The Men Who See Everything But Say Nothing

Please note: This article includes graphic language and issues of sexual assault.

You no doubt remember the trial of Dominique Pelicot who, in the winter of 2024, was found guilty of drugging and raping his wife Gisèle. You probably also haven’t forgotten the men Dominique Pelicot invited to his house to do the same; 50 others were convicted alongside him in France’s mass rape trial.

What you may not know is that two of the men invited by Dominique to rape his wife never followed through on the invitation. I covered the Pelicot rape trial in Avignon, along with the appeal in Nîmes, and since then, I’ve thought about those two men a lot. 

Like the others Dominique recruited to abuse his wife, these two spent time in the online chatroom he had set up to solicit accomplices. Like the others, these two reached out to Dominique, and even sent pictures (including of their genitalia) in exchange for nude photos of Gisèle. But, unlike the other men, Jérôme B. and Cyril F. stopped there.

In Avignon, both of them were called to testify as witnesses, but neither one was charged. After all, they had never driven to the retired couple’s home in Mazan, never acted on Dominique Pelicot’s “offer” to rape his drugged wife, never been caught on tape assaulting her body as she lay comatose.

But they never reported Dominique Pelicot, either.

This week, across the Atlantic, as headlines and social media focus on the seven men accused of gang-raping a Cornell undergraduate, her drunk and drugged body advertised on their 57-member fraternity group chat, I am reminded once again that in Ithaca, N.Y., as in Mazan, France, it’s the men who stay silent keep the machinery running. 

In cases like these, there are the faces we see — the men standing trial, the mug shots splattered across media feeds — and there are the faces we don’t. Those of the people who stood idly by, the ones who maybe had a hunch something was going wrong, but failed to step in; the ones who peeked into the chatroom and then quietly backed away.

The men we see, the ones we hear about, are the trees that prevent us from seeing the forest. It’s the silent, invisible ones who interest me.

Let me give you a single example. In March 2026, after initial reporting by the investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh, CNN exposed a global “rape academy” within a porn site and a Telegram group chat called “Zzz.” The group’s members traded advice on how to drug and assault their partners. They also swapped tips on getting away with it. Beer and Ströh’s reporting uncovered many such groups, one of which had over 70,000 members.

I have no doubt that many, many, many men saw what was going on and backed away, perhaps thinking things were going too far. I’m sure many men chose not to become active participants. But of those men, how many stopped to think that reporting what they’d seen might be the right thing to do? What stopped them? 

The Pelicot case tells a similar story. In the end, 51 men were put on trial, though authorities suspected at least a dozen more men of raping Gisèle. But even then, those monstrous numbers undoubtedly leave out the thousands who, like voyeurs, silently scrolled past the online chatroom offering up Dominique Pelicot’s “sleeping wife” — a chatroom that stayed online for nearly a decade. It would take a security guard catching Dominique snapping photos up women’s skirts in a supermarket for authorities to finally start putting together the pieces of Gisèle's ordeal.

So now, with another already notorious and recently reopened case overtaking the news cycle, let’s do the math on Cornell.

Seven men have been named by the plaintiff, Jane Doe, who was 20 at the time, of the alleged assault. She says she was sexually assaulted on October 20, 2024, at a Cornell fraternity, while drunk and drugged. According to the suit she filed, at 1:45 a.m., Jane Doe engaged in sexual activity with a man she considered her friend and his fraternity brother in Cornell’s Chi Phi house (whether it was initially consensual remains unclear). At some point, a message went out to the fraternity’s 57-member Snapchat group: There was “free pussy” upstairs.

“You can walk in and whip it out,” one member wrote on the group chat. “I fucking love Chi Phi,” added another. Later in the night, a member wrote to ask: “Shop still open?” To his brother’s “Yeah 👿,” he replied: “LFG [let’s fucking go].”

Jane Doe accused five more men of joining the first two and allegedly assaulting her in an ordeal that she says lasted seven hours. While these are, of course, allegations, and it will take work to uncover what happened, here’s one thing we do know: Messages sent that night suggest that at least some of the fraternity brothers, whether they were in the room or not, were certainly in the know.

In other words, besides the seven men Jane Doe says abused her in that bedroom, there were as many as 50 other men whose phones lit up with an advertisement for a woman’s body, then lit up again, and again. Yet as far as we know, of those who saw the messages, none stepped in to check in on their classmate, to offer her assistance, to stop their so-called “brothers,” or to raise the alarm. One had the presence of mind to take a picture of the Snapchat conversation before it could disappear — not a screenshot, mind you: Since Snapchat messages are supposed to be secret, the rest of the group would have been notified had he taken one. 

Many of us may derive a certain comfort from the naming, shaming, and trying of a finite set of accused perpetrators. When the media refers to them as “the Cornell Seven” or “the Fordingbridge Three” (a trio of teens who, in 2024, raped a 14- and 15-year old in England), these cardinal numbers make the alleged crime seem more clear-cut, presenting a ready-made cast of characters in a contained crime. This exercise in arithmetic lets us view rape as an aberration, committed by a finite number of deviants.

But by now it’s clear that the real headcount can’t be contained in any courtroom. Rape culture (and the passive silence that props it up), spills into all the spaces — the chatrooms, the text chats, the frat houses, the boardrooms, the private island retreats — even if everyone present isn’t actually getting in on the act. 

The one thing we can be sure of: Men only shout “free pussy” into a room where they know they won’t be shamed. They shout it because they have come to expect business as usual: that passive bystanders will turn a blind eye, that facilitators, assistants, friends of friends will simply say, “well, this is the way it is” or worse, “I don’t like it, but it’s not my problem.”

But these bystanders are part of the audience that defines the performance. At Cornell, one fraternity brother, told about what was happening upstairs, simply congratulated his friends: “This is crazy work.” It appears that he himself never joined in, and he is not named in the lawsuit.

In France’s mass rape trial, the fact that Jérôme B. and Cyril F. didn’t follow through on Dominique Pelicot’s invitation to actually rape Gisèle was treated as a kind of redemption. It should not be. Sophie Duroy, a scholar at England’s Essex Law School who grew up a few miles from where Gisèle was raped, wrote last month in the Journal of Feminist Legal Studies: “The silence of those who do not rape yet fail to intervene or report is not innocence but connivance.”

A man who reads about a classmate being passed around in an upstairs bedroom and keeps scrolling has very much picked a side — a side that, in 2025, led some 35% of female undergraduates at Cornell to report experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact in a campus poll. That same survey reported that a fifth of incidents against undergraduate women happened in fraternity houses.

The men who see everything but say nothing are at least part of the explanation for those numbers.