The initial hearings were marked by silence interrupted only by the clicking of cameras as Gisèle Pelicot arrived for the trial of the 51 men accused of raping her.
On Friday, as she walked through the modern, marble-floored entrance hall in the criminal court in Avignon in southern France, there was the sustained applause that now greets her every arrival.
“We clapped her and she stopped to thank us,” Lou Anh Raetz, 19, a law student from nearby Aix-en-Provence, said.
Raetz said she had travelled to Avignon in part because “this is an historic case” and in part because “Gisèle Pelicot needs the support of her family but also of the whole of society”.
“I am giving evidence for all the women who are drugged and do not know it,” Pelicot told those waiting to get into the trial a few days ago. “Thanks to you I have the strength to carry on this fight.”
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In legal parlance, Pelicot, 72, is a victim, having been drugged unknowingly by her husband Dominique, 71, a retired electrician, who for ten years invited other men to the family home in Mazan to rape her.
In practice, she has become a symbol of the fight against sexual violence in a country that has long sought to downplay the issue. There have been demonstrations of support for her, open letters in the press and expressions of backing from political parties.
Her decision to waive her anonymity has given the trial publicity that has reverberated across the country, helping to transform it into what feminists hope will be a pivotal moment in a patriarchal nation.
She has already reshaped French media coverage of the case. Initially, the country’s outlets treated the events as the fruit of a sordid criminal mindset on the fringes of society. Now observers say they cannot help being struck by the ordinariness of the men who accepted Mr Pelicot’s invitation to rape his unconscious wife after meeting him on an online sexual encounter platform.
• Dominique Pelicot rape trial: husband who drugged wife admits all charges
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“It’s rare for a woman to talk in public about this sort of thing,” Raetz said. “I think she has opened a lot of eyes.”
Last week, there were gatherings across France in support of Mrs Pelicot. Thousands of people, mostly although not only women, took part amid chants of “We are all Gisèle Pelicot”.
Sophie Barre, a member of the national co-ordination of Nous Toutes, a feminist collective, told 20 Minutes newspaper that Mrs Pelicot’s choice of a public trial was an “act of courage”, which meant that “people who were not necessarily interested in the issue of sexual violence are passionately in this case”.
She said the hearings were helping to dissipate the myth that rape was perpetrated by strangers stalking women in dark alleys. In reality, 91 per cent of victims know the rapist, according to a parliamentary report published in 2018.
“They are your neighbour, your ambulance man, your brother, your banker,” said Barre. “Society was refusing to see these realities and now they are being exposed in the daylight.”
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She added that if the trial was having such an impact on public opinion it was because women across the country could relate to Mrs Pelicot. “She is the figure of the wife, the mother [and] an intergenerational empathy has developed towards her.”
Married for 50 years, she had three children and seven grandchildren, and never once suspected that the memory loss and tiredness she experienced were caused by the tranquilisers and sleeping pills her husband was slipping into her food. She only discovered the truth when he was caught filming under women’s skirts in 2020, prompting a police investigation that led officers to discover the films and the videos that he had taken of all the rapes she had suffered.
She told the court that her world had collapsed when investigators told her that her troubles were not Alzheimer’s, as doctors had suspected, but the result of the administration of drugs designed to put her into such a deep sleep so she could be raped without knowing or remembering it.
Yet every day, she arrives at the courthouse, neatly dressed, wearing dark glasses and with her head held high as the applause echoes across the entrance lobby.
Elsa Labouret, secretary-general and spokeswoman for the feminist organisation Osez le Féminisme, said: “She is refusing to carry this shame and is designating the defendants as having sole responsibility for what happened. She is sending a message to all victims.”
