What Would A Woman Do To An Unconscious Man If She Thought No-One Would Find Out?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the course of the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his fellow accused: what would a woman do to an unconscious man if she thought no-one would find out?

Because we know now what men would do. And not just some men. Many men. So many men in fact, they had a nickname for them during the trial, Monsieur Tout Le Monde - Mr Everyman. Because the men who joined Pelicot in the dock were bakers, they were journalists, they were prison officers, they were accountants, they were young, they were old, they were single, they were married, they were fathers to daughters. But they all had one thing in common, a desire to dominate, to defile, to control, to penetrate, to humiliate. A love of rape.

Some of them knew Gisele Pelicot, some of them made small talk with her in the street, in the boulangerie, all the time knowing what she didn’t, that they had raped her as she lay unconscious in her bed and her husband had filmed them.

And so I asked myself, what would…