Madame L was tall, upright and elegant with silver hair, and she clutched her small bag in both hands. At 77 she was just a few years older than Gisèle Pelicot, who watched from behind her trio of lawyers against the far wall. But this middle-class French woman was standing in the Avignon court for a wholly different reason, to defend her son, the rapist.
This is a mass trial of a scale rarely seen outside war crimes tribunals. Fifty-one men including Dominique Pelicot himself were convicted of raping a drugged, unconscious Gisèle. So many men they became an amorphous mass of weapons-grade toxic masculinity. But what fascinated me on the week I attended was the detail of these lives, and what factors had led