French man accused of drugging his wife and inviting men to rape her

That's a good point, and just as men often have an insight into other men with questionable behaviours, so often do women see how men can behave with vulnerable women in private but put on an upstanding gentleman facade to other men. I struggle to believe that neither Joseph Fritzl's wife nor his friend who he frequently went to Thailand with didn't know he was an evil man.

The men who participated in this have been described as normal men, most in employment and some married or in relationships. This doesn't mean that people in their social circles necessarily felt the same way. I've known absolute creeps who are married or in relationships. Being a creep isn't illegal so it's not something anyone can act on, and it doesn't mean they would engage in criminal behaviour anyway. It's people like Wayne Couzens, who can brazenly bring prostitutes to work gatherings, and have fellow police officers turn a blind eye that I struggle with. He should have been booted out of the force for that as he could never be trusted to do the right thing regarding protecting women.

yes it’s called a criminal trial and the defence quite often will try to put a witness in an uncomfortable position and ask questions to ascertain truth.

I was a victim of a road traffic collision namely I got knocked off an escooter at a roundabout. When in court the defence solicitor argued to me it was my own fault and negligence that caused me to be struck. It was quite shocking for me at the time to be met with that attitude but at the same time your mans solicitor was hardly going to try and have him prosecuted now was he?

You’re a funny one to be honest, you expect men to sort it out, will do nothing yourself only hinder justice being sought and love to say it’s “all your fault”.

The arrogance of you to stand there and tell me you don’t have to help a victim seek assistance because you’re not a rape charity? Fcuk yourself OP to be honest. How dare you pretend to care when you wouldn’t lift a finger to help someone.

You want to accuse me of victim blaming but what have you done to help victims? Nothing. You continue to do nothing here more than accuse us all of being responsible while simultaneously trying to absolve yourself of any responsibility because “I don’t rape people”, well guess what, I don’t fcuking rape people either.

law changes being talked about being pushed look to make this easier for the victims in the EU/France, esp. in regards to consent and withdrawing consent.

(But no doubt the usual woman-haters will ignore this in favour of personal abuse. Because the reality is, there are a number of male posters on here who just want this thread shut down. The last thing they want is any discussion of the issues. That's on them, but it's worth pointing out.)

Are these imaginary people, “woman-haters,” are they in the room with us right now? Get a grip. Your misandry is on full ass display.

On one hand they say it's only the fault of the rapists, on the other it's the fault of the victims for not participating in a system stacked against them. Which is it?

You're just giving me the confirmation that you got it wrong even if you can't see the wood for the trees there.

Despite what a rapist sex ringleader has tried to tell authorities, her own daughter placed the number for us all at 72 rapists. The suspect list police have is 83, they have that from the trove of irrefutable evidence he kept, thousands of photos, videos, texts, etc.

That puts the number at 11 who are suspects but didn't rape her. And one of those men is charged raping his own wife. So that leaves at most, 10 men who meet the talking point.

The only way the thread got to 30 was from users tripping over your bollocks from the perp in the OP, first going on that "30%" didn't rape her, then alliterating that number to simply be "30 men." Somewhere in there you even claimed "over a hundred" raped her - in direct contradiction to the daughter, who I think would know far better than you about all of this.

https://www.news18.com/world/my-father-let-72-men-rape-my-mother-daughter-of-frenchman-reveals-he-kept-her-pictures-in-underwear-9039595.html

What have Swedish and Danish data to do with any of this?

Exactly my point. Yet you bring up England's data like it has anything to do with this. Well done. You got there. We've established your claim that 98% of rapes go unpunished is unproven bollocks.

Your link doesn't say anything about the clearance rate, it is just a story about an increased rate of reports published in 2022. Keep digging!

 It's not like the US judicial system where everyone plea-bargains because they're going to be found guilty anyway. 

Interesting… so there is reason for women to report after all. Fascinating, yet you claim there's no point and you'd be advising them what is the use - you, your attitude is part of the problem.

Your math is completely out of whack, at this point it's almost like you're doing it on purpose to sealion.

It's 83 suspects

Over the course of their investigation, the police found more than 20,000 videos and photographs, many of them dated and labeled, in an electronic folder titled “abuse.” The timeline they built began in 2011. The list of suspects grew to 83.

It's 72 rapists

https://www.news18.com/world/my-father-let-72-men-rape-my-mother-daughter-of-frenchman-reveals-he-kept-her-pictures-in-underwear-9039595.html

1 of the suspects didn't rape her.

Only one of the men is not charged with rape, assault or attempted rape of Mr. Pelicot’s wife. Instead, that man is accused of following the same model, and drugging his own wife to rape her. Mr. Pelicot is also charged with raping the man’s wife while she was drugged.

That leaves your asspull "very least about 30" number to be precisely 10.

I know it's hard for you to admit you're wrong here, but math is math.

so now again you are detailing problems but offering nothing in the way of a solution.

What is YOUR proposed solution to all of this?

Oh dear, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Volchitsa explained the 3 out of 10 thing, that I can only conclude you have deliberately chosen to ignore.

Yes, that's from the report … and?

Are you? Is that it? That's a paragraph from the report, what about it? What argument are you trying to infer from it? Are you at a loss for words?

That's not any sort of gotcha, I don't claim to have read the whole 95 pages and since you haven't either that's a nice glass house, kettle. All I sought to disprove is that England's clearance rate was indicitave of everywhere, citing both examples from the EU and from the US. The fact that eg. Sweden is an outlier is exactly my point: Sweden has less issues with public confidence in criminal justice and less issues with rape myths. It isn't a "point scoring" exercise we're discussing rape not football FFS. If this is a point scoring exercise for you please leave me alone, if you're here to actually discuss the issues though in a solution-driven manner, great, let's go.

My point being that the defeatist attitudes that oh, 98% walk away, what can you do, don't play the quote, "lottery" is proliferating myths and instilling lack of confidence in criminal justice and would only serve to ensure in the future more rapes go unpunished. I would have thought that was entirely clear. Only 5% of victims reporting crime is very clearly a problem, I don't think you'll find any disagreement except maybe from types like the OP who, speaking of prevalent myths, liken reporting it to increasing the victim's risk of suicide.

Even the husband involved in this case apparently once asked his wife to engage in wife swapping and she apparently didn't see this as a red flag.

There's a lot in this case. Some of the reporting even mentions that, at one point, she almost stumbled on the revelation, and teased her husband about whether he was drugging her while wondering about the symptoms she was having. He gaslit the hell out of her, broke down and tears and said how can you accuse me of doing that etc.

“I didn’t understand why I had these moments like this,” Gisèle recalled, per The Telegraph.

She said she jokingly asked Dominique at the time whether he was drugging her, but he “broke down in tears,” the outlet stated. 

The retired electricity worker, who accompanied his wife of almost 50 years to the doctor's appointment, reportedly told her, “You actually think I could do that?” the paper added.

https://people.com/wife-allegedly-drugged-by-husband-raped-dozens-men-convinced-heap-ruins-court-8706774

20 years will be too good for him. And it is maddening that one of the red flags was right there behind a thin veil of crocodile tears.

in which case I bow out.

I hope you don’t, because that allows for the discussion then to be dominated by a false narrative of putting the responsibility for men who commit rape, back on women and girls to prevent themselves from being raped by men, when it should be about preventing men from committing rape.

Separately, and possibly even though they may not realise it, Raichu and volchista are actually saying the same thing in different ways (apologies but the @, never seems to work for me so I can’t refer to posters directly), but they’re both making the same point about the absolute brutality of our adversarial Courts system. Just like all the “preventative advice” (ultimately utterly useless) given to women and girls to prevent themselves from being raped by men - nothing sufficiently prepares witnesses appearing for the prosecution to give evidence at trial. They can’t be prepared for the assault on their character by the defendants legal counsel, which leads to outcomes like this, and the public backlash which ensued, which led to new rules being introduced about how cases are to be reported on:

https://archive.ph/aVAuQ

It’s why people before they ever are victims, are looking at the Criminal Justice system and the Courts, and developing the impression of their own volition, that victims of rape are not seeing justice done, leading to people simply having no confidence in the legal process. This misunderstanding isn’t helped by the dismal charge and conviction rates, the lenient sentencing reported in the media upon conviction, and the overall impression that the odds are simply too great to even consider pursuing a complaint against the man or men who raped them. Women and girls perceive the judicial process to be entirely detached from the reality of their participation in public life in that it’s not set up to help them, it hinders them, and so they remain silent, or bow out.

Raichu and volchista also have a point about the various charities and organisations involved, in that the responsibility of preparing witnesses to give evidence at trial is often ill-considered, in many cases giving victims false hope of seeing justice done. There was one case in particular where the victim was so ill-prepared that she was operating under the impression that the Irish system operates in the same manner as her home country, only to find out upon the defendant being convicted of rape, that it does not. I can’t find the exact case now but the gist of it was that it was a criminal trial, as opposed to a civil case where compensation can be awarded against a defendant:

https://archive.ph/tzxMN

The Judge in the former case was critical of the fact that nobody had thought to explain the process to the victim in a way that she clearly understood the process, which lack of understanding led to her being unable to understand what had just occurred.

There is nothing in my post personally abusing you, and if you think that report the posts. If anything I said is of the standard of personal abuse to you, you would have a lot of things to explain to how you have spoken to and about me in this thread.

You continue proliferating this argument that victims shouldn't come forward and report rapes and that's not a solution at all. You said you were looking for solutions?

Sooo - really? You think it's reasonable to tell a woman who's been raped that if she doesn't report it, she's enabling rapists? Is that really what a mother or sister or close friend of a rape victim should do? Or shoud she go very, very carefully before telling her friend, daughter or sister what to do at all?

If anything like that I'm saying that people who would tell victims to not report are the ones ultimately enabling rapists, encouraging non-report is encouraging the environment in which they can commit crimes again. Please don't tell victims of rape not to report it, it's sickening. It's also not a solution. Nor would it have done anything for the next woman you've just pulled up here as a new deflection from the main story of the thread, but if you want to meander a second, let's meander, this is the pulitzer prize-winning story about her case:

https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story

It's published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit that doesn't just throw its hands up and say ah what can we do, their mission objective is to instill the needed urgency about problems with criminal justice.

It's interesting you bring up this woman as an example of why a woman shouldn't report, yet read her response to that attitude at the end please,

Two and a half years after Marie was branded a liar, Lynnwood police found her, south of Seattle, and told her the news: Her rapist had been arrested in Colorado. They gave her an envelope with information on counseling for rape victims. They said her record would be expunged. And they handed her $500, a refund of her court costs. Marie broke down, experiencing, all at once, shock, relief and anger.

Afterward, Shannon took Marie for a walk in the woods, and told her, “I’m so sorry I doubted you.” Marie forgave, immediately. Peggy, too, apologized. She now wishes she had never shared her doubts with police. “Because I feel that if I would have shut my mouth, they would have done their job,” she says.

Marie sued the city and settled for $150,000. “A risk management decision was made,” a lawyer for Lynnwood told The Herald in Everett, Washington.

Marie left the state, got a commercial driver’s license and took a job as a long-haul trucker. She married, and in October she and her husband had their second child. She asked that her current location not be disclosed.

Before leaving Washington to restart her life, Marie made an appointment to visit the Lynnwood police station. She went to a conference room and waited. Rittgarn had already left the department, but Mason came in, looking “like a lost little puppy,” Marie says. “He was rubbing his head and literally looked like he was ashamed about what they had done.” He told Marie he was sorry — “deeply sorry,” Marie says. To Marie, he seemed sincere.

Recently, Marie was asked if she had considered not reporting the rape.

“No,” she said. She wanted to be honest. She wanted to remember everything she could. She wanted to help the police.

“So nobody else would get hurt,” she said. “They’d be out there searching for this person who had done this to me.”

Even the woman you're trying to bring up to make your point against reporting, she is saying, if she doesn't report it, someone else would get hurt.

What Marie Adler went through was horrifying but she pushed on and exposed it, resulting in not just the criminal prosecution of her rapist, but in destroying **** attitudes that prevailed in that police department because of rape myths, and inspiring WA to update its rape laws. Her experience resulted in a $150k lawsuit and an outside review of the PD which concluded she was coerced into a false confession. The PD addressed this matter again after the Netflix docuseries. Months after this pulitzer reporting in Dec 2015, Washington enacted HB2530 enacting a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners program and a statewide rape kit and tracking system. "Washington has adopted all six pillars of rape kit reform and has cleared its backlog."

https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/washington/

Heads also rolled at the department, the police chief addressing the docuseries is not the same police chief who ordered the outside investigation. He was hired on in 2016.

Upon learning about the circumstances surrounding this investigation in 2011, the former police chief immediately requested an independent outside review of this investigation, as well as a review of the policies and procedures associated with how the department investigated sexual assault complaints. Coincidentally, in 2011, I was part of the leadership team of the outside agency contacted to assist the department. I approved the request and designated the supervisor who conducted this important review for the department. 

It is my understanding that the department took the results of this outside review very seriously and, in fact, implemented multiple changes in 2011 as a result of the lessons learned from the 2008 case. This included employing a victim-centered investigative philosophy and providing additional training in sexual assault investigations for detectives and patrol staff. Portions of these trainings were instructed by victim advocates who work directly in support of victims of sexual assault. 

Additionally, the department currently employs a full-time crime victim coordinator to work directly with all crime victims, including victims of sexual assault. I am proud of the regionally recognized work performed by our crime victim coordinator and our strong emphasis on victim support. 

I was hired as Lynnwood’s police chief in 2016. Although I was not an employee of this department in 2008 or 2011, I am no less distressed by the decisions and circumstances from 11 years ago that undoubtedly caused additional harm to the victim. This was not acceptable then and it would not be acceptable today. 

What I can tell you with certainty is that when I arrived here three years ago, with the vision and support of our current mayor, I and my leadership team began moving the department through measurable cultural change. 

Therefore yes, I think it is perfectly reasonable to tell victims of crimes to report crimes so nobody else gets hurt. Nothing changes if nothing is reported.

I notice you have nothing to say about the poster I was responding to, who said rape victims should be guilt tripped into reporting their rape on the grounds that other women will also be raped if they don't.

lols…that's some mental gymnastics right there.

I’d really love to know where this idea I’m suggesting women who were raped should be “guilted” into reporting it to the authorities.

I’ve literally read accounts from rape survivors who have stated their primary motivation for reporting was to ensure another woman is not harmed by the attacker.

But I’m guilting victims.

Okaaay.