When Thibaut Rey was radioed by a colleague to say a man in the cosmetics department was behaving suspiciously, he went to the CCTV room to watch.
It was late summer in Provence, so many women browsing the E. Leclerc hypermarket were bare-legged. Walking among them a man was carefully positioning a cool box beneath their skirts. Out of it poked a mobile phone. The man, in his sixties, was deftly moving from woman to unwitting woman, and Rey, a security guard, was incensed. But Rey implored another to press charges and called the police.
They too did their jobs. This act of diligence by a decent man was pivotal. Yet so too was an act of dereliction by a careless woman in a key British case. Three days later that man, Wayne Couzens, killed Sarah Everard.
One question was always in my head as I attended the Pelicot trial: could this happen here? There are many differences between French and British sexual mores. So what would stop a British Dominique Pelicot setting up shop in, say, a Cotswolds village? He might have more trouble stockpiling prescription knockout drugs on the NHS, but virtual pharmacies make fewer checks.
What about recruiting men online? The infamous Coco. There will be others. And anyone wondering if British men would participate in a degrading mass sexual encounter should consider the queue in the London Airbnb rented by an OnlyFans performer, Lily Phillips, in her quest to have sex with men.
