doDear Gisèle Pélicot, you entered our lives as if you were entering the court of Avignon, through the main door. You will not want to shy away. You walk upright, with your head held high. Your outfit is well-kept, petite figure, summer dress, impeccable hair. Your gaze is hidden by black glasses that you will soon take off. A little lost, a little floating in the centre of too much attention for you. All around you, it is a circus. Your lawyers keep the group of journalists at bay.
You defended him, this man you made your life and your children with before you found out he drugged you and invited anyone who wanted to rape you. A good father, a good guy, a great guy even, you said. Your daughter Caroline stopped calling her. ” dad ” As she wrote on the cover of her book, she recounts the explosion, the ravages of the lie about the family, the anguish that devastates, the anger that burns, the past turned to ashes and the pain that throbs. She is there with her brothers and their unanswered questions. Her love accompanies you.
The day her rapists went on trial was also the day her divorce was made official. Another group awaits you in the courtroom: the 50 men on trial for gang rape. There are dozens more we have not been able to identify. You face it. Nothing prepared you for being in that courtroom. One of the defendants was late because, he said, he had to walk his son to school for the start of the school year. I wondered who would have walked your grandchildren, who were also returning to school. I know you thought of them at that very moment.
Difficult reality to accept.
You see them all for the first time except this neighbour whom you sometimes met in your previous life, the one that will never return, that of the house in Vaucluse and of preserved ignorance. You look at them. They look at their feet. They had never seen your eyes before, Jean, Didier, Jean-Luc, Romain, Redouan, Cédric, Grégory, Karim, Jean-Marc, Philippe, Quentin, Nicolas, Vincent, Patrick, Paul and the others… We bow under the length of the list and the banality of the profiles. Three quarters of them do not recognise the rapes, like all those who appear in the headlines, the PPDA, Nicolas Hulot, Salim Berrada, Gérard Miller, Olivier Duhamel, Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon, Gérard Depardieu…
Their arguments are always the same. They spin the disgusting scratched record of complacent lies. They didn’t understand what they were doing. They are sure that they are good guys too, not monsters, even when we show them the videos of the crimes. They are firefighters, journalists, students, truck drivers, prison guards, nurses, pensioners, municipal councillors, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our brothers. A reality that is difficult to accept.
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