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Last week, Diana (39) dropped off her two children at school, after which her husband stabbed her about 33 times. This past Sunday, the TV program De Zevende Dag invited, among others, the perpetrator’s lawyer to debate this latest case of femicide. The narrative used by this lawyer strikingly resembles what medieval perpetrators of femicide described in legal sources from that time. During the discussion, the lawyer painted a picture of his client designed to deliberately evoke sympathy from viewers: he is in shock and wishes he could turn back time. Because he doesn’t speak Dutch, he lived in social isolation. Moreover, he still wears his wedding ring because she was the love of his life. So it seems he didn’t really mean for it to happen—a tragic chain of events, so to speak. We see similar speeches in late medieval letters of pardon for femicide. In these sources, criminals begged the sovereign to pardon their crimes. For example, in 1509, Ghislain Devos, along with his lawyer(s), pleaded for forgiveness for the murder of his wife. One afternoon, he decided to go drinking with friends at an inn in Sluis, about 2 kilometers from his home. He ordered his wife and children to prepare a horse for his return. This wasn’t done, and the house was in total disarray when he got back. This made him so angry that he hit his wife with a bag that, quite coincidentally, contained a knife, fatally wounding her in the throat. Shortly after sleeping off his drunkenness, Ghislain saw his wife lying in a pool of blood. In disbelief—neighbors had to tell him he had done it—he took her in his arms, weeping, and cried out to God, all the Saints, and Mother Mary, after which she died. The letter of pardon also claimed that the couple had always lived in “peace and harmony” until then. This 500-year-old narrative doesn’t sound very credible. Are we really to believe that Ghislain Devos killed his wife because there just happened to be a knife in his bag? No, and likely his contemporaries didn’t believe it either. The goal was to paint a good, honorable, and sympathetic image of the perpetrator—something the lawyer of Diana’s murderer also attempted. Of course, a lawyer must defend their client to the fullest. But this can be done with a sense of reality. If you sit at a table across from a former victim and pull out all the stops to justify and excuse something so indefensible, it shows a lack of empathy for survivors of domestic violence and a certain detachment from reality. What all this reveals is a persistent pattern: for over five centuries, women have been murdered by their (ex-)partners, and time and again, perpetrators and their defenders manage to hijack the narrative. They present themselves as victims of circumstance, as men who “didn’t mean it that way,” as people who “lost the love of their life.” But femicide is not a tragic coincidence. It is the endpoint of a structural problem: a society that still downplays, excuses, or individualizes violence against women. As long as we keep listening to voices that defend the indefensible, we remain complicit in maintaining that system. The victims of femicide can no longer speak. It is high time we shift the narrative. No longer: “What drove him to this act?” but rather: “Who is listening to her story?” and “What could have protected her?” No longer empathy for the perpetrator, but justice for the victim.