Gisele Pelicot, the French grandmother who has been hailed as a hero for insisting the trial of her ex-husband and dozens of other men accused of raping her be held in public has taken to the stand and described herself as a “woman who is totally destroyed”.
The then husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted the charges against him – of sedating and then raping Ms Pelicot and inviting other men over to rape her across a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020. Fifty other men are also on trial, with the majority denying rape.
After two months of the trial, 72-year-old Ms Pelicot has told the court she does not know how she could pick herself from the tragedy.
“I am a woman who is totally destroyed, and don’t know how I can pick myself up from this,” she said.
Mr Pelicot watched from the dock as she recounted how “lucky” she felt during their marriage to have him by her side, only for him to allegedly “bring these strangers” into their bedroom without her knowing.
She said she “trusted [him] entirely”, even as he sat with her through doctors appointments about her neurological health, problems that she later found out were brought about by his regular drugging of her.
“How can the perfect man have got to this? How could you have betrayed me to this point? How could you have brought these strangers into my bedroom?” she said.
Ms Pelicot only discovered the alleged rapes after her husband was caught shooting video up unsuspecting women’s skirts in 2020. When police later searched his house, they found thousands of pornographic photos and videos.
Prosecutors have said he would crush sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into her food and drinks, and invite men to rape her in the village of Mazan in Provence, France. He and the other accused face 20 years in prison if found guilty. Mr Pelicot says he found the men mainly on chat rooms.
Speaking about how Mr Pelicot drugged her, Ms Pelicot says she believes he would change her out of her pyjamas into underwear she had never seen before. He would then change her back into her pyjamas before she woke up.
“I never felt my heart flutter, I didn’t feel anything, I must have gone under very quickly,” she told the court. “I would wake up with my pyjamas on. The mornings I must have been more tired than usual, but I walk a lot and thought it was that.”
The trial has captured the attention of France, with Ms Pelicot insisting on attending the hearings in person, having waived her anonymity. She has been praised as a feminist icon, attending the court in Avignon, a small city in southeast France, with her children.
She has also called for the lifting of restrictions on the screening of video evidence in the trial; her lawyer said this was necessary to show the “true horror of rape”.
“It’s true that I hear lots of women, and men, who say you’re very brave,” the grandmother said I say it’s not bravery, it’s will and determination to change society.
Speaking on Wednesday, Ms Pelicot said her case highlighted how a rapist is not just “someone met in a car park late at night” but “can also be in the family, among our friends”.
“When I saw one of the accused on the stand last week, who came into my bedroom and house without consentment,” she said. “This man, who came to rape an unconscious, 57-year-old woman – I am also a mother and grandmother … I could have been his grandmother.”
The 50 men accused of rape and assault alongside Ms Pelicot’s former husband are aged between 26 and 74. They include a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a local councillor, a soldier, lorry drivers and farm workers.
In total, 49 are accused of rape, one of attempted rape and one of sexual assault.
This week, the court is hearing the cases of six men. They include a 34-year-old prison warden, a 55-year-old electrician, a 32-year-old delivery driver, a 46-year-old mirror-maker, a 31-year-old painter and decorator, and a 47-year-old former factory worker.
Of the nearly two dozen defendants who testified during the trial’s first seven weeks, some have accepted their involvement in sleeping with Ms Pelicot but denied raping her.
Defendant Ahmed T. — full last names are generally withheld until conviction – is one of those men who suggested he believed Ms Pelicot was not unconscious, but rather fulfilling an “asleep” fetish.
The married plumber with three kids and five grandchildren said he wasn’t particularly alarmed that Ms Pelicot wasn’t moving when he visited her and her now-ex-husband’s house in 2019.
It reminded him of porn he had watched featuring women who “pretend to be asleep and don’t react,” he said.
Like him, many other defendants told the court that they couldn’t have imagined that Mr Pelicot was drugging his wife, and that they were told she was a willing participant acting out a kinky fantasy. Mr Pelicot denied this, telling the court his co-defendants knew exactly what the situation was.
Celine Piques, a spokesperson of the feminist group “Osez le Feminisme!” or “Dare Feminism!” said she’s convinced that many of the men on trial were inspired or perverted by porn, including videos found on popular websites.
Although some sites have started cracking down on search terms such as “unconscious”, hundreds of videos of men having sex with seemingly passed out women can be found online, she said.
Ms Piques says she was particularly struck by the testimony of a tech expert at the trial who had found the search terms “asleep porn” on Dominique Pelicot’s computer.
The trial runs until 20 December.
