Feminist icon: Gisele Pelicot being congratulated by women outside the Avignon courthouse after the prosecution concluded its case last week. — AFP
EACH morning, when Gisèle Pelicot arrives at the courthouse, dozens of supporters, mainly women, are already there waiting for her. When she leaves each night, they line her path to applaud and cheer.
Many call her “Gisèle,” as if they know her, though few do personally. In her chic image, they see themselves, their mothers, their grandmothers. They come to the court in the southern French city of Avignon and wait for hours to support her.
“I don’t know how she does it – her dignity,” said Catherine Armand, 62, who arrived 1 1/2 hours before proceedings one recent morning to be first in line for a coveted place in a room in the courthouse where the trial was being broadcast.
“I admire this woman,” she added. “She is exceptional.
Since the rape trial against her former husband and 50 other defendants began, Gisèle has become a feminist hero in France. Her face, framed by her red Anna Wintour bob and tan sunglasses, appears on nightly TV newscasts, the front pages of newspapers, graffitied walls and signs held up by protesters around the country
Feminist activists and writers have penned open letters to her that have been published in newspapers and read on the radio.
They laud her courage, her strength, her dignity in confronting her horrifying story. They also praise her rare decision to fling open the doors onto her intimate hell and to insist that the trial be made public, when it could have stayed behind closed doors. Many victims feel she speaks for them.
As Hélène Devynck, a journalist and author, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde: “It is not just you, Gisèle, that they treated like a thing. They tell us all, we are insignificant. Your strength gives us back ours. Thank you for this immense gift.”
Question of consent
Gisèle is at the centre of the most significant rape trial France has seen in decades. Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, has pleaded guilty to putting drugs in her food and drinks for almost a decade. Then he invited men into their bedroom to join him in raping her while she was drugged.
Dominique Pelicot and most of the other men on trial are charged with the aggravated rape of Gisèle.
More than a dozen of the men have pleaded guilty. Most of the rest do not dispute that they had sex with Gisèle, but they say that they did not think it was rape. Instead, they say they were tricked into it, lured by her husband for playful three-way encounters, and told that she was pretending to be asleep or some variation of that.
Pelicot has repeatedly insisted that the others were perfectly aware of what was going on.
The accused are a cross-section of middle- and working-class men – tradesmen, firefighters, truck drivers, a journalist, a nurse. They range in age from 26 to 74. Most live close to Mazan, the town that the Pelicots retired to in 2013. Many are married or in committed relationships. Most have children. The court has heard from their wives, their parents, their friends and children, who mostly have said they are wonderful, kind people.
Gisèle has told the court that the couple met as teenagers and mostly lived together happily for 50 years. She had no idea that he had been drugging her, though she suffered frightening symptoms including extended blackouts. She had visited many doctors, fearing that she had a brain tumor or Alzheimer’s disease.
Before her husband’s arrest, Gisèle, 71, led a quiet life: a retired manager at a big company, a mother of three and a grandmother of seven who had moved with her husband of 50 years to a small town in Provence to enjoy hiking in the hills and swimming in the backyard pool.
Now, she arrives at court each day, dressed impeccably for battle, embodying the phrase her lawyers coined at the beginning of the trial that has become a mantra among her supporters – that shame must change sides, from the victim to the accused.
Her head held high, she sweeps past the defendants who fill the room’s many benches.
By opening the doors to the public, Gisèle has opened up the view not only onto her own collapsing life and the legal process around rape but also onto the regular, mundane, normal profiles of the accused men. And while her children and grandchildren had been ashamed of their name at the beginning of the trial, Gisèle said she believed they were now proud.
Many women credit her with skewering the myth of the monster rapist.
“Friend of the family, stranger at a bar or the street, brother or cousin, friend, colleague, professor, neighbour: All women can sadly find a face that brings them back to a traumatic memory among the multitudes of accused,” said an open letter published in the French daily Libération that was signed by more than 260 artists, writers, politicians, activists and historians – mostly women.
More than 40 defence lawyers fill the room in their black capes. Many have begun to cross-examine Gisèle, revealing their strategies. Some tried to raise doubt about Gisèle’s position that she had been completely unconscious and oblivious. They questioned her credibility and her self-portrayal as someone who enjoyed sex with her husband but was never interested in experimenting with other partners.
At their request, two series of pictures – 27 in total, selected from among the 20,000 photographs and videos that police found on her husband’s electronic devices – were displayed on screens in court while the audience uncomfortably held its breath.
Most showed a woman’s intimate body parts, at times with a protruding sex toy. Some showed Gisèle’s face, her eyes open.
Gisèle remained defiant.
“If this is an attempt to trap me, it’s difficult to bear,” she said. “What is it that you’re looking for here in this room, to make me look guilty?”
One lawyer asked her – causing an uproar in the courtroom – “Would you not have a secret inclination for exhibitionism?”
Another suggested: “These photos are very explicit. Not all women would accept this type of photo, even with a loving husband.”
Men receiving pictures of this kind could have easily been fooled into thinking she wanted to have sex with them, they implied.
Whether or not she looked welcoming in these photos, Gisèle replied, “if a man came to have intercourse with me, he still should have asked for my consent.”
For the first time in the trial, Gisèle’s calm composure cracked.
She raised her voice.“I find it insulting,” she said. “And I understand why rape victims don’t press charges.”
The defence strategies are typical for rape trials, experts say. But now they are being aired before journalists posting updates on social media to an increasingly shocked public.
Reclaiming her dignity
Many women say Gisèle has provided a public – and brave – demonstration about the treatment of rape victims.
“It’s a victim’s obstacle course,” said Audrey Darsonville, a professor of criminal law at the University of Nanterre.
“Their whole life is scrutinised, starting with police officers asking how they were dressed, what is their sexuality, et cetera. All these questions that have nothing to do with the violence that is rape.”
“With everything she represents – a family woman, a grandmother – even she ends up being extremely mistreated by defence lawyers,” Darsonville added, referring to Gisèle . “Can you imagine if she were a young woman who had consumed alcohol?”
The same lawyers who showed the photographs of Gisèle later argued against showing the footage Dominique Pelicot took of the men’s sexual interactions with his drugged wife.
That, one said, would impugn the dignity of the men involved. The prosecutors argued that the edited clips were essential evidence – preciously rare in sexual assault cases. The head judge ruled that the clips would not be viewed publicly given their “indecent and shocking” nature.
Christelle Taraud, a feminist historian in Paris who edited the book Femicides: A World History, said that revealed a double standard.
“It’s only the reputation of men that counts,” Taraud said. “The reversal of responsibility, transforming the victims into guilty and the guilty into victims is a constant in rape trials.”
The trial has inspired soul-searching in France about the relationship between men and women. Some men have begun to speak about “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.”
Taraud said that showed a shift. “We are seeing a difficult, paradoxical, ambiguous awareness – but an awareness nonetheless in part of the French male population,” she noted.
Throughout the hearings, Gisèle has been forced to continue walking into the courthouse and sitting among the accused.
Océane Guichardon, 20, a student, was waiting to applaud Gisèle at the court recently. “We came to support her – it’s feminine solidarity, really,” she said. “Gisèle is brave. Every time we see her leave the courthouse, her head is high.”
Last Tuesday, a day before closing statements were set to begin, she was given the chance to address the court one last time.
She was tired, she said, standing small and poised at the microphone.
“It’s difficult for me to hear that it’s basically banal to have raped Madame Pelicot,” she said, referring to herself. “This is a trial of cowardice.”
The lawyers questioned Gisèle for the last time Tuesday and tested their theories of defence again.
One noted that she had been under her husband’s control, steered and tricked for at least a decade. So how could she not think it was possible that he had tricked and controlled these men?
“He drugged me,” said Gisèle. “He did not manipulate me daily. You think I would have stayed with a man who manipulated me for 50 years?”
Another lawyer said Gisèle seemed to have more sympathy for her ex-husband than the other accused. She posited that Gisèle was still under her husband’s control.
“That’s your analysis,” Gisèle said calmly. She added, “All my life, I have been a very positive person. I will keep with me the best of this man.”
Gisèle said she had been working through her anger and sorrow in sessions with a psychiatrist, as well as long walks, talking to her friends and eating chocolate.
Her ex-husband had always driven her to her medical appointments, searching for the cause of her health issues that, ultimately, he was causing.
Gisèle had described those trips as support. One lawyer pointed out that it was another form of control and manipulation, with an aim to ensure that his secret was not discovered.
“It could be both at the same time,” she responded. “I always took it as an act of kindness. It could also have been a way for him to ensure they didn’t discover the facts.”
Gisèle recognised that her ex-husband was the “orchestra conductor” and that it was not only her family that had been destroyed in the fallout but also the families of the 50 other accused men. But while they might have been manipulated to get them to the house, once the men were in the bedroom and saw her state, they should have left and called the police, she said.
“I feel anger against those who are behind me who not for one moment thought of reporting it,” she said. “Not a single one reported it. It raises some real questions.”
Since she made the rare decision of opening the trial to the public, Gisèle has become a feminist hero. While her children and grandchildren had been ashamed of their name at the beginning of the trial, she said she believed they were now proud.
“Today I am known around the world, whether I like it or not,” she said. “People will remember Madame Pelicot, much less Monsieur Pelicot.”
Dominique Pelicot was also given a final chance Tuesday to address the court and his family, who had all assembled on the other side of the courtroom from where he sat in his prisoner’s box. Many people had been asking why he had done this, he said. He pointed to sexual violence that he said he had suffered or witnessed as a child and teenager.
“It created a fissure that I have kept for life,” he said.
Gisèle had already addressed her ex-husband earlier in the day.
“Some think I have forgiven him,” she said. “I will never forgive him. The things he did to me are unforgivable.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
