Long before Ghislaine Maxwell, these women who exploited other women
Reading time: 10 min
Voici quelques semaines, à l'ouverture du procès de Ghislaine Maxwell, son avocate, Bobbi Sternheim, allait nous resservir une vieille histoire adaptée à sa sauce: «Depuis Ève accusée d'avoir tenté Adam avec la pomme, a-t-elle déclaré, c'est aux femmes que l'on fait porter le chapeau des errements des hommes.» Pour parfaire cet étrange amalgame entre Ève et Maxwell, Sternheim s'en est prise aux accusatrices de Jeffrey Epstein pour invoquer leur propre implication dans leurs agressions. Comme si l'avocate espérait faire du sexe de sa cliente un écran de fumée capable de brouiller les pistes et, peut-être, de soulever quelques doutes plus ou moins raisonnables.
Le procès a repris le 16 décembre et l'accusation (qui a présenté ses conclusions le 10 décembre) espère que le jury verra les choses autrement: qu'être une femme ne dispense pas, et ne devrait pas dispenser, d'une potentielle complicité dans une agression sexuelle, y compris en matière de préparation, de facilitation et de perpétration. Et en réalité, comme l'a détaillé Lara Stemple dans Slate, il n'y a rien de rare là-dedans.
Si les violences sexuelles relèvent, du moins en partie, de l'exercice du pouvoir, pourquoi des femmes –surtout si elles sont en manque d'argent ou d'influence– ne s'y joindraient pas? Et si cette participation féminine a même de quoi être cruciale pour que les violences aient lieu, comme l'ont récemment développé des universitaires et des juristes dans le Washington Post, le sexe ne devrait en aucun cas être une circonstance atténuante lorsque quelqu'un s'est rendu coupable de ce qui est reproché à Maxwell.
As a historians, we can attest to the seniority of the phenomenon.Since the time of Adam and Eve (whether he took place on Earth or in Paradise), there have always been women ready to help men - all the rich and powerful - to violate and sexually assault othersWomen and young girls.Women whose role was very often essential in hunting victims.
Unfortunately, as history has also shown, too many women like Ghislaine Maxwell get away with it: not only thanks to their wealth and power, but also and above all, precisely, thanks to their sex.Considering that in matters of serious crimes - and even sexual crimes - women would necessarily be innocent is a belief that is not new.
The fact is that history offers us, and in abundance, examples of everything that Maxwell is accused.The past is full of women helping and encouraging exploitation and sexual violence committed by men, generally powerful, on other women and adolescent girls.
Between the drops
Pour prendre un cas relativement récent, plongeons-nous dans le livre de l'historienne Julia Laite, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey. Dans cette histoire de trafic sexuel international datant du début du XXe siècle, la femme qui aura le mieux tiré parti du système judiciaire n'est pas Lydia Harvey, la victime, mais Veronique White, la prostituée et maquerelle qui l'aura bernée et pervertie.
The big, beautiful, elegant and charming White, who spilled with her husband a small pimping business, did not have the education, the family and the relations of Ghislaine Maxwell.But other common points between these two women are disturbing to say the least.
Il y a les beaux vêtements, les cadeaux, la femme d'un certain âge sexuellement désinvolte, et même un perroquet servant à amadouer les jeunes filles (Maxwell avait pour sa part un adorable petit chien) –autant d'éléments dressant le tableau de violences permises et banalisées. Et grâce à son sexe, Veronique White a eu tout loisir de disparaître dès qu'elle en a eu besoin –ce dont elle ne s'est pas privée.
À l'instar du cas étudié par Laite, les femmes se livrant au trafic sexuel et au proxénétisme semblent souvent avoir échappé aux poursuites et aux sanctions, comme les hommes qui les employaient, mais les efforts pour les traduire en justice n'ont pas pour autant été inexistants. Il va sans dire que les Européens chrétiens du Moyen Âge partageaient avec Sternheim l'intérêt pour les leçons que l'humanité peut tirer de la Genèse, et cette période a toute son utilité pour aborder la question des femmes complices de violences sexuelles masculines. S'il fut plus lumineux qu'on a tendance à le penser aujourd'hui, le Moyen Âge fut également un temps d'inégalités sociales et genrées endémiques, un contexte des plus propices à la coercition et aux agressions sexuelles.
Active coercion
If we may have trouble conceiving that women can do that kinds of things to other women, medieval were perfectly aware of the essential role they were able to play-and that they actually played-inThe coercion of their fellow men.On the other hand, knowing if this coercive aspect of sex was a phenomenon to condemn or was simply part of life was subject to controversy.
Les guides sur «l'amour courtois» (la séduction), surpeuplant les écrits littéraires médiévaux à la suite du poète romain Ovide, détaillent volontiers l'importance d'une intermédiaire ou d'une entremetteuse, une femme dont l'aide est vitale pour permettre la séduction, le viol, ou les deux. Malgré les objections de théologiens et autres autorités morales comme Christine de Pizan, brillante poétesse et écrivaine du XIVe siècle, ce genre de guide de séduction et de viol aura joué un rôle aussi central que choquant dans la vie culturelle et l'éducation médiévales.
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Readers and listeners, young and old, boys in classrooms or universities, but also public of court listening to songs and poems, learned how a man could, especially with the help of a woman, get the one hewanted - and if necessary by force.For example, a recurring character in Iberian literature, the "convent sections", assisted the monks and the priests in their "conquests".
Sometimes families hired women, duègnes, to protect their daughters, but they were easily corruptible and, by means of finances, became intermediaries facilitating seduction, kidnapping or rape - not all that families wanted to preventcalling on them.
Dijon pimps
Examples are found in the judicial archives of the way in which women could take advantage of the exploitation of their fellow men.Thus, in 1463, the municipal authorities of Dijon record testimonies on the activities of a woman, Symonne, wife of Jean Rouhet.Jacotte, an orphan going over her 17th birthday, explains to the authorities the circumstances of her rape.Her family had sent her to Dijon to find work, and she had found it in a hospital.
One morning, leaving for a while the house-god to get bread for a little patient, she had met on rue Symonne, who had asked her if, by chance, she did not want a better situation.Jacotte had answered in the affirmative and Symonne had told her about a good place where she was going to be better provided, housed safe with other women, and where she would be given a new dress and a hat.Except it was a trap.Jacotte was struck and raped by Jean Jeannin, a married and aged valet of around 34, who had paid Symonne so that she attracts Jacotte far from the hospital.
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In an even more sinister story taking place ten years later, Perrenotte, another 13 -year -old orphan employed as a servant with a rich family from Dijon, was attracted to the house of a priest by the promise ofa better job.One of the servants of the man of the church, a widow named Alison, was going to make him look at a better pay and a new dress.
Perrenotte testified that he had been retained in the priest's house for seven weeks, sometimes sharing her diaper with Alison, and declared that she had been raped several times by the priest.The religious, benefiting from his position of strength and his protected status of ecclesiastics, was able to escape justice and let the two women compete in court.Under torture, Alison ends up admitting.
À Dijon, capitale du duché de Bourgogne, le rôle de femmes comme Alison et Symonne était central pour permettre aux hommes d'avoir des relations sexuelles extraconjugales. Dans son ouvrage sur l'histoire de la prostitution dans la France de la fin du Moyen Âge, Jacques Rossiaud souligne l'importance des femmes comme Symonne pour faciliter la prostitution non autorisée.
For example, he explains that on the eighty-three private and illegal brothels he was able to find in Dijon, seventy-five were held by women.Often, it was very small shops, with a mackerel hosting one or two women or young girls whose services she sold.Not being approved prostitutes in the municipal closed houses, which offered them at least protection in principle, women and young girls working in these clandestine establishments were much more vulnerable to violence and exploitation, as well as to prosecution forAdultery or fornication.
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For their action in these seductions, assaults and rapes, certain women, including Symonne and Alison, were continued and punished.Whatever what Maxwell's lawyer derives from the story of Adam and Eve, in some cases of sexual violence involving women, we find that only the provider is punished - in many others, it is theman, and sometimes they are both.The fact remains that most often, the outcome of the surveys is completely unknown to us.
Regarding Symonne and Alison, we nevertheless know that they were both condemned for pimping and subject to public punishment.That they were whipped, put in the pillory and forced to wear a straw hat illustrating the supply and sale of a woman to a man.And here we are in one of the many moments in the life of a historian where we could regret the absence of pictorial representations of such punishment, or mediocre conservation of straw since the Middle Ages.In the current state of our knowledge, we are left to our imagination.After their humiliation and public abuse, the two women were condemned to leave the city.
On the rapist side, Jean Jeannin was also arrested and tortured, but, unlike Symonne, he denied having committed this crime.And as often with medieval judicial archives, we do not know its final fate.As for the priest assisted by Alison, he asserted his ecclesiastical privilege and his right to be judged only by a religious court.Other men who have failed to flee, or to cover themselves by any exemption or a legal privilege, were, like Symonne and Alison, beaten and ostracized or even, in certain cases, condemned to death.
Antoinette de Maignelais, teenage supplier
But for fear that sternheim we think we are going in his sense (that the Eve are always punished for the crimes of the Adam), let us specify that the proceedings and the punishments recorded against men for sexual assault, kidnapping or seduction are much moremany for accomplices women.That being said, we can also find many cases of men pardoned or generally escaping any sanction, especially in the rich and powerful.
These few examples, taken from the rich judicial archives of Dijon, are closely linked to the history of urban poverty of the end of the Middle Ages.The upheavals due to the plague, famine and war were going to attract to the city always more young women looking for a job, and the clandestine sexual work was an essential, although dangerous expedient, of the fight for survival.But similar trends are also emerging within the medieval elite.It is said that in the last years of King Charles VII, before his death in 1461, his last favorite, Antoinette de Maignelais, would have sought to keep her favors by providing her with noble adolescent girls.
As a columnist writes, who was certainly not fond of King Charles, Antoinette always managed so that the king was accompanied by at least three or four extremely beautiful young women, adorned with the most beautiful attires at the kingdom's expense.The columnist also tells how noble families, aware of the risks for the virtue of their daughters, but also the gains for their lines, agreed to send them to the royal court.He describes a young and beautiful provincial woman in tears at the time of his departure from the paternal house, and added that she was received with enthusiasm by the king and his mistress.
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Nothing surprising that men authors of sexual crimes in medieval Europe have often managed to go under the radar or, at least, to escape the proceedings, but it is not because the Middle Ages were a backward timeor barbaric.Like today, many sexual predators had no account to be rendered because power offers privileges.And as today, some medieval women accomplices of such a sexual predation, or who were directly authors, were able to take advantage of gender standards to escape punishment, while even their misdeeds will have been precisely facilitated, and theirattracted victims, because they were women.
No right pass
Most of the women involved in the trade of other women remain pruning, and very little of their victims accept the risk of denunciation.Which brings us straight to Maxwell's defense by Sternheim: because she is a woman, she would only be a scapegoat, and the only accusing finger should be turned to Epstein, as well as to her victims becauseThey unfairly accuse Maxwell.
How can a contemporary jury apprehend the charges against Maxwell?Will the jurors be able to imagine that a woman like her, with her way of being and behaving, is capable of sexual coercion and assault?It seems that the question of the responsibility of accomplices of sexual violence is still difficult to approach us, and that even if we are well aware that all the famous serial predators who fell with #MeToo could not have act in this way withoutSuch accomplices - with people, men or women, who brought them their victims, closed doors or their eyes.
Whether today or in medieval times, our judicial system and our fellow men seem just as ready to leave power and gender standards interfere with justice.But if it is essential not to blame the victims, as our systems genius of "justice" allow us too often, it is just as crucial not to make the genre a joker allowing the authors and accomplices of sexual violence of'escape their responsibilities.Because if the story is old, it still does not belong to the past.
