This is a time of year when those in the media like to look back over the previous 12 months and come to conclusions about what and who is worthy of remembrance.
One of these media organisations that does so is Time magazine. Time has been running its Person of the Year featuring a person, group, idea, or object that “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year”.
This year Time’s Person of the Year for the second time (the first being in 2016. Ed.) is none other than the waste of food and oxygen variously described as the disgraced president-elect of the United States, the disgraced former 45th president, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat, one Donald John Trump.
The selection of Trump is not without precedent as far as authoritarians are involved: past persons of the year have included both Adolf Hitler (1938), Jospeh Stalin (1939 and 1942, Chiang Kai-shek (1937 – shared with his wife, Soong Mei-ling) and Vladimir ‘the Invader’ Putin (2007).
Move across the Atlantic and there’s a clear contrast. The British periodical The New European, which launched in 2016, also selects a person of the year. However, the difference between The New European’s choice and that of Time could not be more pronounced as the former has chosen rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot, a survivor of repeated rapes and sexual abuse (as opposed to the sexual predator chosen by Time. Ed.).
Revelations about the mass rape of Mme Pelicot came to light as follows: in September 2024, Dominique Pélicot, a 71-year-old from Mazan in south-eastern France, testified in court that he repeatedly drugged his wife, raped her and invited strangers to rape her while she was unconscious. Over a period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Gisèle Pélicot, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped 92 times by 72 men while her husband filmed them. The crimes only came to light in September 2020 when Dominique Pélicot was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket and the ensuing police investigation discovered thousands of images and videos of men raping Gisèle Pélicot on his computing equipment. For three and a half months Gisèle Pélicot, who waived her right to anonymity, has attended court to confront her former husband and her abusers, stating that the story of all these men and their alleged sex crimes must be told in order to end what she called “rape culture”, where sexual violence is so commonplace in society it is almost shrugged off, as well as because Pelicot and the men got away with it for so long.
Mme Pelicot’s actions have raised her to a feminist hero in seeking justice for the harm done to her, whilst over the pond The Felon continues to evade justice, hiding behind the fig-leaf of his election win.
Do you have a person of the year or a preference out out of the above two. If so, leave a comment.
Update 21/12/2024: Prospect magazine has revealed the Felon of the Year has also been named as the Financial Times‘ person the year.