Like most days at the courthouse in Avignon, France, Gisèle Pelicot arrived to the cheers of a crowd of mostly female supporters on Wednesday.
“I express neither my anger nor my shame,” she told the court, taking the stand again in a trial that has gripped France and sparked deep discussions about sexual violence and the definition of rape in the criminal code. “I am expressing a desire to change society.”
For weeks, she remained silent as one defendant after another spoke before the judges. Some 51 men are on trial, most charged with aggravated rape against Ms. Pelicot, a 71-year-old grandmother who prosecutors say was drugged repeatedly by her husband of 50 years and then served up to the men. She was unconscious during the rapes, and says she has suffered lapses in her memory and hair and weight loss as a result of being repeatedly drugged.
Speaking in a calm and steady voice, Ms. Pelicot told the court on Wednesday that listening to the testimony over the past weeks had made her feel violated again.
But she said she felt she had a higher purpose. “I want victims of rapes to tell themselves, ‘If Ms. Pelicot did it, so can we.’ I don’t want the victims to feel shame, they are the ones who should feel shame,” she said, referring to the defendants.
Dominique Pelicot, her ex-husband, told the court in September that he had begun drugging his wife so he could have sex with her in ways that she would not agree to when lucid. He then met other men on a website and invited them to join him. Mr. Pelicot had been doing this for almost a decade until he was arrested in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of women shopping in a grocery store.
The police seized his electronic devices, including his laptop, before releasing him on bail. They found a trove of photographs and videos of Ms. Pelicot being sexually assaulted. Over the course of their investigation, the police identified more than 80 suspects but were able to track down and charge only 50 of them.
“I have been preparing for this trial for four years. I still don’t understand why, I cannot understand how my life crumbled, how you could betray me like this,” she said in court, addressing her ex-husband without looking at him as he sat to her left in a glass witness box. “How you could let these men into my room.”
Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty along with more than a dozen others. Since the trial began last month, the court has examined the cases of six to seven men each week. The defendants appear as a sample of small-town, middle- and working-class French society: truck drivers, tradesmen, soldiers, a nurse, a journalist and an IT specialist. They range in age from 26 to 74. The majority live close to Mazan, the town in which Ms. Pelicot and her husband had retired in 2013.
So far, 30 men, including Mr. Pelicot, have spoken before the court’s five-judge panel. Most of them have acknowledged going to the house and having intercourse with Ms. Pelicot but denied that it was a rape, saying they had no idea she had been drugged.
They have argued that Mr. Pelicot, described as an imposing and manipulative figure, tricked them by presenting the encounter as a sexual game in which Ms. Pelicot was pretending to be asleep. Some have also said they believe Mr. Pelicot drugged them, too, as they claim to have no memory of the encounter.
“He told me it was a scenario because she was shy; I didn’t doubt him, what with their age and all, it seemed like an agreed-upon scenario,” said Mahdi Daoudi, 36, one of the accused who took the stand last week.
“At the time I didn’t ask myself the right questions, but it seemed impossible that there were drugs involved,” he added.
On Wednesday, Ms. Pelicot said she had listened to wives, mothers and sisters of many of the accused describe them as “exceptional men” who did not seem capable of rape.
“Me, I had the same in my house,” she said of her husband, telling the court that she had considered him the “perfect man.”
The lesson, Ms. Pelicot said, was clear: “A rapist is not someone in a parking lot at night.”
Mr. Pelicot filmed most of the encounters, storing and filing many of them in a digital folder titled “Abuse.” In the videos that have been shown in court, Mr. Pelicot and other men can be seen in a well-lit room performing sex acts on what looks like a lifeless Ms. Pelicot, who is lying on her side with her mouth half-open. The men are careful not to make any noise, and jerk back at her slightest movement. At times, she can be heard loudly snoring.
“For six minutes you are penetrating her; we can hear her snoring and see you place the sheet back over her body when it falls, yet, you are telling me that you did not rape her?” Ms. Pelicot’s lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, asked Cyril Beaubis, one of the accused, in court last week.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he replied.
Ms. Pelicot fought for the case to be open to the public and then to have the videos shown in court as incontrovertible evidence. To look at them, her lawyer argued, was “to look rape straight in the eyes.”
But when the videos play over the court’s three screens, Ms. Pelicot does not watch them. Instead, she sits behind her two lawyers against the wall of the courtroom and looks down. Throughout the trial, she has shown little expression as the sex acts she suffered are described in explicit detail.
“It was difficult for me to make the decision to broadcast these videos, but it was also a way of finding out the truth,” she told the court on Wednesday.
Mr. Pelicot, whom she divorced just as the trial began, has said that he had clearly informed all of the men that he had drugged his wife without her knowledge and that they were invited to have sex with her unconscious body.
“He finds it hard to say but, like I am a rapist, so is he,” he said of one of the accused last week.
Every day, dozens of people have lined up to watch the trial and support Ms. Pelicot, who has unwittingly become a feminist icon in France.
“I hear lots of women, and men, who say, ‘You’re very brave,’” Ms. Pelicot said in her testimony on Wednesday. “I say it’s not bravery — it’s will and determination to change society.”
Late last week, the head judge questioned Mr. Pelicot again.
“How do you manage to live with this woman you say you love more than anything, who was prepared, offered, who then woke up in your house and with whom you kept on living?” he asked.
“There is this dark side I have,” Mr. Pelicot started, hesitantly. “Nobody belongs to anybody — in fact, now I know this — but I stuck with that feeling of doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it,” he said. “The mornings after were difficult, because I could tell she was not in a good state.”
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