Speaker 1: Welcome to the nonprofits. And today we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about a very serious case in France. So to talk
Speaker 1: about it, we're going to go to Sandy. Sandy, what
Speaker 1: do you have for us?
Speaker 2: Hey? Yeah. So on September second of this year, a
Speaker 2: historic trial started in Avignon, in France, close to where
Speaker 2: I grew up. A man called Dominique Petticou is accused
Speaker 2: of having sedated his wife in order to have her
Speaker 2: raped by other men while he was filming and taking pictures.
Speaker 2: And this happened for over ten years. Those men were
Speaker 2: recruited on an adult meeting forum where the situation was
Speaker 2: clearly advertised. A total of seventy two men positively responded
Speaker 2: to the invitation. Fifty of them are facing trial with
Speaker 2: him right now. Sentencing happens on the twentieth of December,
Speaker 2: so in a week more or less. That pretty cool.
Speaker 2: The victim refused to have a closed trial, and that
Speaker 2: was a very very brave decision, and with that decision
Speaker 2: she became an icon during the course of the trial,
Speaker 2: being applauded by women every single day in the courthouse.
Speaker 2: This story is from Frands twenty four by Newswires on
Speaker 2: the twenty fifth of November twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Four, exceeding now setting what impact does the prevalence of
Speaker 1: problematic childhoods have one understanding the motivation behind crimes and
Speaker 1: is this an explanation?
Speaker 2: So yeah, we need to make sure we keep the
Speaker 2: distinction between explanation and justification, but it can be in
Speaker 2: some cases. However, there was a very very and there
Speaker 2: is still a big debate on this in the French
Speaker 2: media right now, because the question is those men are
Speaker 2: from very diverse backgrounds, very different ages from twenty six
Speaker 2: to seventy two, something like that. There are some there's
Speaker 2: a fireman, there's a soldier or former soldier, there are
Speaker 2: some financial people, and so there's a lot of different profiles,
Speaker 2: and so some people tend to say that they are
Speaker 2: representative of the entire French society. But on the other hand,
Speaker 2: other people say yes, but no, because not all people
Speaker 2: would act like this in this situation, and so what
Speaker 2: happened during the childhood of some of them, not all
Speaker 2: of them, but a small portion of them can be
Speaker 2: an explanation to this kind of behavior. We know that
Speaker 2: from the most recent neuro studies that nature and nurture
Speaker 2: both have to play a role in becoming those kinds
Speaker 2: of people, you have to have some specific DNA markers
Speaker 2: or some epigenetic sequences, but you also need to have
Speaker 2: some triggers in your childhood most of the time. So
Speaker 2: it's it's not as simple as some people would like
Speaker 2: us to believe. But yeah, this trial is very, very
Speaker 2: very important in France because it starts to change the
Speaker 2: perception of what a rapist is because like two thirds
Speaker 2: of the accused refused to agree that they actually raped Pelico.
Speaker 2: In their difference, they are saying different things like dominic
Speaker 2: Pelico forced me, or I was scared of him, or
Speaker 2: I didn't rape her because I wasn't violent with her somehow,
Speaker 2: or because I thought because I had the husband's permission,
Speaker 2: So it's not a rape. And so what this trial
Speaker 2: will will bring, in my opinion, is the shift in
Speaker 2: perspective at least that a rapist is not just a
Speaker 2: guy who attacks women in the dark in a dark
Speaker 2: early in the streets outside. Nine out of ten rapes
Speaker 2: are from someone you know, and that's something hopefully the
Speaker 2: trial will will change in the in people's minds.
Speaker 1: A jay I kind of touched on it earlier. What
Speaker 1: do you think there's a role between childhood trauma and
Speaker 1: harmful behaviors? And how do you think society, So, how
Speaker 1: do you think society can differentiate between these trauma responses
Speaker 1: and manipulative behavior.
Speaker 3: No, I wasn't really even familiar with this case at
Speaker 3: all before the auticle came up, so I had to
Speaker 3: go and do a lot of the In have to say,
Speaker 3: I was shocked at the extent as since they mentioned
Speaker 3: like how many people were involved and the variety of
Speaker 3: people that were involved. And one thing that takes out
Speaker 3: to me is there's this saying that I've heard before
Speaker 3: that goes something like traumatized people traumatize people, right, And
Speaker 3: I think that that is the key here. I don't
Speaker 3: doubt that Perlicott himself experienced quite a bit of trauma
Speaker 3: as a child. And there's a theory that says that
Speaker 3: in psychology that points to people who are abused as
Speaker 3: children tending to abuse others because they want to make
Speaker 3: the abuse that they experience to feel normal, So they
Speaker 3: do it in order for it to be you know, normalized,
Speaker 3: so that their mind normalized is doing these things. But
Speaker 3: in the case of manipulation versus trauma response, I think
Speaker 3: it's really really hard to differentiate them because often manipulation
Speaker 3: is a trauma response in itself. And I think what
Speaker 3: we can learn from this story, well, one of the
Speaker 3: things we can learn, because there's a whole lot of
Speaker 3: things to be taken from here. One of the things
Speaker 3: that I came out with was that statistically, men are
Speaker 3: much less likely to seek mental health help. And you
Speaker 3: can tell that that holds true in this case because again,
Speaker 3: as Cindy pointed out, these were over fifty men, and
Speaker 3: there were aged between twenty six and seventy four, and
Speaker 3: this happened over the course of over ten years. Among
Speaker 3: some of the images that the detectives were able to
Speaker 3: find in all of the devices that Policot had, they
Speaker 3: determined that she was waited at least two hundred times
Speaker 3: based only on those photos. Okay only there's no telling
Speaker 3: if there were more, and like before he started taking
Speaker 3: those images and howful those were by her own husband,
Speaker 3: and in the other instances some of the men came
Speaker 3: more than one time. Issues the horrifying story and what
Speaker 3: we need to normalize here is mental care for everyone
Speaker 3: for any reason, like whether you're man or a woman,
Speaker 3: Like we need to stop making it taboo, like you're
Speaker 3: not going to be less of a man if you
Speaker 3: seek therapy.
Speaker 1: AJ was talking about the sheer extremity of horror of
Speaker 1: this case. What impact do you think that we can
Speaker 1: hope this has on public understanding of how far this
Speaker 1: abuse can go within our societal norms. Do you think
Speaker 1: this will have an impact with her making this choice
Speaker 1: to make sure this is public and not doing this
Speaker 1: in a closed form.
Speaker 4: I'm sure it'll have impact of some form. Hopefully it'll
Speaker 4: be a positive one when something like this happens. There's
Speaker 4: actually jokes about this in war movies and such, where
Speaker 4: if I go out and kill somebody, I'm a murderer.
Speaker 4: If I kill two people, I'm now a repeat murderer.
Speaker 4: If I kill fourteen people, I'm a serial killer. And
Speaker 4: if I kill ten thousand people, I am a war veteran.
Speaker 4: That's just a statistic. So there just comes a point
Speaker 4: where something is so grand, so big beyond it being personal,
Speaker 4: that people can, haha, compartmentalize it a little bit and
Speaker 4: be like, oh, that wasn't rape, that was clearly something else.
Speaker 4: I'm not saying that's what they're going to do, because
Speaker 4: ideally that doesn't happen. I just fear that this rape
Speaker 4: case is so insane, like truly absurd, that the severity
Speaker 4: of it doesn't color justice better rape laws, because it'd
Speaker 4: be very easy for people to look at and go, oh, well,
Speaker 4: that's just a one time scenario, and maybe it is
Speaker 4: like that just seems really unlikely to happen again. Also,
Speaker 4: that doesn't matter. One of the things though, that Cindy said,
Speaker 4: because I actually have a question that I think that
Speaker 4: is pretty good in America, at least from the people
Speaker 4: that I'm around, is since I was brought up from
Speaker 4: my teens to now, the idea of what is consent
Speaker 4: and also it's corollary what is rape has kind of changed,
Speaker 4: and it has also been more specified, because when I
Speaker 4: was a kid, it was just like if they don't
Speaker 4: say no, and then later on it would just be
Speaker 4: like no, not no doesn't mean yes, and now later
Speaker 4: it's yes and only if yes, if not yes does
Speaker 4: not mean yes. So in America, to me, it seems
Speaker 4: like we've done a pretty good job at trying to specify.
Speaker 4: Enthusiastic consent is the only thing that makes it not rape,
Speaker 4: and if you don't have that, even like we have
Speaker 4: mayor rape as a clause, something like that exists in France.
Speaker 4: Are these concepts strange or is that just also true?
Speaker 2: No, it's it's a good question. So the marital rape
Speaker 2: has been entring into law about I think it was
Speaker 2: fourteen years ago something like that. The definition of consent
Speaker 2: of not consent, but of rape has been also specified
Speaker 2: in cases of surprise, stupor and things like that. But
Speaker 2: the word consent is not itself in the law. And
Speaker 2: there is actually a huge debate right now on the
Speaker 2: question whether the word consent needs to be in the law.
Speaker 2: Some even some feminists, say it shouldn't be, and some
Speaker 2: say it should be. So there's there's a lot of
Speaker 2: variation in this in this topic. But the most important
Speaker 2: thing is that what we saw here is not just rape,
Speaker 2: but it's that many men see sex as a form
Speaker 2: of control. And Domini Pelico said it very well when
Speaker 2: he was questioned on why he did all this, because
Speaker 2: they've been married for fifty years and he started doing
Speaker 2: this only ten years ago, so they were happily married
Speaker 2: for decades before he started doing this, and so the
Speaker 2: question was why did you start doing this? And he said,
Speaker 2: I wanted to submit and submitted women, and so there
Speaker 2: is this idea of control a woman. And in the
Speaker 2: questions on the other fifty people, this idea came up
Speaker 2: quite often as well, is the idea that because lawyers
Speaker 2: were asking, but when you came here and you saw
Speaker 2: this woman was almost dead, how could you want to
Speaker 2: have sex with her? And many of them said, well,
Speaker 2: it was about doing her whatever we wanted. And I
Speaker 2: think this is another thing that's going to come out
Speaker 2: from this is the understanding too many people that sex
Speaker 2: has to be between two people, two minds. It's not
Speaker 2: just one man and a body. It's two minds to
Speaker 2: two active people. It's beyond consent, beyond all any definition
Speaker 2: of rape. It's the concept of sex itself that we're
Speaker 2: talking about here, in my opinion. And the last question is,
Speaker 2: while no one says all men are are rapists, and
Speaker 2: on the contrary, a lot of people try to profess
Speaker 2: the discussion with no, that's definition what we're saying, there's
Speaker 2: still the question of how come this topic was on
Speaker 2: this website, this forum for ten years and nobody said anything.
Speaker 2: How come men came here and did that and nobody
Speaker 2: thought about talking to the police about what was happening
Speaker 2: for ten years, because in the end, Giselle was very
Speaker 2: lucky because Dominique was arrested because he was filming in
Speaker 2: a grocery store under the skirt of a woman, and
Speaker 2: that's how he got cut. Because without this, all this
Speaker 2: would be still happening right now. So this is the
Speaker 2: questions we need to be asking, how come all this
Speaker 2: happened for so long and nobody said anything, No man
Speaker 2: said anything.
Speaker 1: I know that here in the United States, obviously not
Speaker 1: in France, we're seeing a push against even teaching consent
Speaker 1: where we're not even there, politicians not even wanting to
Speaker 1: have that conversation, which I find very unhealthy. But aj
Speaker 1: in that mindset of getting away from consent encouraging submission,
Speaker 1: because we see that with the whole trad wife and
Speaker 1: the right wing push here in this country. What do
Speaker 1: you think all these things almost a terrible perfect storm.
Speaker 1: How can we shift societal views towards body autonomy because
Speaker 1: it's not just the words of consent, but as I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, it's about two minds, or maybe more than
Speaker 1: two minds, but minds, not just a mind and a body.
Speaker 1: In this context, how do we shift into that conversation.
Speaker 3: You know, there was a quote by one of the
Speaker 3: prosecutors that stood out to me and I thought if
Speaker 3: they made a really good point. They say that the
Speaker 3: trial is shaking up our society in our relationship with
Speaker 3: each other, in the most intimate relationships between human beings.
Speaker 3: French society has to understand their needs or emotions or desires,
Speaker 3: and above all to take into account those of others.
Speaker 3: What is at stake is to fundamentally change the relationship
Speaker 3: between men and women. And hearing that quote, I hope
Speaker 3: that if there is anything that we take away from
Speaker 3: this story, let it be just that sentiment, the fact
Speaker 3: that humans need to understand to value other human lives
Speaker 3: as much as they value their own, because that's the
Speaker 3: only way that we are ever going to be treating
Speaker 3: others with full respect and allow them to have the
Speaker 3: body autonomy that every single human being deserves, like everybody
Speaker 3: deserves to be respected if they say no, And everybody
Speaker 3: needs to know that when somebody doesn't have the ability
Speaker 3: to say no because they're intoxicated or unconscious or whatever
Speaker 3: it may be, that does not mean that it suddenly
Speaker 3: becomes a yes. Just like well mentioned earlier because it's
Speaker 3: you know, it's not a question that you can answer
Speaker 3: for them. And you know we always discuss in cases
Speaker 3: of as you and I have discussed before Infidel of
Speaker 3: assisted that abortion or transgender rights. Body autonomy should be
Speaker 3: one of the most fundamentally basic rights that any human
Speaker 3: being is allowed to.
Speaker 1: Have without a doubt. It's one of those things that
Speaker 1: if you don't have the right to self determine you
Speaker 1: whether that's consent, whether that's the right not to be.
Speaker 1: All those rights stem from your own body autonomy. And
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, Rob, I think you really nailed it
Speaker 1: with what we consider consent has evolved over time and
Speaker 1: will continue to evolve, and that's a good thing because
Speaker 1: just because we treated as if it was good enough
Speaker 1: in the past doesn't mean it is now. So it's
Speaker 1: important to learn those things and subjects like this this,
Speaker 1: I mean, as difficult as they are to talk about.
Speaker 1: I wanted to thank all of you for dealing with
Speaker 1: this and bringing some very important points to the forefront
Speaker 1: because it say something we need to learn. And did
Speaker 1: you have something you wanted to touch on sending.
Speaker 2: Yes, I wanted to ask you guys a question. Let's
Speaker 2: say that this exact story breaks out in the US today,
Speaker 2: like two months after Rapists was voted as president. What
Speaker 2: do you think the effect would be in the US.
Speaker 1: I think that as a whole, the American public wouldn't
Speaker 1: even connect those on one side. The other side may
Speaker 1: say something about it, but I think they would be
Speaker 1: treated as two separate issues because one side doesn't want
Speaker 1: to recognize the hypocrisy. And the truth is, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure it would even irrelevant because it's still a horrible crime,
Speaker 1: regardless of how hideous a particular choice someone else made
Speaker 1: would be or not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, honestly, I don't think anything will change how things
Speaker 3: are done currently. I think it will just be another
Speaker 3: media circus where people who just watch and shock and
Speaker 3: then forget about it.
Speaker 4: It would depend on the person, just like before with theatric,
Speaker 4: theatrics and popularity. If it was a normal person, that
Speaker 4: person would be destroyed. But if they're in politics, they
Speaker 4: will have their allies.
Speaker 1: You know, they may even get a cabinet post. And
Speaker 1: once again, I wanted to thank all of you for
Speaker 1: this conversation. Hopefully people's awareness of this type of thing
Speaker 1: will help cause some serious thoughts and reconsiderations of consent,
Speaker 1: body autonomy, all those important issues that really need to
Speaker 1: be discussed on a regular basis and not neglected,