Lee Hockstader: Pelicot rape trial could be watershed moment for France over horrors of abuse and toxic masculinity

Predators and paedophiles, especially the celebrity variety, long enjoyed not just protection in France but also a certain prestige. For decades their abuse and crimes were excused, ignored and rationalised, even glamorised. For several years after #MeToo forced a reckoning in the United States, it was widely belittled by French cultural luminaries as a banal eruption of American pearl-clutching – puritanical Yanks yoked to “le wokisme”.

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