Before and After the Pelicot Trial

On Manon Garcia’s new book about the recent case, and what it tells us about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the complicity of men in general.

By Lori MarsoApril 1, 2026

• Law

• Gender & Sexuality

“[S]INCE I BEGAN to attend the trial, going home has become harder,” admits philosopher Manon Garcia near the end of Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial (trans. Maya B. Kronic, 2025).

How can I play with my kids when I’m thinking about Christian L.’s chats? How can I have a heterosexual relationship when I’m thinking about those videos? How can I stand it that people don’t think all the time, night and day, about what Gisèle Pelicot went through? I find it hard to exist normally around people who aren’t following the trial closely.

For several weeks in the fall of 2024, Manon Garcia was present in Avignon, France, at the three-and-a-half-month trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men whom he initially contacted via a chat room called “Without Her Knowledge.” The purpose of the chat room was to invite men (all strangers to him and to each other) to the Pelicot home in Mazan to rape Dominique P.’s drugged wife, Gisèle. Garcia follows the French legal custom of referencing defendants by first name and last initial.

Over a period of nine years, there were at least 92 rapes involving 72 different men. Dominique P. arranged them and also assisted not only by secretly dosing Gisèle with lorazepam but also by being inside the room with each man, repositioning his sixtysomething wife’s slack-jawed, often snoring, comatose-appearing body, which sometimes wore a sign announcing, “I am a submissive slut.”

During this decade, Gisèle was losing her hair and experiencing weight loss and memory gaps. She suspected she had Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor. She only discovered what was really happening to her when, one weekend, while she was caring for her grandchildren in Paris, a security guard at a supermarket caught her husband “upskirting” several women.

Early in the trial, Dominique P. said of Gisèle, “She was the opposite of my mother, she was totally unsubmissive.” Gisèle was the one who kept a roof over their heads, made a living, cared for the children, once had an affair, and refused her husband’s entreaties for anal sex and, later, for any sex. For Garcia, this was Gisèle’s punishment for having failed “to play the game of female submission.” During his initial testimony, Dominique P. repeatedly claimed to love his wife while freely admitting, “I am a rapist like the others in this room.”

Dominique P. recorded over 20,000 videos and photographs of the violations he and his codefendants committed on his wife’s body and saved them in his computer in a file called “Abuse.” Garcia lists several individual files names, including “Cunni 2 Marc,” “Nice fuck on her side holding leg,” “groping tits,” “Well filled,” “In her arse,” and “Fucked sideways.”

The rapists ranged in age from 26 to 74. They had diverse jobs and assorted political views. They had achieved varying levels of education; together, they comprised several different ethnicities, classes, and social backgrounds. Some of them might have been thought to be “promising young men”; others were older and known in the community as upstanding or even prominent. Many were regular working men—thought to be decent—with wives who were eager to claim them as “family men.” Less than half had previous criminal convictions. The only thing they shared in common was the random fact of living within a 50 kilometer (30 mile) radius of the Pelicot house in Provence. Dominique P. didn’t want to take a chance that Gisèle’s drugs might wear off.

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Garcia, a professor at Freie Universität in Berlin, was born and studied in France but has taught philosophy at prominent universities in the United States. She is uniquely situated to be witness and guide to the Pelicot trial for readers because of her previous writing and preoccupations.

Garcia’s first book, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives (2018), follows a path laid by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) to argue that, although gender norms link men with dominance and women with submission, there is no natural tie between femininity and submission. With Beauvoir, Garcia shows that the lived experiences of women under patriarchy schools them to consent to, and to take pleasure in, acts of submission, and even to lead a submissive life. Submission includes playing a passive role in sex and agreeing to sex even when it is not desired, “keeping the peace” in relationships, and choosing not to challenge a partner’s or colleague’s decisions, all of which adds up to a woman systematically putting the needs and wants of others above her own. “Submission is not a nature, but it appears to women as a destiny,” Garcia writes.

But why? Romance, physical protection, economic advantage, racial solidarity, comfort, ease, maybe even forms of leisure, all promised to women by heterosexuality and close association with men, persuade via interest and “soft power.” As comedian Ali Wong used to joke before her divorce: “I don’t want to lean in […] I want to lie down!” Just as Beauvoir predicted, women of privilege might find it in their interest to reject the responsibility and burden of freedom, choosing the “easy slopes.” When soft power fails to work its magic on ambitious, freedom-seeking, or especially unsubmissive members of “the second sex” (perhaps like Gisèle), ordinary men like Dominique P. and his codefendants fall back on the threat or actual use of force to keep women in line.

Garcia wrote her subsequent book, The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (2021), to explore the ambiguities around what consent looks like under patriarchy. She asks not only what should be legally prohibited in sex but also the ethical question of what good sex might look like. How can heterosexual sex be “good,” meaning consensual and pleasurable, when women cannot separate their desire from the imperative to be submissive? She wonders if the presence or absence of consent is the right gauge to measure whether sex is bad (violating, dehumanizing, regrettable) or good. Unwilling to jettison the baby with the bathwater, she mobilizes the compromised notion of consent as a starting point toward sexual flourishing for all.

Not surprisingly, multiple articulations of agency, submission, and consent circulated in the courtroom during the Pelicot trial. Garcia discovers that, although French law does not use consent to establish that sexual violence has occurred, the language of consent dominated the testimonies and was on the minds of the perpetrators as they committed their crimes. Several of the defendants claimed that Gisèle’s consent was assumed through the proximity and involvement of her husband. But the videos showed unimpeachable evidence that the men took extreme care not to “disturb” or wake her as they plumbed the orifices of her inert body.

The videos, the testimonies, and even the bland recital of the facts are almost impossible for Garcia, and for readers, to take in. As intellectually prepared as Garcia was to make meaning of the Pelicot trial, the book’s style (first person) and organization (21 short chapters with names like “Anger,” “Writing Mazan,” and “What Remains of Our Love?”) display the emotional challenges the case inevitably presents in regard to women living with men.

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The most terrifying question of Garcia’s book is a simple one: can we, how can we, live with men after the Pelicot trial? By “we,” Garcia sometimes means heterosexual women, or women who sleep with men, but sometimes she means anyone who identifies as a woman. After all, all women have deep ties to men as fathers, brothers, co-workers, friends, and sons. The enormity, the ubiquity, the all-encompassing nature of the problem of living with men sinks in for readers as one comes to understand that the horror of the Pelicot trial affects all women and all men. The trial implicates and affects all of us.

Ironically, or maybe fittingly, the first day Garcia attended the trial in Avignon was the day Donald Trump (of “grab ’em by the pussy” fame) won his second term as president of the United States. Despite having a press pass, Garcia was initially not allowed into the actual courtroom and spent three days watching the trial from the “overflow” room. When she gets into the courtroom, she sees “just how much [she] hadn’t previously been able to see, feel, or understand.” She notices the camaraderie between the defendants, the way Dominique P. seems to preside over the room from the dock. The homosocial relationships between the men form a recurring theme in Garcia’s account of the trial, evidence of which she gathers not only from how and when the men look at each other in the courtroom but also by carefully observing how, in the videos, they position their own bodies in relation to each other, even as the sleeping body of Gisèle lies between them.

Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir of her life before and after learning of this shocking abuse orchestrated by her husband was just released in February, in an English translation by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver. Titled A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, the memoir puts her own shame and the difficulties of getting beyond it at the center of her story. Gisèle also notices the boys’ club in the courthouse:

I had to squeeze past them during breaks in the proceedings. I heard them talking, not even bothering to lower their voices, naturally buoyed by male camaraderie. I saw them high-fiving each other, going to the café across the street at lunchtime, chatting at the bar, buying rounds of beer, laughing. They bonded with each other simply because they were convinced they had done nothing wrong. And yet they didn’t resemble one another: some were articulate, others could barely string a sentence together in the witness box; there were old men, bald men, men with paunches, men who were young and athletic; one was constantly chewing gum; another had brought along some policeman friends for support. But they did share one thing: a sense of entitlement. An attitude of complete indifference to whatever anyone said or thought, because power had always been on their side.

The form of power that Gisèle says “had always been on their side” is homosocial, a bonding among and between men against women and girls. To say all men have power over all women and girls, without regard to race or class, is inaccurate and misleading. Thinking this way, the French men from all walks of life who raped Gisèle seem to little resemble what is now being called the “Epstein class.” But the homosocial power Gisèle’s rapists share with the Epstein class is striking, a common feature that became clear to this reader of Nobody’s Girl, the 2025 memoir of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Jeffrey Epstein’s most visible victim. Giuffre was trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and brought the crimes of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to light. She died by suicide at age 41 just prior to her book’s publication. In the book, Giuffre reports that she was sexually abused by her father from the age of seven; loaned to a family friend and subjected to his sexual abuse around the same time; abused by sex trafficker Ron Eppinger in her early teens; and, while working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell said she knew “a wealthy man—a long-time Mar-a-Lago member”—who was “looking for a massage therapist to travel with him.”

Thinking back on this first encounter with Jeffrey Epstein, where Maxwell coaxes Giuffre to take off her clothes, pinch Epstein’s nipples to arouse him, watch as he masturbates, administer a blow job, and climb onto him to be penetrated, Giuffre writes:

From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.

Giuffre escaped Epstein and Maxwell’s grip by convincing them to send her to Thailand to learn massage therapy; there, she met and married her Australian husband. Later, she stepped up as one of the earliest informants about extensive sex trafficking by Epstein and Maxwell. A foreword from Amy Wallace, Giuffre’s writing collaborator, reports that Giuffre would suffer abuse at the hands of her husband Robbie. Virginia Giuffre sent photos of her bruised and battered face to Wallace and made a public statement about the abuse three weeks prior to her suicide. While the memoir showcases Giuffre’s bravery and resilience, the tragedy at its center is that she tried to escape the treachery and abuse by running headlong into an institution—marriage—that, as we know from the Pelicot trial, is often at the center of such abuse.

In believing that creating a new family would heal her, Giuffre shared a patriarchal fantasy with Gisèle Pelicot, one that affects too many women. Gisèle also thought her marriage to Dominique Pelicot and the act of building a family with him would heal their inherited shame and trauma. Dominique’s family was haunted by a domineering and violent father, a cowering mother, and an adopted foster girl who was sexually abused by the father and later trapped as the father’s sexual partner upon the death of the mother. Gisèle’s family was haunted by the death of her mother when Gisèle was a girl of nine years, the ongoing grief of her never-healed father, and the machinations of a domineering and cold stepmother.

Can shame “change sides” within the nuclear family? Lest we forget, most of the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot were married, several were fathers, and Dominique was both. On the day the verdict is scheduled to be read, December 19, 2024, Garcia watches as family members of the accused men stream into the overflow room:

A young woman is shaking, racked by sobs as she tries to get coffee for her father, unable to overcome her anguish at the fact that she may be seeing him free for the last time in years. He tells her, “Come on, don’t worry, it’ll be all right.” It’s clear that he feels for her, but obviously he hadn’t thought about her for a second on the day he went to Mazan. It probably didn’t even cross his mind that when he decided to rape a sedated woman he might end up destroying his daughter’s life in the process.

Tragically, even after she learns of her husband’s abuse, Gisèle tries to hold on to fragments of the “family life [she] had never had.” She often repeats, “I had been happy, I was sure of it. I was more than just a victim.” But this mantra, while it saves her, sacrifices her daughter Caroline. In a long piece in The New Yorker, reporter Rachel Aviv explores how the adult Pelicot children—David, Caroline, and Florian—reacted to the trial, and, in particular, their feelings about lewd pictures of Caroline and the daughters-in-law that were found in Dominique’s possession.

Caroline Darian (née Pelicot) remains certain that, like her mother, she was drugged by her father, and maybe much worse. During the trial, Caroline pleaded with her father to admit that he violated her, and he would not do so. Gisèle also was unwilling to admit that any incest had occurred, even when David’s son Nathan accused his grandfather of incest. While recognizing the great harm done to their mother, the two brothers and Caroline characterize the trial as a search for justice not just for Gisèle but also for “the entire family.”

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The gendered habits that eroticize violence and gender hierarchy, but at the same time promote marriage and family as social glue and the key to personal happiness, are so ingrained in our psyches and bodies that it is hard to wrap our heads and our politics around them.

Feminists of the second wave also experienced men’s disregard, cruelty, and abuse, even and especially as they occupied roles as wives, daughters, sisters, co-workers, and comrades. In consciousness-raising groups all over the country, women came to understand what gendered expectations and gendered socialization meant in their own experience. They suddenly felt the wild injustice of it all deep in their bones.

Like us, here and now, these women wondered what feeling and knowing this deep and seemingly intractable and naturalized inequality now meant for their ability (and desire) to live in harmony with (and to try and love) men. Some of the men they knew—and we know—are so accustomed to holding power that they do not see the need to address women’s desires and ambitions, much less their freedom. During these heady years of the Civil Rights, anti-war, and counterculture movements, it was ironically the sexism of left-wing men (in groups such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and other radical groups) that motivated some women to form a separate movement for women’s liberation. Ninety-six-year-old Dolores Huerta’s recent revelations about the actions of Cesar Chavez underline that misogyny is a part of all political ideologies. Huerta admits, “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor—of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

How to live and work with men; how to have heterosexual sex with men; how to maintain and nurture new relationships with sons, fathers, and male friends; and whether to start and build nuclear families became vexed, sometimes seemingly intractable questions when men as a group were considered the “enemy.” Radical feminists acted on what was then, and what now seems even more so, the utopian possibility of claiming autonomy, naming their own oppression, rethinking how and whether to form families and raise children, and learning how to connect the oppressive forces of war, racism, and capitalism with the need to fundamentally change the way people live their personal and intimate lives.

Feminist activists such as Ti-Grace Atkinson referred to married women as “hostages”; Atkinson maintained that “the proof of class consciousness will be when we separate off from men.” The women of Cell 16, a Boston feminist collective co-founded by Roxanne Dunbar and Dana Densmore in 1968, took a vow of celibacy and practiced karate as a method of self-defense against male violence. While Cell 16 members, like some who became “political lesbians,” renounced sexuality, women in other feminist groups had sex with women, and some even felt that uninhibited and free female sexual desire (with men and/or women) would open the way to other forms of liberation.

In On Strike Against God (1980), feminist writer Joanna Russ sums up, in the words of her main character, the “problem” of men:

That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries’ asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some.

Ruminating on these thoughts, Russ’s character “sat down on the lawn and wept.”

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Were it not for Gisèle Pelicot’s insistence that the trial be public, we would not know what occurred night after night in the bedroom in Mazan. The raping of Gisèle by Romain V. is one of the videos Manon Garcia describes in detail. He is reported to have had an “atrocious childhood,” and appears in the courtroom like “an old man with a grey beard who looks lost and frightened.” But he went six times to rape Gisèle in her home. Before his first visit, he made an appointment with Dominique P. to spy on Gisèle in a grocery store to see if he liked the “look of her.” To Garcia, the most disturbing part of Romain V.’s video is witnessing him stick his tongue in Gisèle’s mouth. It is too intimate, she says, a disgusting and particularly chilling violation. Garcia takes notes about the videos as a way to ground herself. She takes care to write about them in such a way as to avoid eroticization. “[V]iolence is eroticized, it is arousing, it gets people off,” she laments.

The defense team’s stated reasons for a private trial were that the videos were too shocking, too nauseating, for public view. Indeed, Gisèle’s willingness to open the trial to the public was evidence for some that she was vengeful or an exhibitionist when in fact, as Gisèle tells it, she suddenly understood that a private trial would entail being trapped inside the courtroom with over 50 of her rapists and their teams of lawyers. “I was beginning to realise,” she writes in A Hymn to Life, “that a closed hearing meant I would be alone with them. Locked in with them.”

The defense team in the Pelicot trial, tasked to explain or at least contextualize their clients’ behavior, offered a repetition of gendered clichés. Garcia explores each of these (sometimes conflicting, sometimes intersecting) narratives: Gisèle somehow must have known; Gisèle was a drug addict or alcoholic; men have impossible-to-control sexual urges; previous sexual abuse put the men on a trajectory to rape and abuse others; these are particularly bad men; these men were unable to resist the control and manipulation of Dominique P. Taken singularly or collectively, the explanations only underscore the prevalence of patriarchal myths about sexual violence. They are, Garcia claims, part of what New Zealand psychologist Nicola Gavey calls “the cultural scaffolding of rape.”

Such explanations and circumstances did not hold sway over the presiding French judges. Dominique P., who never denied his guilt, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, and 46 of the other 50 defendants were found guilty of rape, the four remaining defendants of attempted rape or aggravated sexual assault, with sentences ranging from three to 15 years imprisonment. The sentences seem light given the crimes, and yet the outcome was received as a positive one for justice.

The fact that Dominique P. and the men who violated Gisèle Pelicot are in prison, and that Prince Andrew, to whom Virginia Roberts Giuffre was trafficked, has been arrested, comes as some relief. But the problem of sexual violence is far deeper, far broader, far more intractable than the legal system can accommodate or fix. As Garcia puts it:

As far as I am concerned, it is a matter of life and death to understand how a man described by those closest to him as loving, helpful, a grandfather, a “nice man,” can film the videos I have seen, how he can torture the woman he says he loves most in the world. And I also need to understand how these normal guys, the likes of which I have come across a thousand times in my life, can roll up at the Pelicot home and, faced with the spectacle of sedated Gisèle Pelicot, say to themselves either that this is exactly what they want, or that it will do. It is terrifying in either case, so I would love to find an explanation.

Garcia concedes that carceral punishment, which always (rightly) happens after the fact anyway, cannot solve such an enduring social, political, structural problem as gender inequality and the sexual violence it engenders. The criminal justice system reflects and replicates, rather than repairs, structural racism, deep inequality, and misogyny. Scholars and activists such as Angela Davis have shown how racist policies make it possible to invasively and disproportionately police Black and Brown men, women, and families; lock people up before they commit any crimes; and deepen and extend inequalities and forms of injustice in the name of keeping women and the streets “safe.” Doubling down on the prosecution of sex trafficking and sex work as a response to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes will fundamentally fail to address the reasons that Epstein and his elite cohort’s coconspirators did not see the young girls around them as anything other than bodies to be fucked.

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Reflecting on the trial, Gisèle seems satisfied to say that it might do some good in the world: “One morning, when a woman wakes up and can’t remember what she did the previous day, she will say to herself, ‘Well, I heard Mme Pelicot’s testimony.’”

Gisèle’s memoir mostly avoids politics to focus on her own repair and psychological health, as memoirs often do. She even recounts that she fired her first lawyer because of “the great battle between women and men she claimed to be waging.” Midway through the trial, however, Gisèle seemed to have a moment where her consciousness was raised, and she made a statement using “words that [she] was using for the first time in [her] life: ‘Every day people thank me for my courage. I want to tell them this is not courage, but a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.’ These were words I would never have uttered before.”

As a concession to Caroline, Gisèle describes the photos of her daughter as reflecting “her father’s unbearable incestuous gaze,” but this is as far as she will go in exploring how incest may have been replicated in her own family. The through line and saving grace, as Gisèle sees it, is that she finds a new lover. Gisèle credits romantic love for giving her the strength to open the trial to the public, to face her rapists in court, and to hear and see her supporters outside the courtroom cheering her on every single day.

I was taken aback that Garcia also ends her book on a discussion of love and its transformative possibilities. In closing, Garcia references her opening epitaph by Marguerite Duras: “You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.” Garcia responds with these as the last lines of the book: “I had thought that it was partly up to us to ask ourselves whether we should really love men the way we do, but now I am beginning to think that maybe they should love women a little. A little, just a little. Let them love us a little so that we can go on loving them.”

Why would anyone put stock in love when Dominique P. repeatedly claimed to love the wife he violated so extensively and so often? When Dominique P. professes his love for his wife in the courtroom, Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s words in Nobody’s Girl echo in my brain: “Robbie insists he knew instantly that I was his soulmate.”

A more fitting conclusion to Garcia’s book comes a few pages earlier. Garcia tells us that upon exiting the courtroom as the trial was ending, she saw and joined a demonstration that included young immigrant men (mostly members of antifa) joining with others, mostly women, to protest rape. This is a picture of an honest, grassroots partnership from which we might take heart. Present also, Garcia says, were a few “old men, men with strollers, men with young children; I am moved to see trans people, queer people, old feminists who have seen it all, young women in veils, and young racialized men.”

This is not romantic love, not a retreat into the patriarchal family, not a matter of men loving us “just a little.” It is solidarity between strangers who are becoming friends or comrades, determined to come together to bring a new world into being. It is a reed of hope to cling to as we try to imagine and shape new forms of intimacy and family after the Pelicot trial.

What could come in the wake of learning what too many women, in our bodies, already knew?