France’s horrifying rape trial has a feminist hero

Avignon, France: Each morning, when Gisele 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 “Gisele” instead of Madame Pelicot as is customary, 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 1½ 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.

Gisele Pelicot arrives at the Avignon courthouse, in Avignon, southern France, for one of many hearings.Credit: AP

“I admire this woman,” she added. “She is exceptional.”

In the three weeks since the rape trial against her former husband and 50 other defendants began, Gisele Pelicot 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.

Several thousand people gather to stage a demonstration in support of Gisele Pelicot and all victims of rape on the Place de la Republique in Paris on September 14.Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images

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 Helene Devynck, a journalist and author, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde: “It is not just you, Gisele, 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.”

Gisele 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 and inviting 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 Gisele.

More than a dozen of the men have pleaded guilty. Most of the rest do not dispute that they had sex with her, but they say 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.

Gisele Pelicot, left, and her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, right, during his rape trial, at the Avignon courthouse, in Avignon, southern France.Credit: AP

Before her husband’s arrest, Gisele, 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.

This photograph shows a mural created by Maca_dessine depicting Gisele Pelicot and a sentence reading “So that shame changes sides” in Gentilly, south of Paris.Credit: AFP

Her head held high, she sweeps past the defendants who fill the room’s many benches. They range in age from 26 to 74. They are thin, fat, bearded, smooth-faced. Many are married and have children. They work as truck drivers, construction workers, tradesmen, salesmen. There is a journalist, a nurse, a prison guard and a tech specialist among them.

By opening the doors to the public, Gisele 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 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. Last week, many began to cross-examine Gisele and to reveal their strategies. Some tried to raise doubt about her 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 Gisele’s face, her eyes open.

She 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 she looked welcoming in these photos, she 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, Gisele’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.

People gather in Paris in support of Gisele Pelicot who was allegedly drugged by her ex-husband and raped by dozens of men while unconscious.Credit: AP

Many women say Gisele 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. “Can you imagine if she were a young woman who had consumed alcohol?”

The same lawyers who showed the photographs 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.

The accused are scheduled to appear at the hearings in groups of six or seven every week. As they do, Gisele Pelicot will be forced to continue walking into the courthouse and sitting among them.

Oceane Guichardon, 20, a student, was waiting to applaud her at the court recently. “We came to support her – it’s feminine solidarity, really,” she said. “Gisele is brave. Every time we see her leave the courthouse, her head is high.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.