It is finally over, or so they tell us. The gavel has banged down on the wood. The men have been sent away. The cameras are starting to pack up their gear to go find the next tragedy. Gisèle Pelicot, the woman at the center of the most horrifying story to come out of France in years, is looking at the future. She is finally speaking. And frankly, the rest of us should just shut up and listen, though I doubt we will learn a single thing.

For those of you who have been living under a rock—or perhaps just avoiding the news to keep your sanity intact—let us look at the mess we are left with. This was not just a crime. It was a complete collapse of everything we think is safe. A woman was drugged and abused by dozens of men for a decade. The ringleader was her husband. The man who sat across from her at the breakfast table. The man who likely asked her how her day was. It is enough to make you look at your own living room with suspicion.

Now that the convictions are handed down, Ms. Pelicot is talking. She stayed quiet for a long time. That silence was heavy. It was the silence of someone who was trying to understand how her entire life was a lie. But now she is breaking that silence to explain how she survived. She wants peace. It is a nice idea, isn't it? Peace. But you have to wonder what peace looks like when you know what she knows about human nature.

The most terrifying part of this whole circus wasn't the violence itself, though that was bad enough. It was the men. If you looked at the photos of the accused during the trial, you didn't see monsters with horns. You didn't see drooling villains from a comic book. You saw your neighbor. You saw the guy who fixes your car. You saw the man who stands in line behind you at the bakery buying a baguette. That is what Philomena finds so exhausting. We want evil to look ugly. We want it to be obvious. But it isn't. Evil is boring. It looks just like us. It wears a cheap sweater and complains about the weather.

Ms. Pelicot is now trying to turn this horror into something useful. She is publicizing her ordeal. She is showing the world exactly what happened. This is a brave move, but it is also a sad necessity. In our world, if you don't scream your truth from the rooftops, people will forget you in a week. They will twist your story. So she has to stand up and wave the flag of her own trauma just to make sure the history books get it right. It is a job she shouldn't have to do, but the incompetence of the world around her leaves her no choice.

Think about the husband. For fifty years, they were together. Fifty years. It is a lifetime. And the whole time, behind the mask of a boring marriage, he was orchestrating a nightmare. It makes you realize how little we know the people around us. We play our parts in this theater of life. We say the right lines. We smile at parties. But underneath, the floorboards are rotten. The fact that dozens of other men joined in—men who had families, jobs, and reputations—proves that the rot goes deep. It isn't just one bad apple; the whole orchard is diseased.

Now, society will do what it always does. We will clap for Gisèle. We will call her a hero. We will write articles like this one. We will pretend that because the men are in jail, the problem is fixed. But we are lying to ourselves. The problem isn't fixed because the problem is human nature. The problem is that dozens of "normal" men thought this was okay as long as nobody caught them.

Ms. Pelicot says she wants to look to the future. I hope she finds whatever it is she is looking for. She deserves to sit in a garden somewhere and never hear a man's voice again if she chooses. But her story has shattered the illusion for the rest of us. She has pulled back the curtain and showed us that the monsters aren't hiding under the bed. They are sleeping in it. They are driving the bus. They are running the meetings.

So, as she moves forward to find her peace, the rest of us are left here in the wreckage. We can try to rebuild our little belief that the world is a good place, but the cracks are showing. Gisèle Pelicot survived the unthinkable. The question is, can our society survive the truth she has forced us to look at? I wouldn't bet money on it.