This is important, writes Garcia in “Living With Men,” because despite the deeply unsettling revelations of the Pelicot trial, women like her were going home to their own husbands every night with their heads full of images from Dominique Pelicot’s meticulously logged and titled cache of videos where he directed strangers as they raped his sedated wife. They were going home knowing that what looked to the rest of the world like a singularly horrifying case had revealed that Mr. Pelicot’s crimes and those of his accomplices were not nearly as unique as we want to believe. “If a single man in a small town like Mazan can manage to find at least 70 others living within a radius of less than fifty kilometres” — about 30 miles — “then how many men are there in France who would be prepared to rape an unconscious woman if the opportunity arose? . . . [C]ould it be that the average ‘guy next door’ would willingly rape his neighbor’s sleeping wife?”
She found the answer both during the trial, which ended with Dominique Pelicot and all 50 men found guilty of either rape or sexual assault, and beyond it, via a Telegram channel with 70,000 users who, Garcia writes, “help one another out with tips for drugging the women around them, share photos of their sedated partners, and describe the abuse they plan to inflict on them.” Not everyone would do this; the problem is that there is no way for women to know who would and who wouldn’t. {read}