bitterly unsuccessful to the hardworking but bored, these were men who hadn’t got what they wanted from life.

Days before the sentencing, in mid-December, a German investigative-journalism unit, STRG_F, broke a story about the app Telegram. Through a yearlong undercover investigation, it found dozens of chats in which users shared tips on how to drug and rape women, as well as videos and photos of themselves doing so. In many cases, these users were men whose partners had refused certain sexual acts. One of the chats reportedly had seventy-three thousand members and extended internationally. It is not only in the combination of drugs, rape, mass organization, an online space, and recording that this story is like the Pelicot trial. Taken together, the two cases make something plain: many men do not know how to navigate situations in which their desires are unmet. Rape through sedation does not emerge only out of a misguided belief in a right to sex. It is the ultimate protection from disappointment.

As I walked to the courthouse on the day of sentencing, a cold wind cut through my layers of clothing. In front of the building, Brigitte and Bernadette were now flanked by feminist protesters and hundreds of journalists. The courthouse was packed, and there was no longer room in the salle. One journalist told me that the scene, with its feeling of anticipation, recalled a grim version of the Cannes Film Festival. The banners here revealed the difference: “Rapist, put your prick in a blender”; “Christmas in prison, Easter in the can.”

Gisèle arrived just before nine-thirty, to loud applause. When the proceedings began, those of us outside began looking at our smartphones, waiting for the sentences. The prosecution had demanded six hundred and fifty-two years in prison, in total, for the fifty-one defendants. Twenty years (the maximum penalty) for Dominique, and between ten and eighteen for the rest. At about 10 A.M., the verdicts appeared on our screens: all of the men were found guilty, but all except Dominique received significantly shorter sentences than requested. (Appeals will begin in October.) Six of the accused were dealt suspended sentences, which they had already served in pretrial detention, and thus left the court as free men. In this unique rape trial, which possessed every shred of evidence you could want, the prosecution still did not get what it asked for. As my colleague the French philosopher Manon Garcia said, when leaving the trial, “I really would not want to be raped without videos.”

A trial can always be approached from two points of view. It can be seen as a legal process set up to judge the guilt, innocence, or dangerousness of the accused against established standards. Or, as in a case like this, given the number of defendants, the connections between them, the duration of the crimes, the fact that most of the men did not think that anything was wrong at the time, and the medium through which the abuse was organized, it can be seen as an event that brings to light a series of social dysfunctions.

In the course of nearly four months, society had been invited to try to understand the people in the dock. We heard about the defendants’ abusive childhoods, their sexual appetites, their loneliness. But, with the trial concluded, we can finally turn the question around and ask what it shows us about ourselves. There are many things we can learn from this case. Not only about the persistence of violence against women but about the confusions present across our societies. We do not yet know where to draw the line between normal and pathological desire, in what ways desire is altered by the virtual world, or how to adjudicate responsibility for the behavior it inspires. When we dismiss these men as evil, we let ourselves off the hook. Many oppositions had characterized the case—between night and day, fantasy and reality, the courtroom and the salle, perversion and normality—but it was an older one that I left with: the space between understanding and judgment. ♦