With 51 guilty verdicts Gisele Pelicot’s rape ordeal becomes message of hope

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,” she added.

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 that they were satisfied with the sentences, though it was unclear if some would appeal.

The trial has rattled France 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 her husband 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 in a nearly comatose state. 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 number of men who had agreed to participate and because of their varied and ordinary profiles. The French news media called them “Monsieur Tout-le-monde” – “Mr Everyman” – and experts said they destroyed the myth of the “monster rapist”, replacing it with the image of the man next door. Aged from 26 to 74, they appeared to be a cross-section of middle- and working-class men – tradesmen, firefighters, truck drivers, a journalist, a nurse.

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About 15 of the defendants had 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 her husband 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”, “non-consenting 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.

Pelicot, however, had her own closing statements for the crowds that awaited her.

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“I think of the victims, unrecognised, whose stories often remain hidden. I want you to know that we share the same struggle,” she said, accompanied by her three children and one grandson.

“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,” Pelicot added. Then, she was whisked off by a crowd of police officers escorting her through the throngs of reporters and those who had come out to support her.