Gisele Pelicot defendants described

Okay someone already mentioned the one's whose partners were standing by them, awful.How coould you stand by someone like that?

I noticed two of the men had partners , who were standing by them,I found this pretty shocking.
A high preportion had already got a criminal record, I think not quite half.
I think what's frightening is half were not at all known to the police at all.

I read it all, to the end, if Gisèle Pelicot endured it I can endure reading about it. But I now feel physically ill.

This was a cross-section of men. True, men who used porn and were on chatrooms, but that doesn't narrow down the cross-section very much. They were from different places and different backgrounds. Lots of them were the bloke-next-door father-of-family types. But every one of them is a rapist.
The conclusions to be drawn from that about the danger men pose to women and children are frightening. It could be any man. There is no guarantee, no safety.

I agree wholeheartedly about the 'sob stories'. I understand that each defendant will be trying to offer some kind of excuse or mitigation. The point is that being sexually abused as a child is not an excuse - it does not cause you to choose to repeat the abuse. The majority of CSA victims are girls, they grown up to be women, and women form a tiny minority of abusers; the 'cycle of abuse' is a manifestation of toxic masculinity at work.
In my experience, an adult female survivors of CSA is more like to be fiercely protective of children.

I'm fed up with men using that as an excuse for abusing children. If childhood sexual abuse has happened to you, as it has to me, you know how awful it is and if you have a grain of morality in you, you would die rather than inflict that on a vulnerable child.

The only positive in this sickening case is the unbelievable, powerful courage of Gisèle Pelicot.

I have no issue with the men trying to give excuses. That is how court works; if they were moral men they would never have raped Gisele. I object to anyone giving them any weight or publishing them.

I also searched for that... it is rather telling that on some level we do not trust men not to deliver justice.. and it crosed my mind that these 'excuses'.. who doesn't find ways of having their sexual urges satisfied... who doesn't believe that women could be part of such a game... might stike a chord with other males and result in some leniency.

I agree with all of you that the excuses are wholly unnecessary.
One was jailed previously for raping his own daughter FFS.
I’m also horrified that a couple of these alleged rapists’ parters are standing by them. WTAF. In the event they are not convicted (and I sincerely hope they are) they still went digging around on a horrendous online forum to find someone to cheat with. Why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship.

Real 'banality of evil', such princes. I think it's arguable that these aren't typical of all men. They were self selected in the first instance because they were the types of blokes who used a chat site called 'without her knowledge'. I'd like to believe it would not cross the minds of the majority to even look for such a site.

Perhaps I'm kidding myself, but if you need a crumb it's all I've got for the moment.

One in 3, if they know there will be no consequences and the word 'rape' isn't actually used in the question. One in 6 if the question does include the word.

Edit: those numbers are specifically for rape. Probably higher for assault.

Of course each of the men are trying to offer mitigation for their crimes. They want a smaller punishment and will say what they can to try and achieve that. Some may believe their own excuses but others will just be making stuff up.

I believe a study found that a high percentage of men would happily rape or sexually assault as long as it wasn’t called that.

Men understand consent perfectly well when it comes to their own holes.

And the slightly sneery comment 'what lorry driver hasn't visited sex workers'... is about reminding all men that they have sexual needs and urges that are 'natural' and that since time began, men have sought to have their needs met, at the expense of the autonomy, safety and freely given consent of women. It's a reminder to the judges, that these men are 'ordinary' men with 'ordinary' urges, being painted as monsters.

I hope not a single one of them gets off.

The issue of consent in French law seems to leave a loophole.. these are the words of one of the defense lawyers.

'In France, you don't need to have obtained the victim's consent necessarily to ensure that it's not rape," Guillaume de Palma, who represents several of the defendants, told reporters last week.

Earlier the same day, he had caused outcry in the courtroom when he remarked: "There's rape and there's rape, and without intent to commit it, it's not rape."

I hope that the necessity to prove rape on the basis that it needs to have an element of violence, threat or surprise to it, does not allow these men to walk free.

Oh my goodness, I had to stop after a while, it’s literally sickening. She was a ‘thing’ in their minds, not a human with her own alive world. One who said ‘she seemed dead’ but this didn’t stop him. Many of them do come across as stupid but I think it would be naive to accept that, cold and barbaric is more what is required to participate in such acts. Agreed that the consumption of porn has to play a large part.

Many have been found guilty of rape of their partners, possession of child sex abuse images, have admitted seeing sex workers (sadly not illegal), admitted seeking out couple encounters for sex and one had documented 89 partners.

One woman had reported her concerns to the police that she had been drugged and raped by her partner but it was not investigated. I would bet that his browsing history had illegal and non consentual sexual violence on it.

Sadly, there is no information about their use of porn, legal or otherwise because abuse of women is normalised and possession of images of sexual abuse of women is presumed consensual and presumed legal despite much evidence that a vast proportion of porn has at best, elements of coercion, men are rarely prosecuted for distribution of pornographic images of women and the consent of women in those images is rarely investigated.

It is against the landscape of acceptable abuse of women, share by millions on the internet every day, that these men and likely many many more, engage in the systematic abuse of women every day.

Despite the fact that being a victim of abuse in childhood does not excuse being an abuser as an adult, it is verybsad that there is so much abuse of children but I hate that abuse of male children is seen as so much more worse than abuse of women. There is an underlying belief that is not spoken out loud that sex with women is acceptable, regardless of whether it is nonconsentual or violent.

I couldn’t get past the first one, absolutely sickening.

Yeah right so all these men who didn’t know this was wrong or didn’t think about it were openly telling friends and family about what they were up to right? No, because otherwise it would have come out sooner. They knew they were doing something very dodgy indeed that was arranged online by men with an active interest in the concept of “without her knowledge”.

And if you’re using a crappy childhood or CSA as an excuse that also means you know you did wrong. Though loads of people have background that and manage not to commit sex crimes, including me, so I’m not very impressed by that.

Gisele Pelicot shouldn’t have to be insulted by whiny excuses. I’m glad some of them did admit it and apologise, but she must feel overwhelmed by the revoltingness of all these men.

Yes, I agree that porn is likely to have been a huge contributing factor to these men seeing this as in any way a normal thing to do

I feel so sad for the women sticking by these disgusting excuses of people.

The longer I am on this earth the closer I become to misandry.

They will have been immersed in porn. Other men doing it, seeing it on their laptops, on their phones, talking about it. Porn films being written, directed, produced, acted, depicting just such a thing. It becoming 'normalised' as much as anything like that can.

But yes, you just have to see women as receptacle, of course.

On a less bleak note I should also say that men are not socialised to consider others in the way women are and I believe that is another reason why men’s behaviour is vastly more problematic to society than women’s. If true, this obviously means that you could increase the cohort of humans who consider the impact of their behaviour on others before acting by changing the way we raise boys

as a mother of sons, answers on a postcard about how to achieve this please!

Depressingly I think the answer is yes for some men. And not just some men, some humans. It’s just that men are as a group stronger and more aggressive than women and children, so the problems caused by this kind of behaviour are more apparent and widespread in men

thinking about the effect of your behaviour on others and potentially giving up something you really want if you draw the conclusion that taking it could harm someone else is not something a lot of humans are capable of I think. It’s why we need police forces