Paris is waging war on a depraved sex club accused by neighbours and officials of glorifying gang rape.
Police had managed to bring a halt to the orgies in the city’s 15th arrondissement, which saw groups of men pay £60 to have sex with one woman in an underground ‘headquarters’ beneath luxury apartments.
But organisers have merely moved their ‘events’ around the city – including a recent ‘sex party’ that involved a staged abduction of a woman who was stripped, handcuffed and taken to a waiting group of men for sex.
The parties, boasting ‘tailor-made libertine events’ in which crowds of men each pay 80 euros (£60) to have group sex with a woman, are legal. But French police banned the subterranean premises, a former car park, from hosting the public last month after refusing a request for an accessibility exemption.
The group vowed to ‘continue … but differently’ in a pledge to reportedly thousands of followers, citing a ‘small, imposed transformation’.
‘This doesn’t mean our business is stopping – far from it,’ they said. ‘We’ll continue to organise and welcome you but differently.’
A programme for last Friday, in the interim, featured a ‘consensual and long-considered and thought-out’ kidnapping of a woman in the centre of Paris, Le Parisien reports.
The woman, nicknamed ‘Little Doll’, was to be wilfully ‘abducted’ by two men, hooded, handcuffed and undressed before being met by three paying men in a ‘damp Parisian cellar’. A dozen male participants would then have sex with her until morning, the outlet said.
Another woman was to be met by four men in a ‘huge Parisian parking lot’. ‘She’ll have to be quick and discreet’, ‘Z’, the organiser said. Today, a woman will be involved in an event at a Parisian cinema, Le Parisien reports.
Banished from their venue, organisers are now said to be reinventing the meet ups in parking lots, cinemas and forests until, they expect, they are able to reopen in November.
‘We survived Covid, we will get through this stage too,’ a notice online said.
Authorities and neighbours alike are not pleased by the prospect. A municipal source told Le Parisien the events were ‘at the intersection of moral and criminal matters’, accusing the organiser of ‘exploiting the administrative loopholes’.
A mother living above the basement said in December, before the closure, that they had only had ‘a few days of respite’ at the end of November. She viewed the events as ‘a degrading practice for women’.
Neighbours share concerns the parties contribute to a damaging ‘gang rape culture’, an unsettling reflection brought into focus by France’s #MeToo movement and the public trial of Dominique Pelicot in Avignon last year.
They say events are ‘reminiscent of the [Pelicot] Mazan rape case’, and the mayor warns ‘even if there is consent, this practice glorifies rape’.
‘After the Mazan trial, we can’t have any more of this sort of thing,’ mayor Philippe Goujon said in reference to the mass rape trial of Dominique Pelicot, who invited dozens of men to his house to rape his wife, Gisele, while she was asleep.
The Paris organisers insist all is legal and consenting.
The organiser told Le Parisien that recent publicity has only boosted interest. By the end of last year, the number of subscribers on Telegram had grown to nearly 2,500 people. By September this year, that figure had grown to 6,000.
Events between several locations number ‘an average’ of 300 to 400 every year, hosting ‘from three to 250 people’.
In February, the mayor had to intervene to halt an extension after the owner said he had received permission to develop the former car park with a ‘sex disco’ to meet rising demand.
For now, the organisers continue to put on spectacles for punters. Events planned in private homes in the interim are said to be interspersed with daring forays into new spheres.
Mayor Goujon said at the end of December: ‘We will monitor everything and see how to issue fines, even if it could be complicated, because this activity is not illegal. But it remains scandalous. Even if there is consent, this practice glorifies rape.’
The borough mayor warned around the time that ‘there may be one in the lot that was abused or coerced’. A concerned resident said a participant ‘caught up in the herd effect could go to far’.
