The Pelicot Trial Returns, This Time to the Stage

New York Times

a day ago

The buzz of this year's Avignon Festival was a play set inside a medieval convent, not far from the courthouse where six months ago Gisèle Pelicot confronted her ex-husband and dozens of men accused of raping her while she was deeply drugged.
The play had a simple name: 'The Pelicot Trial.'
By the French playwright Servane Dècle and the Swiss director Milo Rau, it promised to distill into four hours the four-month trial that rocked France.
All 51 defendants in the case were found guilty, most on charges of rape. The case jolted the country into difficult questions around the pervasiveness of rape, the widespread use of pharmaceuticals to drug women and commit abuse, and the uncomfortably familiar face of rapists who are also fathers, uncles, brothers, neighbors.
The playwright, Ms. Dècle, told French radio that the work was taking up the demand by Ms. Pelicot, who had waived her right to a closed-door trial and insisted that the videos of the hundreds of rapes she suffered, all of which were filmed and cataloged by her husband, be played publicly in court, to 'look rape straight in the eyes.'
As on most days of the trial, a line had formed outside the building where the stage was set, led by women looking for last-minute tickets to the show, which played one night at the festival but is being staged elsewhere. Some said they had come to witness how the director would meld the case into art, and to process their own personal stories of sexual violence. Two women near the front were in tears.
'I think men felt protected before. They let things slide,' said one woman in line, Nathalie Le Meur, a 54-year-old art therapist. 'Because of this trial, they realize they could potentially end up in court.'
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