Tribune. We were journalists or author, beginners with a tendency to be good students.
I came for a professional interview. He gave me a blowjob. I had known him for ten minutes.
Me, it was at a journalism fair. I found it in my hotel room when I got out of the shower.
I screamed so much that he took his hands away and opened the door.
It was my very first interview after leaving school. He asked my bosses to stop making me work.
I was afraid. I no longer went to editorial conferences.
Me, he put his hand in my cock while he said he wanted to talk to me about a report.
Me, I came to see a “8 pm”. He raped me on the carpet in his office.
I thought I was strong and free. The rape made me realize that I was wrong.
I was putting out my first book. I didn’t see her hand coming in my bra and her tongue in my mouth.
We were 19 to 34 years old. We sign this text on behalf of the nine women who filed a complaint.
We are the prescribed, the classified, the no-sequel.
In the state of the law and its application, the reasoning holds. Time has erased the possibility of reparation. Taken in isolation – it is too late, or the evidence is too weak – our complaints are no longer worth a tripette. The law is powerless. The law cannot hear us.
Collectively, however, we pose a problem that exploration of the mysteries of prescription will not erase.
Problem is, we’re all talking about the same man.
“We are not anecdotes from the ‘people’ section, we are the banality of power relations in a system of ordinary gender-based violence”
Simply putting the case back at the Musée Grévin du patriarchate means putting everything in place to start it all over again with other victims and other perpetrators.
Not wondering about what allowed it to wreak havoc without getting caught for decades turns into blindness.
Our complaints and our testimonies tell how, where the national story is fabricated, in the most powerful French television channel, we were able to let it go without seeing, without trying to understand, without worrying about ourselves, by minimizing, by taking at face value the myth of the ladies’ man, the great romantic who loves them all. The summit of the fable of French seduction.
We are not anecdotes from the “people” section. We are the banality of power relations in a system of ordinary gender-based violence.
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