Sitting across a courtroom from the husband who drugged and raped her for a decade, along with the 46 complete strangers he invited to join in the attacks, Gisèle Pelicot was the epitome of dignity.
After bravely choosing to waive her right to anonymity, the grandmother has looked each of her rapists in the eye during a gruelling four-month public trial which horrified the world.
The 72-year-old’s remarkable courage in the face of unfathomable abuse and her simple message – that she and other victims of sexual crimes have no reason to feel ashamed – has inspired conversations about rape culture across the globe as she became a symbol of the struggle against sexual violence.
Each day, scores of women queued outside the courtroom in Avignon, France, to applaud Gisele as she entered. She told the trial she wants women who have been raped to know that “it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them”.
On Thursday, she watched as the man she had once trusted the most, her husband of 50 years Dominique Pelicot, was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years.
He recruited complete strangers in an online chatroom to rape her while she was unconscious as five judges returned their verdicts at Avignon’s Palais de Justice. Fifty men stood trial alongside Pelicot – 47 were found guilty of rape.
During weeks of appalling testimony, the court heard how in 2011, after 40 years of seemingly happy marriage, Pelicot – an electrician nearing retirement – decided to begin sedating and raping the mother of his three grown-up children.
Pelicot, 72, who admitted his crimes, testified that he hid tranquilisers in food and drink that he gave his wife, knocking her out so profoundly that he could do what he wanted to her for hours.
Not content with his own sordid attacks, he then invited others he met in a now-closed ‘Coco’ online chatroom to join in the abuse over the next nine years, which he meticulously documented in a sick library of homemade videos. Most assaults were carried out in their own bedroom in Mazan, a small town in Provence where they retired in 2013.
Totally unaware of the violations being carried out while she was unconscious, Gisèle visited doctors as she struggled with blackouts, weight loss and oversleeping – even undergoing neurological tests for Alzheimers or a brain tumour.
The horrifying truth of what was causing her symptoms was only uncovered in 2020, when Pelicot was arrested for surreptitiously filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket. Police then found more 20,000 images and grotesquely explicit videos on his computer in files marked ‘abuse’.
Gisèle said “her world was destroyed” when she was shown pictures of the attacks by investigators. The screams of her daughter Caroline Darian, 45, as she told her children of their father’s abuse will be forever etched in her mind, she said.
Gisèle, supported by Caroline and her other children David and Florian, quickly cleared out the house in Mazan, leaving with just two suitcases and her beloved French bulldog, Lancome.
In court, Caroline described her father as “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”. She revealed her belief he drugged her too after photos were found on his computer of her asleep in bed in underwear that she did not recognise as her own.
