A UK-based petition calling for Gisele Pelicot to receive the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has received more than 125,000 signatures. Ms Pelicot, 72, a retired logistics manager, was drugged by her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, to render her unconscious, and then raped by him and dozens of other men, between 2011 and 2020.
Fifty men were found guilty of rape or sexual offences after a three-and-a-half-month trial in Avignon, France, which concluded in December. The court found Pelicot guilty of rape and all other charges against him. Ms Pelicot, who waived her right to anonymity as a survivor, said that shame should fall on her abusers, not her.
Catherine Mayer, 63, from London, a veteran journalist and co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, started a petition to urge the Nobel Committee to recognise Ms Pelicot with one of the world’s most prestigious honours. “One of the things in my own activism I’ve tried very much to convey is that violence against women and girls is a war,” she told the PA news agency.
“It’s just not recognised as such because it has been so normalised in daily life. “I thought that Gisele Pelicot, in her extraordinarily brave decision to testify and to waive anonymity, managed to put a face on what it looks like to be on the receiving end of this relentless sexual violence.”.
Ms Pelicot was named by the Financial Times as one of the 25 most influential women of 2024, and featured in the BBC’s 100 Women list the same year. Ms Mayer said Ms Pelicot’s “viscerally hideous” case was a “teaching moment” for the world.
