With guilty verdicts, victim’s rape ordeal in France becomes a message of hope

After it was over, she stepped into a swarm of French and international reporters and hundreds of supporters eagerly awaiting her, who held up signs of appreciation and cheered when she emerged. There were so many of them that they stopped traffic on the road outside the courthouse.

“Justice for Gisele, justice for all,” one sign read. Another proclaimed, “All the women on Earth support you. Thank you Gisele”.

As she has throughout the trial, Pelicot retained her trademark poise, giving a simple statement about her decision to allow the world to witness the painful details of her rapes, rather than keep them private as is allowed by French law. Her goal was to force discussions of rape, including those facilitated through the use of drugs.

“I wanted, by opening the doors of this trial on September 2, that society would take up the debates that have been launched,” she said Thursday. “I never regretted my decision.”

She said she had drawn strength from the backing she had received from people around the world, adding that the support had allowed her to return to the courthouse “over long days of this trial” – even when videos of some of the rapes were shown in court at her insistence.

Although all the men were convicted, many feminist activists who have lined up daily to watch the proceedings in an overflow room were upset by the sentences. That was because in all cases, except for Dominique Pelicot’s, the sentences were lower than the prosecutor had recommended. Six of the convicted men were freed, having already served most or all of their time in jail.

“It means you can rape a woman who was drugged in her own home and walk out free,” said Pascale Plattard, a member of the feminist collective the Amazons of Avignon, who was perched on a fence in front of the courthouse. “I am very angry.”

Lorraine Questiaux, a lawyer whose Paris practice focuses on violence against women, called the sentences “relatively lenient, given the gravity of the acts”.

Many of the lawyers of the accused said they were satisfied with the sentences, though it was unclear if some would appeal.

The trial has rattled the country because of its many sordid elements.

A grandmother and retired manager at a big public company, Pelicot had built what she and her children thought was a happy life with her husband.

But that gauzy vision was torn apart one day in late 2020, when the police arrested him and told her of the abuse she had been suffering. Only then did she understand why she was losing hair and weight, and suffering repeated memory losses so severe that she thought she had Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour.

Dominique Pelicot quickly admitted to crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink for years to rape her when she was nearly comatose. Then, he invited dozens of men he met online to join him, charging them nothing but regularly filming the encounters. (Gisele Pelicot has since divorced him.)

The case drew so much attention in part because of the sheer numbers of men who had participated and because of their varied and ordinary profiles. The French news media called them “Monsieur Tout-le-monde” – “Mr Every Man” – and experts said they destroyed the myth of the “monster rapist,” replacing it with the image of the man next door. Aged 26 to 74, they appeared to be a cross-section of middle- and working-class men – tradesmen, firefighters, truck drivers, a journalist, a nurse.

About 15 of the defendants pleaded guilty. The rest admitted that they had had sex with Pelicot but argued that they had never intended to rape her. Instead, most said that they had been lured by Dominique Pelicot to join the couple for a consensual threesome and had been told that Gisele Pelicot was pretending to sleep or had taken sleeping pills herself. Most painted Dominique Pelicot as a master manipulator; some argued that he had drugged them as well, a charge he denied.

Many offered stunning explanations to the court, qualifying their acts as “involuntary rape,” “nonconsenting rape,” “accidental rape” or “rape by body but not mind”.

But the videos – which Gisele Pelicot insisted be played in court as evidence and as a wake-up call to the country – showed the men penetrating her non-responsive body.

Earlier this week, the accused were given a last chance to offer any final words in their defence. Few took it.

Many of those who had been free on bail for the trial arrived at the courtroom Thursday morning carrying small bags with their belongings in preparation for what the day might hold. Shortly after the verdict, they were whisked away by police and taken directly to prison. Their wives, mothers and daughters who had watched the verdict in an overflow room wept.

As in other important moments during the trial, on Thursday, Pelicot was flanked by her and Dominique Pelicot’s three children. The trial, and the horrific crimes it documented, had shattered not just her life and identity but theirs as well.

The children had considered their father a loving pillar of the family who had hosted fabulous birthday parties and was there for them, whether it was attending sports events together or making sure his daughter got home from parties safely. The revelation of his crimes and double life destroyed their perceptions of their childhoods.

The couple’s eldest son, David Pelicot, told the court recently that he feared his own son, who remains in psychological treatment, had also been abused by Dominique Pelicot – a charge Dominique denied. The couple’s second son, Florian Pelicot, said he had lost his marriage because of the tragedy.

And the couple’s daughter, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, is convinced she was also drugged and sexually abused by her father since the police recovered deleted photos of her from his electronics that showed her in underwear she did not recognise, asleep with the lights on.

She was briefly hospitalised in a psychiatric ward soon after the police took her father into custody and checked herself back into a clinic during the trial, she said on Instagram, “to recover all my energy, to be able to sleep again”.

Her memoir about the horrific discovery has been translated into English and will be released soon: I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.

Dominique Pelicot was convicted Thursday of taking and publishing sexual photos of her as well as of his two daughters-in-law. He had repeatedly denied abusing his daughter or grandchildren.

As she left the courtroom, Gisèle Pelicot thanked her children, their partners and her grandchildren, including one grandson standing nearby, “because they are the future, and it’s also for them that I waged this battle”.

Then, she shared some thoughts for the crowds.

“I think of the victims, unrecognised, whose stories often remain hidden,” she said. “I want you to know that we share the same struggle.”

She added, “I have confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which everyone, women and men, can live in harmony, with respect and mutual understanding”.

With that, she was escorted by a knot of police officers through the throngs of reporters and into the giant cheering mass of her supporters.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic

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