Gisèle Pelicot was in her sixties when her children started to suspect she was exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s. At times, she seemed distracted, unable to remember details from the night before. She developed trouble sleeping and lost weight. One night, eating dinner with her husband, son and grandchildren, she slumped over in her chair. It was, her son said, “like her strings had been cut… She just sagged where she sat. Her eyes were empty.” Her husband carried her to bed. She became too scared to drive: what if she passed out at the wheel? She booked brain scans, and one neurologist suggested she might be experiencing “transient global amnesia – a sort of black hole that opens up momentarily, drawing in all memories, only to vanish as mysteriously as it came”. But that didn’t explain the blackouts, or the heavy bleeding that occurred years after menopause.
We now know that Gisèle Pelicot was not unwell, nor in decline. In a trial that has captured the horrified attention of both France and the world, her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot admitted to regularly drugging and raping his wife and orchestrating her rape by at least 72 male strangers over a decade: he and 50 other defendants were all found guilty of rape, sexual assault and attempted rape. Pelicot refused her right to anonymity at trial, ensuring her attackers were exposed in public. That the majority of her rapists – sourced through an anonymous forum, since shut down, called à son insu (“without her knowledge”) – lived within a 50-kilometre radius of her home in rural France is just one of the case’s many disquieting revelations. Was Pelicot’s village of Mazan in southern France a freak epicentre of violent misogyny? Or is such abuse more widespread than most of us would like to believe? In this unsettling context, “transient global amnesia” begins to sound less like an individual diagnosis and more like a precondition of patriarchy: a collective suspension of belief; a shared, willed ignorance; the regular forgetting of what we fear we know about men.
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