Gisèle Pelicot, the French grandmother who has become a feminist hero for insisting that the rape trial of her ex-husband and 50 other men should be held in public, will take the stand on Wednesday to comment on the evidence so far.
The 72-year-old former logistics manager was unknowingly sedated and raped by her then husband, Dominique Pelicot, 71, who crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into her food and drinks, and invited men to rape her over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020 in the village of Mazan in Provence.
Dominique Pelicot has admitted the charges against him and said that for almost a decade he was in contact with men on an online chatroom titled “without her knowledge” where he would organise for strangers to come to the couple’s home in the southern village of Mazan to rape his wife while she was in a comatose state in her bed. He said he administered drugs to her at mealtimes or in a bowl of ice-cream he brought to her as she watched TV after dinner.
“I am a rapist, like the others in this room,” Pelicot told the court, saying the other men on trial were aware they were being invited to rape his wife.
“I never, even for a single second, gave my consent to Mr Pelicot or those other men,” Gisèle Pelicot told the court last month, saying she had been “sacrificed on the altar of vice”.
In almost two months of testimony, the court has heard from dozens of accused men. The majority denied rape. Some said they thought Pelicot was pretending to be asleep or was playing a game, or felt the fact her husband had consented was sufficient.
Video evidence of the alleged rapes was discovered by police after Dominique Pelicot was arrested in 2020 after filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket.
A total of 50 men were identified by police from films meticulously labelled and stored by Pelicot. The men on trial alongside Pelicot face sentences of up to 20 years in prison. In total, 49 men are accused of rape, one of attempted rape and one of sexual assault. Five others are also accused of possessing child abuse imagery.
Aged between 26 and 74, the accused include a nurse, a journalist, a prison officer, a local councillor, a soldier, lorry drivers and farm workers.
Pelicot said she felt humiliated by questioning from defence lawyers who had argued that the men might have made an error of judgment, or thought she was drunk or pretending to be asleep and complicit.
“I have felt humiliated while I’ve been in this courtroom. I have been called an alcoholic, a conspirator of Mr Pelicot,” she said in court last month, adding that her life had been “destroyed” for 10 years.
“In the state I was in, I absolutely could not respond. I was in a comatose state – the videos show that.”
She has been invited by the court president to speak as the trial nears the halfway point.
Pelicot’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, said she did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”. She wanted the trial to raise awareness of the use of drugging in sexual assault.
Thousands have taken part in street demonstrations across France in support of Gisèle Pelicot.
The trial runs until 20 December.
