The Chat Room Behind the Pelicot Rape Trial

There were two rooms at the Pelicot mass-rape trial in Avignon: the courtroom for the press, and a live-feed room for the public. From the day it began, in early September, women lined up outside the courthouse before 7 A.M. in order to secure one of sixty seats in the latter, the salle de retransmission. Two retired women were always at the front: Bernadette and Brigitte. Bernadette came, she said, to see how justice worked; Brigitte because this was a live version of the crime shows she liked to watch on TV. Both admitted that, once they started coming, they couldn’t stop.

Among the other spectators were a family—grandmother, mother, and two daughters—from Bordeaux. There was a woman whose daughter had been raped and who had come to learn how such a trial worked. There was a woman in her seventies who had been raped years ago by the father of one of the fifty-one defendants—making the trial, for her, a paltry chance at remedial justice. Every day, a few men joined the line. They were looked at with suspicion. The rumor was that more of them tended to come toward the end of the week, when the videos of the rapes were shown.

When the doors opened every morning, at eight-thirty, the press, the plaintiffs, and the lawyers filed through: well-dressed professionals, a vision of Paris at work, sauntering in front of the waiting provincials. (Avignon is the prefecture of Vaucluse, a heartland of the far-right Rassemblement National party, and one of the poorest regions in the South.) Meanwhile, an official gave the public instructions about how to behave in the salle, where a screen at the front projected a view of the courtroom. If we left—for lunch, or to go to the rest room—we would lose our place. The only exception to this rule, the official said, would be when the videos of the rapes were shown. At that point, we could step out, as the official did every time. She was, she said, a woman, too.

Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot got married in 1973, when they were both in their early twenties. By 2011, they had three children, several grandchildren, and were living in the suburbs of Paris. Gisèle worked at the state electricity company; Dominique was an electrician by trade. That year, Dominique began to slip Gisèle drugs that rendered her unconscious, then rape her as she slept. Two years later, when the couple retired to Mazan, a small town in Vaucluse, Dominique began inviting men to their home to rape his wife while she was sedated.

Dominique’s crimes were discovered after police apprehended him in 2020, when he was caught filming up the skirts of three women in a supermarket, and authorities confiscated his phones, hard drives, and a laptop. He and his co-defendants’ trial commenced four years later. After his primary portion concluded, in September, fifty of the eighty-three men whom he had solicited to rape his wife while he filmed them were tried in batches of six or seven per week. I first attended in November, when I saw the trial of Romain Vandevelde, a former forklift driver; Omar Douiri, a mechanic who cleaned buses; Cendric Venzin, a restaurant manager; Saifeddine Ghabi, a truck driver; Paul-Koikoi Grovogui, a food-processing worker; Ludovick Blemeur, a warehouse worker; and Cédric Grassot, a man who worked in I.T.

In France, rape trials are usually held in camera, in part to preserve the anonymity of the victim. Gisèle rejected this norm, claiming that she wanted “to insure that society could see what was happening.” The trial consequently landed front and center in the French national debate, with daily news coverage. Cities are now daubed with feminist graffiti. In the public discourse, the mystery of the case was not really what had taken place: in court, Dominique confessed, and the co-defendants’ actions had been captured in meticulously labelled video recordings.

Instead, the mystery was why the men had done what they did. In an immortal parody of Simone de Beauvoir, delivered during his confession, Dominique argued that “one is not born a pervert, one becomes one.” But what was it that perverted him and the others? During the months of proceedings, the court heard testimony from the defendants themselves, from character witnesses, and from mental-health professionals who had conducted interviews with the defendants, including an enquêteur de personnalité (akin to a social worker), a Freudian expert psychologue, and a more medically oriented expert psychiatre. One of the answers that emerged from their discussions was sexual trauma. A quarter of the accused claimed to have been sexually abused as children, as Dominique himself says he was; of the seven defendants being tried one week, three had been victims of incest or rape. In one proceeding, a witness declared that, if it weren’t for the convicted pedophile Fabrice Motch, who had raped Blemeur when he was twelve, Blemeur would not have been there. (Earlier, in a telling slip of the tongue, the witness had confused the two men in his testimony.) But, if these accounts were harrowing, they were not universally convincing—some observers felt that the defense lawyers were enlisting a casual determinism to explain away their clients’ responsibility. After all, not all people who are subjected to such events end up committing rape.

Several of the defendants’ lawyers asked questions of the psychiatrists and psychologists to attempt to better comprehend another set of terms that had been circulating throughout the trial. If the presence of an abusive childhood would not be sufficient to explain these men’s behavior, perhaps a better understanding of their approach to sex would. How, one lawyer asked, should we understand “fantasy”? What is “paraphilia”? When is sexuality “deviant”? What counts as “curiosity”? In France, trials for crimes punishable by up to fifteen to twenty years in prison are judged by a jury of professional magistrates. At the Pelicot trial, the president of the jury often invoked the “famous norm” of sexuality—what did that actually mean? The more, however, that the lawyers gleaned from these questions, the less explanatory power the answers seemed to possess. Many people have fantasies, experience atypical kinds of arousal, or are sexually curious and experimental but do not act on these impulses in a way that infringes upon the law. Though multiple explanations for the defendants’ actions were offered at the trial, nothing quite fit. That is, apart from a much mentioned, though little analyzed, site called Coco.

In a memoir, “Et J’ai Cessé de T’appeler Papa” (“I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again”), Dominique and Gisèle’s daughter, Caroline Darian, recounts the process her father used to recruit men to rape his wife. He would first log on to Coco. The site required no membership, provided little to no moderation, and had the unusual feature that message histories were not saved after a user logged off. All users needed to provide was a pseudonym, an age, a location, and an indication of their gender. Anh P., the co-founder of the Avignon branch of a trans-rights organization, told me that typical themes for the discussion groups around which Coco was structured included trans meetups and porn, hentai, B.D.S.M., sex work, zoophilia, and date-rape drugs (some of which were hidden under other names). Groups without sufficient activity would be closed by the system. The forum that Dominique used was called “Without Her Knowledge,” and was active for at least ten years. His opening gambit, Darian recounts, was to ask chat-room entrants whether, just like him, they enjoyed “rape mode.”

Throughout the trial, the jury kept referring to Coco as a “dating site”—something that made many people in the crowd wish that a set of older magistrates had not been chosen to decide on this case. In fact, Coco, which was shut down this past year, was not a dating site but a platform for anonymous chat rooms—a place where stating your desire, no matter what it was, could be done without fear of the usual consequences. In Anh’s words, “operating behind a screen masks moral limits, and certain people overcame the hurdle of reality.”

The most canonical theory of invisibility’s effect on behavior is perhaps the Ring of Gyges: the invisibility device mentioned in Plato’s Republic. When Gyges realizes that with a twist of a ring he can disappear, he rapes the king’s wife, kills the king, and takes over the kingdom. On Coco, the psychology of invisibility met the power of the crowd. Users were not only invited to speak free from scrutiny—they were also introduced to people speaking the same way, at the same time. It is as if, when Gyges turned his ring to become invisible, he suddenly met others who were invisible, too, who would nurture his desires.

You might assume that the powerful feeling of invisibility ends when you close your computer screen. But, throughout the years, users of Coco repeatedly performed the unsavory things that they had discussed on the platform. The public prosecutor’s office in Paris reported that, between January, 2021, and May, 2024, Coco was named in more than twenty-three thousand criminal cases. Several of these were related to a wave of violent ambushes of gay or trans people, which were orchestrated by predators who arranged meetups with their victims online. According to a 2023 documentary produced by Mediapart, three hundred people were attacked in this manner in the course of five years, equating to at least one attack a week. Though attacks associated with online platforms like Coco have dramatically increased recently, the history of this kind of crime stretches back to the days of Minitel, an early French online network. Coco made things much worse. Véronique Godet, a former co-president of the L.G.B.T.Q. organization SOS Homophobie, told me that ninety per cent of the ambushes reported to them were organized on the platform. Prompted by SOS Homophobie, the French government conducted an investigation of Coco and, this past June, closed the site. In early January, Coco’s founder, Isaac Steidl, was indicted in France on charges including hosting a site that allowed gangs to plan violent ambushes. But other platforms, such as Chaat, still exist, and have a similar functionality.

What happens to a person’s psychology in a chat room? There is a certain kind of language in the testimonies of Coco ambush victims that was echoed in the Pelicot trial. A man who was attacked by twelve people in Besançon in 2018 said that it felt like “a game” to his aggressors, only one of whom ultimately acknowledged his guilt. “It did not seem at all like they were committing an act of violence,” the victim said. Many defendants at the Pelicot trial similarly expressed the feeling that the scenes they lived through were fictional. Ghabi and Venzin said that they thought their visits were, respectively, a “scenario” and a “fantasy.” Vandevelde, who went to the Pelicot house six times between 2019 and 2020, described himself as “a self-directed zombie.” Related to the fictionality was a perceived lack of agency. Douiri, one psychologist said, did not see himself as a subject, “but as an object which responded to impulses.”

The defendants’ avowed lack of consciousness of their actions would seem to go far beyond what one might ordinarily expect from criminal defendants. To psychologists, this mind-set accords with research about other kinds of Internet use. Writing about online pornography, the clinical psychologist Alessandra Lemma has made the case that, compared with porn distributed via traditional media, online porn represents not a difference in scale but a difference in kind. This is in part due to how the Internet has reshaped the basic structure of desire. The Internet has shifted society, Lemma argues, from a “3(D)” model of desire, entailing “Desire, Delay, and Delivery,” to a “2(D)” model, which goes straight from desire to delivery. In this new model, we gratify our desires so readily that we do not have time to question them. Bypassing delay, we bypass a chance to interrogate ourselves.

Lemma concludes that the Internet can unleash “more primitive psychic states.” Is it possible that, when desires explored on the Internet move offline, these states persist? That the virtual extends out into the real?