After the Gisèle Pelicot verdict, will anything change about 'the way we look at rape'?
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As Gisèle Pelicot made her final statement to the Avignon court in November, she was clear on what she hopes the outcome of the trial will be. “It’s time that the macho, patriarchal society that trivialises rape changes,” she said. “It’s time we changed the way we look at rape.” Gisèle’s decision to waive her right to anonymity and to open the court room to the world’s media have made her a feminist folk hero. No one has been able to look away from so much horror laid bare.
The verdicts, due to be handed down to the 51 men on trial for raping her, are coming in. Gisèle’s former husband, Dominique Pelicot, 71, has admitted to the charges of drugging his wife of over 50 years and inviting men on the internet to rape her. “I am a rapist,” he told the court, “like the others in this room.” He has been given the maximum sentence for rape under French law: 20 years.
Pelicot kept extensive video evidence of all the crimes, labelled on a USB stick in a file name “abuses”. But despite this seemingly irrefutable evidence, only 14 of the 50 other men on trial have admitted to raping the 72-year-old grandmother in 92 verifiable incidents between 2011 and 2020. At least 22 of the men were never identified.
Some of the accused have claimed that that they believed that a husband’s consent was enough to have sex with an obviously unconscious woman. Others that they believed Gisèle was only pretending to be asleep, as part of a “libertine” sex game played by the couple. Defendants have claimed that they were manipulated into the scenario by Pelicot and felt to afraid to do anything but proceed with the sexual abuse. A couple of them claim they were drugged, too. None of them reported anything to the police. They all face potential sentences of between four to 18 years in prison.
