French man accused of drugging his wife and inviting men to rape her

What on earth do you expect any men here to say, other than this is an incredibly horrific story?

He was looking for weirdos on weirdo websites and chat sites. It's hardly that surprising that none of them blew the whistle.

To expect otherwise would be similar to making friends on boards.ie and then being surprised if you meet them in person and they turned out to be a weirdo - albeit maybe not quite a rapey one. YMMV with regard to the latter part.

There was a case in Ireland a good few years ago when someone posted online that their wife/girlfriend had some rape fantasy, looking for someone to "play along" and attack her. Some fella took up the request and went along with it and attacked the woman and it turned out to be a complete setup. I can't remember what the relationship was between the poster of the ad and the victim. It might have been an ex-boyfriend or something. I think that the perpetrator was not convicted because he actually believed it was some sort of role-play and that the woman agreed

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Some weirdo looked for other weirdos on a specific website/chat-room dedicated to doing a certain illegal thing over a number of years and you extrapolate this to being representative of the population in general. There is probably a chatroom somewhere for people who like to dress up as smurfs while sticking mars bars up their arses. If you find it, don't be surprised if they aren't representative of the wider population. (You can PM me for the link if you want. We don't advertise it generally as Mars cut their sponsorship last year so we are hanging on until they reinstate it)

And the only mention of the origin of any of the perpetrators that I can see in the article is that the woman only recognised one of them as being a neighbour. I didn't see anywhere where it said they were all from her village/town/city/region.

I didn't read the details but thats horrific and of course its totally unfair to tar all men with the same brush…. there are millions of men in the world and some are bad, but i really believe the vast majority are not and would be disgusted to read such a horrific story. As for the numbers involved snd no one went to the police, chances are they all had the same deviant fantasies and they knew each other, horrible and disgusting. Poor woman, what a terrible betrayal of her by the man who should have loved and protected her most in the world.

The world needs more shame.

Well there’s this:

“Which means there are a lot of men living normal lives who are eager to rape an unconscious woman as long as her husband isn't going to punch their lights out.”

and

“The facts are that most of those men were not known sex offenders, and were not marginals living on the edge of society either.”

I think the issue is that you didn’t read the article fully. The husband actively sought out sexual deviants, these were people who’d already expressed a desire to do things like this. Maybe you did read it fully and ignored this very salient point.

If I’ve misread your tone and you agree that this is only an issue for a tiny, tiny fraction of men, I’ll be delighted if you can clarify that.

you’ve answered your own question

“If one of the perpetrators reported him”

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. As soon as they agreed to it, they were complicit, even if they didn’t go through with the actual deed.

It’s a hellish thought but the chances of someone who would respond to something like this then deciding to fall on their own sword by reporting it and wrecking their own life in the process is a lot less than 1 in 20, it’s zero. These aren’t upstanding citizens, they’re subhuman scum, basic compassion is not in their tool chest like. And certainly none of them were going to hand over their computers as evidence…

Because it appears the circumstances of recruiting the men was, they had predisposition and premeditation, they were not, in fact, some stochastic cohort of men chosen randomly from among the husband's peer group, neighbors, etc. but from an unmoderated french website. The owner has since been arrested and their website shut down.

The chat room where most of the men met Mr. Pelicot was called “a son insu,” which means “without their knowledge.”

According to NYT some of the defendants have tried to assert defense against rape by alleging they… believed the husband's permission was sufficient, and others believed the wife had agreed to be drugged for sexual excursion. Whether there is any truth to those defenses, or they all were predetermined to date-rape her, it seems clear that none of them would have willingly gone to the police because of the predicament they chose to place themselves in.

I get why people just jumping in to the thread and reacting to the OP might get the mistaken impressions seemingly designed as a smear of men's attitudes in general, but it is clear from the facts in the case this was not a random sampling of men by any stretch. These men in particular are a curated group of some of the worst french society has on offer - and 5 of them are also charged with possessing child pornography. 1 isn't charged with raping the woman at the head of this case but rather following the husbands example and raping his own wife, and allowing the ringleader in this case to do so as well, for which he is additionally being charged.