Honte et silence des victimes

Honte et silence des victimes examines how shame can compound the harm of sexual violence: it can make a survivor doubt herself, withdraw from others, and struggle to narrate what happened, while repeated demands for testimony reopen the experience. Through Mila Wizman’s case, the novel sets that silence against the long process of reporting, investigation, and trial, and makes public recognition—not the presumed ease of speaking—the condition on which recovery might begin.

Shame, fear, and the first account

The contrast between Alexandre Farel’s arrest and Mila’s later account shows how differently the accusation first enters the lives of the people involved. When three officers of the Police judiciaire (France) arrive at his father’s apartment, Alexandre is alone, breathless after running on a treadmill. He tells them that they have made a mistake. Later, questioned by his father, he describes a recent encounter with Mila but initially maintains that he does not know what the accusation concerns. The novel places this denial alongside the procedures by which investigators assess a complaint, including repeated interviews and medical examinations; the process makes clear that speaking is not a single, uncomplicated act.

Mila arrives at the police station at 8:32 in the morning with her mother, crying and visibly shocked. She identifies Alexandre as the son of her father’s partner and reports that he assaulted her in a refuse room behind a garbage container. The investigating officer sends her to hospital for examinations, while police search the location and the Farel family’s apartment. They find the yellow underwear Mila had described, and she identifies Alexandre in a lineup. The DNA evidence later confirms sexual intercourse, but experts disagree about whether it was coercive. These procedural findings establish the reality of a sexual encounter without, by themselves, resolving the central question of consent.

Mila’s account of fear becomes especially consequential when Claire Farel reads the confidential police interview record. Léo Farel has obtained it through a police officer he once coached in boxing, and warns Claire and Jean Farel not to disclose that they have seen it. The document is not even available to Mila herself. Claire reads quickly through the description of the evening, then lingers over the account of the assault, where Mila says she was frightened because Alexandre had claimed to have a knife. The scene links shame and silence not only to a survivor’s difficulty in speaking but also to the unequal circulation of her words: an account gathered under official procedure can reach the accused family through a secret channel, while the complainant herself does not possess it.

Repetition and the cost of testimony

At the trial, Mila’s voice reaches the courtroom through a recording. Her sobs and frightened tone disturb the jurors; Alexandre keeps his head down, and Claire, hearing the recording for the first time, struggles to contain her distress. The sound is evidence, but it is also an encounter with the difficulty of turning distress into a record that others can hear and judge. The courtroom’s formal attention cannot erase the pain carried by the voice it plays.

Mila’s lawyer describes the repeated telling demanded by the case: interviews with police, meetings with the investigating judge, medical examinations, and finally testimony before the assize court. She recalls that Mila had been unable to express herself in their earlier meetings, crying and asking what she had done to deserve what happened. The lawyer emphasizes that each retelling confronts Mila with the same pain she had wanted to forget. In the formulation that gives the subject its force, to tell again is to live through the experience again. Testimony may be necessary for recognition and justice, but the procedure extracts a cost from the person required to provide it.

The trial also places Mila under intrusive questioning about her life, especially her sexual history. Her lawyer argues that she has been maligned and made to appear untruthful even though she maintained her account to police and judges over two years. The case is not presented as a simple opposition between speaking and silence: Mila comes to court despite fear and pressure, but her ability to speak does not protect her from humiliation or from the renewed scrutiny of her private life. The legal demand for a coherent account and the public appetite for judgment can turn the survivor’s words into another occasion for exposure.

From self-blame to public recognition

The account of Mila’s aftermath gives shame a visible, continuing presence in her life. She blames herself for not having been able to resist, fears that Alexandre had a knife, and feels dirty. She comes to hate and mistreat her body, and wears loose black clothes to hide it from men’s attention. Later, she tells men she meets that she has uterine cancer, using the lie to keep them at a distance and protect herself. These are not signs that the event has passed; they are strategies for managing fear and unwanted attention after it. The lawyer’s account makes the link explicit between the assault and Mila’s efforts to cover, control, or conceal her body.

The ongoing effects include nightmares and avoidance. Mila has for a long time found it difficult to leave home, and the lawyer describes her as not doing well despite the effort to rebuild her life. The harm is therefore neither confined to the night of the assault nor resolved by filing a complaint. Each stage of the process can revive it, while daily life remains marked by withdrawal and distress. The novel gives this aftermath its own weight rather than treating testimony or trial attendance as proof of recovery.

Against Mila’s self-blame, her lawyer asks the jurors to locate shame with the aggressor. The appeal is not merely a consoling phrase: it answers the survivor’s question about what she did to deserve the assault and counters the degrading implication that she caused it. The lawyer connects that reversal to a wider change in public speech after the Weinstein scandal and the spread of #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc. More women have begun to describe assaults and harassment, challenging the silence that once left such experiences isolated. Yet the speech insists that the change is incomplete: listening and recognition remain necessary, and nothing is secured simply because speaking has become more possible.

Competing stories and the public trial

The proceedings bring competing accounts of shame into the same public space. The prosecution recognizes that Mila fears not being believed and fears the judgment of strangers; it argues that the difficulty is not whether a sexual encounter occurred, but how Alexandre could have crossed the line into violence. The defense, by contrast, stresses the media’s treatment of Alexandre and the damage done to the presumption of innocence. Before the trial, an AFP report identifies him as the son of Jean Farel and reports his placement in police custody on suspicion of rape. The case then becomes part of a public climate transformed by the Weinstein revelations and the online circulation of survivors’ accounts.

The opening of the trial makes that public conflict visible. Journalists and spectators queue outside the Palais de Justice, while women hold signs opposing impunity and supporting #MeToo. Claire, whose interview about the Cologne assaults has collided in public attention with her son’s custody, has declined to sign public statements and remains silent. She experiences that silence as a personal failure and an intimate betrayal. The novel thus distinguishes the survivor’s forced retellings from the silence of someone who fears the consequences of speaking; both are shaped by pressure, but they do not carry the same burden or serve the same position in the case.

The defense describes Alexandre’s online vilification and the loss of educational and professional prospects, arguing that media judgment has damaged his presumption of innocence. The book does not make that public condemnation equivalent to Mila’s trauma. Instead, it shows a trial caught between the survivor’s need for her suffering to be heard and the danger that public narratives will pronounce judgment before the court has done so. The distinction matters: recognition of Mila’s shame and pain need not erase the legal question, while concern about media power cannot substitute for hearing what she says happened.

The verdict does not make these competing experiences disappear. Jean Farel shows no visible reaction when it is read; after speaking briefly with Alexandre, he tells journalists he will make no comment. A woman outside says that justice has not been done and describes the outcome as protecting a white man with a promising future. Jean leaves quickly, wanting to reach Françoise, who no longer remembers his name. The immediate return to that private scene of illness places public judgment beside another form of helplessness, without suggesting that one cancels the other. The novel’s account of shame and silence ends not with a simple resolution but with the persistent question of who is heard, who is believed, and who is left to carry the consequences.