Hazel Behan and Gisèle Pelicot are not victims, but survivors setting the world on fire with their truth

It has been 20 years but, when she closes her eyes at night, Hazel Behan can still see his. On that terrible night, June 16th, 2004, that’s all there was. Just the darkness and bright blue eyes that “bored into her skull”. The man who broke into her flat in Portugal’s Algarve woke her up by saying her name. She thought it was her boyfriend come to apologise after a row, until she saw the black tights, the black leather mask and the long machete.
Then he had his knee in her back and pulled her up off the bed by her hair. And then, in an ordeal that lasted hours, he raped her, whipped her and dragged her around by the hair, filming it on a camera set up on top of the TV. The attack, which may be too inconsequential a word to describe what happened to her, left her hospitalised for four days.
“Spend hours in a room with somebody who is absolutely torturing you, and all you can see is their eyes? By god you’d better believe I’ll remember them,” she said in a television interview this week. When she saw what she believed to be those eyes again, in a photograph accompanying a 2020 report about Christian Brückner’s conviction for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in Portugal in 2005, Behan’s reaction was instant and visceral. She retched.
Earlier this year, she waived her anonymity and travelled to Germany to give evidence in the criminal trial of Brückner, the man she believed was her rapist. Last week, he was acquitted of three counts of aggravated rape and two of indecent assault against a number of girls and women, including the aggravated rape of Behan, in Portugal between December 2000 and June 2017, because the evidence was “not enough for a conviction”. He is due for release from the sentence he is serving for the rape of the 72-year-old next year. He remains the chief suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann.
Behan, who has no release date from the memories that haunt her, was described by the judge as a “credible” witness. She would be unlikely to use such positive terms to describe her experience in court. “Tense”, “testy” and “excruciating” is how the media put it. Prosecutor Ute Lindemann accused the court of “putting the witnesses on trial”. Judge Uta Engemann’s questions “prompted regular gasps from the public gallery”, wrote Derek Scally in The Irish Times.
Brückner’s defence team asked that Behan be positioned in a way that forced her to be at right angles with him. She was questioned about her sex life. She told the court how she had received a “very unusual” email from the prosecutor asking for the case file. At one point, the judge asked her why the ex-boyfriend, Jason Coates, said she was making it all up – as though the word of a man who wasn’t there then, isn’t here now, and who told her he would “spend the rest of his life talking bad about” her – might carry more weight than hers. On another occasion, a second defence lawyer demanded to know: “Why are you telling the story in an open court?”
We’ve heard versions of all of this. Behan joins a long line of Irish women who were victims of sexual violence, who bucked the odds once by reporting it, and again by seeing their case eventually go to court. And then when they got there, they were made to feel that they were the ones on trial. Or that they had brought this on themselves. Or even – the most invidious kind of silencing that happens to women, the kind masquerading as benign – that they had a responsibility not to cause themselves or anyone else distress by talking about it. Or that they should feel some shame.
Remember 1978, and then minister for justice Gerry Collins’s response to calls for tougher sentences for rape: “But of course, so many girls are asking for it, you know.”
Remember 1998, and the victims of Derry O’Rourke who were advised by the judge not to read their statements on the grounds that “they would only upset themselves”. They read them anyway.
Remember 2018, and the 17-year-old complainant whose underwear was held up in court by a barrister as evidence that she was “open to meeting someone”. The defendant in that case was acquitted in just 90 minutes.
Lately, though, a handful of heroic women have begun pushing back, refusing to carry a shame that was never theirs.
Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman drugged and raped by her then-husband, Dominique Pelicot, and allegedly dozens of other men, walks into court every day of the trial, her head held high, her face unreadable behind dark sunglasses, but the message is clear. I am here. I will not be silenced. I will not spare you the discomfort of my pain.
On Thursday, when Dominique Pelicot’s disturbing home movies were finally shown in court, the judge said people “of a sensitive disposition” could leave. Her legal team commended the many who had decided to stay and “look the rape straight in the eye”.
Looking rape straight in the eye is what more of us need to do if these rape myths are ever to be dispelled. Behan chose to waive her anonymity because she had been helped by the Rape Crisis Centre and wanted to encourage other women to seek help. But there was another reason too. Her message on social media last year is worth repeating here, not just for the benefit of other victims, but for anyone else who might need a reminder. “You are not a victim for sharing your story. You are a survivor setting the world on fire with your truth.”
– The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre 24-hour free helpline can be contacted at 1800 77 8888