Gilbert Rozon’s fantasy life
Isabelle Hachey dissects the psychology of Gilbert Rozon who apparently still believes that all the women he sexually assaulted desired him. The lines she quotes from his testimonies would be excessive in a romance novel.
Blork 10:53 on 2025-07-09 Permalink
I suppose he might be doing that as some kind of tactic, but if so it’s a losing tactic. More likely he has, as Hachey says, created a sort of parallel reality in his mind in which he’s the good guy in all of this.
It’s an interesting study in human psychology, and I think this kind of thing is more common than we realize. When you see otherwise “normal” people being strong Trump supporters, or so-called salt-of-the-Earth “regular people” getting wrapped up in that stupid trucker convoy thing from a few years ago… it’s not just stupidity or ignorance at play; there’s a kind of parallel reality going on in the minds of (some of) these people that completely blocks out some things and rearranges others. It’s weird but it’s real and it happens a lot.
And it’s not limited to the right either. There is no shortage of “parallel reality” thinking on the left too.
Kate 11:08 on 2025-07-09 Permalink
Not just the good guy – the irresistibly attractive guy who felt obliged to give in and “make love” to all these women who were mesmerized by his charms. It would be hilarious had he not wreaked so much damage (and I’m not going to write “alleged” this time because he’s actually been found guilty of sexual assault before. Wikipedia: “In 1998, Gilbert Rozon received an unconditional discharge from the Quebec Superior Court after pleading and being found guilty of a sexual assault on a 19-year-old woman, because a criminal record would have made it difficult for him to travel internationally for his work.”)
azrhey 13:55 on 2025-07-09 Permalink
this is not, unfortunately, a new thing. Some years ago in Portugal there was a football player accused of raping a woman in a nightclub. and his defense/POV was something like “She just said no and faked resisting because she didn’t want me to think she was easy, deep down she wanted to. Any woman would be lucky to have sex with me, I was the top goal scorer last season!” and, unfortunately a LOT of women ( and anything more than zero, is too many ) seemed to second that with street interviews of women saying “I’d be so lucky if did it to me!” and other “why is she complaining? she made the front pages of the magazines!” I seem to recall there was even “it is impossible that he raped her, she has to have wanted it! He earns millions of euros a year! Have you seen his abs?”
It was discussing, but it speaks to the mindset of that kind of people…they cannot comprehend someone not wanting to have sex with them. It is a strange world…
bob 08:20 on 2025-07-10 Permalink
There’s a failure of imagination in narcissism. There’s this thing in psychology and philosophy called “theory of mind”, which is basically a fundamental recognition that other people are conscious beings with their own thoughts and feelings just like yours, and it starts to develop in humans around the age of three (if all goes well). And it is developmental, not quite learned behaviour. Frequently the process is incomplete, or there are defects in it, and so they literally cannot imagine that other people can think or feel any differently than they themselves do, or have different motivations, points of view, etc. It can be solipsistic. It isn’t denial or an unconscious coping strategy or anything like that, it’s just how they are made.