Over the course of the trial, the men charged said they thought they were just participants in a husband’s sexual games, and were unaware their acts were rape.
For more than two months, Gisele Pelicot sat in a courtroom as video − shot by her husband − showing numerous men sexually abusing her played before the court.
She was asleep throughout all these rapes.
Pelicot did not leave the courtroom when these films were shown. In fact, she fought hard to have the videos shown to the public.
On Tuesday, Pelicot made her closing statement to the court in the trial of the 51 men charged with raping her after her husband drugged her and invited the men into their home to abuse her over the course of almost a decade. The case has gripped France and beyond, stirred feminist protests, and sparked a reckoning over the pervasiveness of rape and sexual violence.
Speaking before the court over the course of the trial, Pelicot never flinched from throwing full responsibility and shame back onto her accused rapists, inspiring the motto “shame must change sides” taken up by feminist demonstrators. Her closing remarks were no exception.
“It is time for society to look at this macho, patriarchal society and change the way it looks at rape,” she said.
In the courtroom were many of the accused, men from many walks of life, occupations, and backgrounds. Over the course of the trial, they said they thought they were just participants in a husband’s sexual games, and were unaware their acts were rape.
Pelicot lambasted their “cowardice” in direct terms.
“When you walk into a bedroom and see a motionless body, at what point (do you decide) not to react? Why did you not leave immediately to report it to the police?”
“For me this is the trial of cowardice, there is no other way to describe it,” she said.
The “absence of understanding what abuse is” showed how an abuser could be “anyone,” even someone “who doesn’t see themselves as an abuser,” said Violette Perrotte, director of Le Maison des Femmes, a French non-profit organization that runs health centers dedicated to women victims of violence.
‘Our family has been destroyed’
Up until she was contacted by police, Gisele Pelicot believed she had a happy marriage to her husband, Dominique Pelicot. Totally unrelated, she believed, were the memory loss and worrying symptoms she experienced for years, causing her to fear she had a brain tumor or Alzheimer’s and visit many doctors, the New York Times reported.
But the explanation came in 2020, after officials arrested her husband when he was caught filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket. On his seized electronic equipment, they found around 300 photos and videos of her being abused by 72 different men.
Dominique Pelicot connected with the men on Coco.gg, a since-shut down anonymous chat site implicated in a string of murders, rapes, and assaults.
For his part, Dominique Pelicot took direct responsibility in front of the court weeks ago: “I am a rapist, just like all the others in this room,” he said.
But in his closing statement, Pelicot maintained that he was innocent of abusing their daughter, who goes by the pseudonym Caroline Darian, or their grandchildren, despite nude photos of Darian found in her father’s possession.
“You don’t even have the courage to tell the truth!” Darian shouted in the courtroom. “You will die in a lie. You are alone in your lie.”
“Our family has been destroyed,” David Pelicot, one of her two brothers, told the court on Monday. He expects from the trial that the men charged, including his father, who he referred to as “that man,” will be punished for “the horrors they inflicted on my mother,” he said.
When his father interrupted his testimony to apologize, David Pelicot shot back, “Never!”
“It’s been four years since I lost my father,” Florian Pelicot, the couple’s other son, told the court. He said he hoped the court would slap his father with a heavy sentence to encourage other rape victims to speak out.
Perrotte said she believes the trial will have some impact, like highlighting how most rapists are already known to their victims, and that a “perfect victim” or “perfect crime” doesn’t exist. Her organization, for example, now trains professionals on “chemical submission,” the term used to describe drugging a rape victim.
“The patriarchy still has very nice days ahead of it, but it has definitely had an impact on how we view perpetrators,” she said.
Contributing: Reuters
