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