Culpabilisation de la victime

Victim blaming is a recurring pressure in the novel’s account of the allegation against Alexandre Farel: instead of focusing only on what happened, those questioning Mila Wizman repeatedly invite scrutiny of what she drank, whether she followed him, whether she appeared interested, and whether she clearly refused. The courtroom makes that shift visible as both a legal tactic and a public argument, while Mila’s fear and distress show what it costs to have her account tested in those terms.

A framework for questioning credibility

An unnamed lawyer’s explanation lays out the social logic surrounding a rape complaint. Even when the physical facts can be established, the lawyer warns, attention moves to consent and to the complainant’s life: whether she drank, dined or danced with the accused, or met him online. Such details can be made to support the insinuation that she brought the assault on herself. The passage presents this not as an isolated question but as a predictable adversarial process, in which a complainant’s ordinary conduct is recast as evidence against her.

The novel also places this framework beside the police procedure that follows Mila’s complaint. When Alexandre is told that a complaint has led to questioning, medical examinations, and forensic tests, he initially denies knowing what the police are talking about. In his account of the previous night, he describes going to a party with Mila, smoking cannabis with her, and engaging in sexual contact, but says that they did not have intercourse. The subsequent investigation and the trial therefore concern not only whether sex occurred, but how the participants’ actions and perceptions will be interpreted. The contested question of consent creates room for conduct before and during the encounter to be used to assess Mila’s credibility.

The defense turns conduct into implication

At trial, the defense lawyer tells Mila that Alexandre perceives things differently and asks whether alcohol can lead someone to behave unusually. He then asks why she agreed to follow Alexandre into the street and then into the room where the alleged assault occurred. When Mila says she does not know, the questioning presses the implication that following him might have flattered her or signaled interest. The sequence converts movement through a series of settings into an argument about what Alexandre could reasonably have thought, even as Mila struggles to explain her actions.

The same logic recurs in questions about the encounter itself. The defense suggests that Mila accepted Alexandre’s kiss; she answers that he did not give her a choice. Asked whether she could have left because the door was not locked, she says she did not know that and was afraid because of a knife he had mentioned. The lawyer then challenges the knife’s significance by asking whether she ever saw it. The questioning treats the possible availability of an exit, and the absence of a weapon she can confirm seeing, as reasons to doubt her fear. Mila’s account, by contrast, makes that fear central to how she experienced the situation.

The questions continue by treating her actions as evidence of consent. When the defense points to her having removed her jeans, Mila says she was afraid and had been forced. Asked whether she screamed, she cannot remember clearly and says that at one point Alexandre put his hand over her mouth. The defense contrasts her description of a violent gesture with Alexandre’s description of an erotic one. In this exchange, the same act is made to carry opposing meanings; the complainant must not only recount what she says happened but answer for why her behavior should not be read as willingness.

Public defense and the phrase “gray area”

Jean Farel carries the argument beyond the courtroom’s individual questions. In his speech to the jurors, he says that Alexandre had been drinking and using drugs, portrays the sexual encounter as something his son regarded as casual, and describes the climate around allegations as a collective hysteria and a hunt for men. He argues that an adult woman who followed a young man into a room at night knew what she was doing, and speculates that Mila may have regretted the encounter afterward or felt ashamed. His argument thus treats her decision to accompany Alexandre as a basis for assigning responsibility to her, while framing Alexandre as a target of social denunciation.

Jean’s appeal to a “gray area” crystallizes this reasoning: he says Alexandre thought Mila wanted the encounter because she had not expressed a categorical refusal. That claim shifts the burden from establishing her consent to explaining why she did not say a particular word. It also sits uneasily beside the facts presented in court: Mila has described being afraid and unable to leave as she understood the situation, while the investigation established that sexual intercourse took place and that experts disagreed about whether it was coercive. The novel keeps the difference between those propositions in view rather than treating the existence of sex as proof of consent.

The speech has an immediate consequence in the courtroom. Adam Wizman rushes at Jean in anger, and Mila leaves the room in tears; Claire Farel hides her face in her hands. Adam rebukes Jean for reducing the alleged rape to a brief episode and for repeatedly pressuring the family. The scene makes public rhetoric part of the harm of the trial: discussion of the complainant’s responsibility does not remain an abstract debate but provokes visible distress and confrontation among the families.

Countering blame through testimony

The prosecution names a different burden. It describes Mila as having been ashamed, afraid she would not be believed, and fearful of telling what she could barely articulate. It places those fears alongside the repeated police and judicial interviews, medical examinations, and appearance before strangers at the assize court. The account explains why a complainant’s hesitation or difficulty speaking cannot simply be treated as evidence against her: the process itself exposes her to scrutiny and to the possibility of sarcasm that she must have brought the assault on herself.

The prosecutor also separates the established occurrence of sexual intercourse from the disputed question of how it happened. The central difficulty, the argument runs, is not whether there was sex on the night of January 11–12, 2016, but how Alexandre could have committed the crime. The prosecutor presents him as having both a vulnerable, attentive side and a capacity for contempt, violence, possessiveness, and jealousy, and calls the alleged assault opportunistic. This framing resists the idea that a favorable image of the accused, or uncertainty about his motive, settles the question of Mila’s consent.

Narrative significance

Across the lawyer’s warning, the defense’s cross-examination, Jean’s speech, and the prosecutor’s response, victim blaming appears as a struggle over what counts as relevant evidence. Mila’s drinking, her decision to follow Alexandre, the absence of a clearly stated refusal, and her difficulty recalling events are repeatedly made to carry moral weight. The novel sets those interpretations against her expressed fear and distress, and against the investigation’s distinction between proof of intercourse and disagreement over its coercive nature.

The courtroom scenes do not erase uncertainty by turning one side’s interpretation into a simple explanation. Instead, they show how an alleged victim can be made to defend her choices even while describing harm, and how the demand for a perfectly legible refusal can displace attention from the accused’s actions. The consequence is not merely a clash of arguments: the scrutiny deepens Mila’s exposure before the court, while the competing claims about her responsibility fracture the families gathered there.