PARIS — The Associated Press has falsely implicated “pornography” in its coverage of the Pelicot rape scandal in France.
Dominique Pelicot is currently on trial for allegedly arranging for 50 strangers to rape his drugged and unconscious wife Gisele.
“The harrowing and unprecedented trial in France is exposing how pornography, chatrooms and men’s disdain for or hazy understanding of consent is fueling rape culture,” the AP’s Diane Jeantet writes in the article.
She goes on to write that Céline Piques, spokesperson for a group called Osez le Féminisme!, or Dare Feminism!, says that “she’s convinced that many of the men on trial were inspired or perverted by porn, including videos found on popular websites.”
Jeantet provides no evidence that porn was in any way involved in the crime, other than mentioning that a tech expert testified that Dominique had searched “asleep porn” on his computer. Pelicot had also video recorded some of his encounters for his private collection.
This isn’t the first time since the trial began that the media has attempted to show cause and effect between watching pornography and committing sexual violence by using this case. U.K. conservative magazine The Spectator’s Mary Wakefield wrote an article titled “Pornography and the Truth About the Pelicot Case,” in which she says, “It’s porn which leads a human down into the sludgy gutters of his own psyche. If the feminists of France really wanted to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain. Not just from the obviously illegal stuff, but from all of it.”
As XBIZ reported earlier this month, Wakefield “offers broad generalizations and cites debunked notions about the supposed effects of watching adult content” in her piece.
While Jeantet doesn’t write in such stark terms, she does immediately follow her paragraph paraphrasing Piques with a list of sexual violence statistics, clearly drawing a causal line from pornography to sexual assault.
She also used the testimony of one of the accused rapists to bolster her case, writing that defendant Ahmed T. (French defendants’ full last names are generally withheld until conviction) testified that he had been “reminded him of porn he had watched featuring women who ‘pretend to be asleep and don’t react.’”
The implication Jeantet makes in the article is that ordinary men with careers and families were possibly influenced by the pornography they watch to participate in this rape.