The Vaucluse Criminal Court in Avignon (in southeastern France) sentenced Dominique Pelicot to the maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. It also found all 50 of his co-defendants guilty at the end of a historic four-month serial rape trial that has made headlines around the world and become a symbol of violence against women. There were 150 accredited journalists in court, including 86 foreigners.
“Mr. Pelicot, you have been found guilty of aggravated rape against Gisèle Pelicot,” presiding judge Roger Arata told the man who for a decade drugged his now ex-wife Gisèle with anti-anxiety drugs after planning enjoy her retirement by turning her into a sex object and handing her over to dozens of men recruited on the Internet.
Following the prosecution’s request, the court sentenced Dominique Pelicot to the maximum possible sentence for aggravated rape. The man, her lawyer said, has not ruled out appealing.
The magistrate then listed the sentences for the 50 co-defendants, men between the ages of 27 and 74, none of whom were acquitted; their sentences range from three years to 20 years in prison
/Ansa/Epa
In late November, the prosecution had asked for between 10 and 18 years’ imprisonment for 49 of the co-defendants, on trial for aggravated or attempted rape, and four years’ imprisonment for the last, on trial for molesting Gisèle Pelicot.
“Rape affects women all over the world, which is why the whole world has its eyes on what will happen,” a representative of the Avignon-based feminist collective Amazones, told AFP.
The couple’s three children, David, Caroline and Florian, arrived at the courthouse together around 8:30 a.m. Their mother Gisèle, accompanied by her two lawyers, arrived separately, smiling, shortly after 9:00.
Defense attorneys had presented some 30 requests for acquittal for their clients, who they said had been “manipulated” by the “monster,” the “wolf,” the “ogre,” Dominique Pelicot.
The tension was palpable in the courtroom, where a large police presence had been deployed. Many of the condemned are expected to sleep behind bars as early as tonight; prepared for this eventuality, most of them had arrived at the hearing with a bag containing a few items of clothing. In tears, one of them hugged his partner for a long time before entering the courtroom.
The case also served to embody the plague of sexual violence, through the figure of Gisèle Pelicot, who went from being an anonymous victim to becoming a feminist icon, urging women to “stop being silent” so that “shame will change flags.” “Thank you Gisèle,” proclaimed Thursday morning a banner hung on the ramparts of Avignon’s Old City, in front of the courthouse.
On the eve of the verdict, the 72-year-old made the BBC’s list of 100 Women for 2024, along with fellow mass rape survivor and Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad and Hollywood actress Sharon Stone.
In August Pelicot was granted a divorce from her husband, who confessed to the abuse she had meticulously documented with photos and videos. The woman left the southern city of Mazan where, in her own words, her husband treated her for years as “a piece of meat” or a “rag doll.” She now uses her maiden name, but during the trial she asked the media to use her old married name, the one passed on to some of her seven grandchildren.
In mid-September, she abandoned her usual reserve to talk about her humiliation and her anger at some lawyers who had made insinuations about her ordeal. “Rape is rape,” she said. In October she said that she was “broken” but determined to change society. Last month she reiterated to the court that it is time for a “ masculinist and patriarchal” society to change its attitude toward rape. She also said the marathon hearing was an examination of the “ cowardliness” of the men who participated in the assaults. Many of them claimed that they thought they were taking part in a couple’s fantasy. Gisèle Pelicot questioned how it is possible that none of her abusers warned the police about the rapes, which occurred between 2011 and 2020. Several participated in the abuse six times. More than 20 other suspects are at large because investigators failed to identify them before the mass trial began.
Gisèle Pelicot was just another woman. The daughter of a military man, she was born in 1952 in Germany and returned to France with her family when she was five years old. At the age of nine, her mother, aged only 35, died of cancer. Her older brother Michel died of a heart attack at age 43, before his 20th birthday. Gisèle met Dominique Pelicot, her future husband and rapist, in 1971. She dreamed of becoming a hairdresser, but studied to become a typist. After a few years of temporary work, she joined the French national electricity company EDF, ending her career in a logistics service center for its nuclear power plants. At home, she cared for her three children and then seven grandchildren. After retirement, she had devoted herself to walking and singing in a local choir. It was only when police caught her husband filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in 2020 and examined his computer that Gisèle discovered what had happened to her and why, for years, she had also suffered from vaginal infections and troubling memory lapses.
