Pélicot and the banality of evil

The regional newspaper La Provence, which covers the area of Vaucluse in southern France, ran a a front page on Thursday with photos of the 50 defendants in the Pélicot trial. The images, with blurred faces, belonged to the men who answered Dominique Pélicot’s invitation, issued for a decade, to come to his house and rape his wife while she was sedated inside their bedroom. Each photograph came with a short biography of each individual in this sort of five-page supplement called “Portraits of the banality of evil.” The statement emulated the famous theory developed by the philosopher Hannah Arendt about the psychological nature of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, an ordinary guy who was not even anti-Semitic, despite becoming one of the organizers of the Holocaust. And that — the motives that could have led supposedly normal people to commit horror with their actions — is one of the main questions in a case without much mystery as far as the evidence and the conviction are concerned.

The backgrounds of the 50 accused — 18 of whom are in custody — are diverse, both on the personal and professional level: there is a journalist, a construction worker, a nurse, a gardener, a fireman... Their lives, in general, seem ordinary and part of the system, although the years spent in prison have darkened many of them. The trial has underscored the idea that the monster often hides next door. It has also given credence to the idea that most assaults occur in a domestic setting and that the weapons used are simply found inside the home medicine cabinet.

The monster could be any one of us, suggests the defendants’ legal team. So do some of the residents of Mazan, the quiet, pretty little village in the south of France where the couple had retired a decade ago. “Look, this doesn’t represent us. We have nothing to do with these people,” says a waitress inside the main bar, which is close to the car park of the André Malraux school, where Pélicot forced the men who came to his house to park discreetly. Three of the defendants at the trial might be residents of this town. “So what?” the waitress rightly protests.

Mazan and Avignon are separated by a 40-kilometer road that runs through the lush vineyards of Provence, which thousands of tourists visit every year. On the way back to the city, a huge, freshly painted graffiti welcomes visitors: “Hello to those ordinary men capable of horrible crimes,” the message reads. A few kilometers away is the Palace of Justice in Avignon, where the extraordinary case will be tried until December. Given the enormous amount of evidence, the guilty pleas entered by most of the accused and the expected conviction, what will be most relevant about this case is the reflections that emerge and how they will mark France’s relationship with certain concepts concerning sexual matters such as consent, submission or sexual education.

Beatrice Zavarro, a lawyer with experience defending sexual offenders, walks out the courthouse hours before the trial, with the papers under her arm and her robe still on. Dark-skinned, petite and wearing burgundy-coloured glasses like a tiara, she has become one of the most iconic characters in the trial taking place these days in Avignon. She represents the main defendant, Dominique Pélicot. Her role, of enormous moral and emotional complexity, is fundamental in a trial that is already lost. She accepted the case because she found it “very interesting on a human and personality level.”

Zavarro’s idea — or at least her opinion of the accused — is that it is useless to evoke the “banality of evil” because that is a moral concept. “Morality is not justice. And we are not here to judge moral questions, but facts, criminal offenses. And in any case, it is not a question of the banality of evil. Otherwise, this man would have other convictions on his record. And he only has one in 2010, when he filmed upskirts,” she has said. This is not entirely accurate, because although he has not yet been charged, Pélicot’s DNA implicates him in two other rapes that the judge is now investigating. Two female real estate agents — the same profession as himself — who were raped after being put to sleep with ether.

“You can do something monstrous without being a monster”

The idea that Zavarro defends makes Pélicot, the alleged mastermind of more than 50 rapes, a mirror of society. “We are all capable of doing horrible things,” says the lawyer. “There are no predictions for what an individual can or cannot commit. We see it with children too. There can be behaviors that are not a reflection of our personality.” Zavarro explains that she does not expect anything concrete from the sentence, because she and her client know that he will be convicted. “I am going to try to send a message that the man I am defending is not a monster. What he has done is monstrous, that is unquestionable, and I am not going to minimize his responsibility. I am simply saying that you can do something monstrous without being a monster. He built a family, he had a wife whom he loved and she loved him, he had three children who each have a position in life. His life was normal and everyday. And besides that, there was a darker side, a side in the shadows, for which he is now sitting in the dock.”

Gisèle Pélicot’s lawyers, as well as the victim herself and her family, know that the outcome of the trial is largely a foregone conclusion. “My clients only hope to gain a better understanding of who this man was who raised them, or with whom they shared their life for 50 years, because one day they discovered that they did not know him at all. They want to know who the man was with whom they shared their holidays, who raised them, who took them to school… For his children, now in their forties, it is important to know, because the backbone of their life has collapsed and they need to understand many things,” says lawyer Antoine Camus.

For the lawyer, there are still many gaps in the case. “Did all this start in 2011, when the police discovered it, or had he been doing it for years? Was he only using Temesta to drug her? Was he putting his wife in danger of death by giving her 10 2.5 milligram pills that could have killed her? The reality of the facts is that they no longer expect anything more than that, because they have already understood that Pélicot was duplicity in the flesh.”

Psychiatrists attribute Pélicot’s behavior to a so-called cleavage rather than to the caricature of the monster or the moral idea of evil. This is a self-defense phenomenon that develops in the first years of life to protect oneself from a strong anxiety generated by the distortion between the image that we would like to project to others and what we really are. “And this mechanism of self-protection explains why this man had an A side and a B side. And why he only showed his family the A side, including his wife, whom he had to put to sleep so that she wouldn’t see it. It would have been much easier for the family if this man had been a bad father, if he had hit his children, or had been a disinterested husband… But no, he was a great father, a wonderful neighbor and his wife adored him. They all fell from a 36th floor.”

Gisèle Pélicot — who still keeps the surname she adopted when she married Dominique — has become a symbol of the feminist struggle in recent weeks. Her face appears in hundreds of photomontages of activism against sexual abuse. This Saturday, various marches are being called across the country in support of the victim, who decided to make the trial public so that the press could have access to all the testimonies. “This case will be a turning point,” Elsa Labouret, spokesperson for the association Osez le feminisme, told this newspaper. Her lawyer clarifies the issue and points out that she is not seeking to turn this trial into “a trial against men, or about the toxicity of male sexuality.” “It is not at all what she is saying. She cannot prevent anyone from thinking what they will. But she is not trying to turn this into a confrontation between the sexes; on the contrary, she wants this to be a dialogue and to show the reality of what rape is in all its crudeness. It is not a confrontation, it is a conversation.”

Meanwhile, Dominique Pélicot was again reported ill on Monday. After suspending his testimony last week, on Monday he was said to be suffering from gallstone and a kidney infection, and it was unlikely that he would be appearing in court as scheduled.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition