Perhaps the sentences were not what the victim’s family expected but, in the speech he gave as he left the Avignon court, Gisele Pelicot She did not question the French Justice after reading the ruling that sentenced her ex-husband to twenty years in prison and declared guilty 51 other men who were tried for raping her over ten years. Your case, a race against amazementis already part of the world history of perversion but she, personally, is one of the great heroines of our time.
In 2020, Gisèle Pelicot learned that the man she had been living with for almost fifty years was not the devoted father and grandfather the family imagined. The police had detained some time ago Dominique Pelicot after discovering him filming up the skirts of some women in a supermarket and that episode led to an investigation that led to horrifying findings.
The good grandfather and ideal companion had a terrifying B-side and the evidence was on his cell phones and computers. There were hundreds and hundreds of films starring 83 men who over the years accepted Pelicot’s online invitation to sexually abuse his wife.
The Pelicots were residents of Mazan, a small town in France, with 6,000 inhabitants. Most of the men who came to her house to abuse Gisèle and be filmed, too. Only 51 of them were identified, one is still at large. Some of these men were already in prison before the ruling that found them guilty, although not all received the same sentence.
In most cases, punishments do not last long. In fact, six of them will be released because the sentences are exempt from compliance or because they have already served part of them in preventive detention. All parties have ten days to determine whether to appeal the sentence, something that would lead to a new trial in the Nimes Court of Appeal, with a popular jury.
During the years of sexual torture of which she was unaware, Gisèle Pelicot went to several doctors’ offices for chronic fatigue, memory problems, sexually transmitted diseases and injuries to the cervix but None of the professionals who treated her associated these symptoms with ongoing rape or sexual abuse.
The woman who He decided to make the trial of his executioners public because he wanted the shame to change sides. I knew I was speaking for her but also for all the women who, by default, suffer social distrust every time they report a case of sexual violence. For 65 days, Gisèle saw the faces she did not see when she was abused and today she also saw how one by one they were condemned in public. They, on the other hand, hid under their hoods all this time. Shame begins to change sides.
During the trial – which started shy and wearing dark glasses and ended with her face uncovered – the woman exposed her privacy and had to come across in the same room those who never showed the slightest consideration for her, whom they treated as just another object. Men who, in their defense, went so far as to say that they never understood that they were raping her since they had accepted a proposal from her husband. Others declared that they believed they were watching a couple’s sexual game and that she was “pretending to be asleep”: the zero degree of degradation of a woman.
Those who have seen the videos recorded by Pelicot that were shown in court assure that the images, at times unbearable, They do not show any form of sexual play but rather a large, fainting woman who is subjected to rape and abuse.
The events that gave rise to an investigation and a subsequent trial that has just ended occurred starting in 2011 and for almost ten years. An abhorrent parenthesis in the life of any human being. Some of Dominique Pelicot’s accomplices have a history of convictions for gender violence, various addictions, rape, pedophilia and bestiality. The police investigation concluded that Gisèle P. had suffered at least 92 rapes.
In an article by The New York Times, Catherine Porter y Ségolène Le Stradic described in detail Gisele’s team of rapists, what feminism calls “the healthy children of patriarchy” and they called “a kaleidoscope of French middle and working class society”composed among others of “truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and workers, a prison guard, a nurse, a computer expert who works for a bank, a local journalist. Their ages range between 26 and 74 years. Many have children and are in a relationship. Most are accused of having raped the woman once. A few are accused of returning up to six times to rape her.”
On one of the days of the trial, where she was always received with applause and demonstrations of solidarity, Gisèle P. said: “They tell me that I have courage. It is not bravery, it is will and determination to make this society evolve.”
Gisèle Pelicot decided to keep the surname because it is also that of her children and grandchildren: she understood that it was a good way to cleanse him of the disgrace caused by Dominique’s behaviorher ex-husband, who drugged her for a decade and handed her over to the lasciviousness and perversion of dozens of men who never questioned the feelings or rights of that elderly, drugged woman whom they violated in every possible way. . Both she and the father of her three children are 72 years old today.
Gisèle Pelicot was dehumanized by dozens of men led by her husband but over the course of fifteen weeks she became a symbol throughout the world for her strength and courage. Her family name is already recognized much more for her fight against sexual violence than for the figure of the man who ruined her life.who knows – because he declared it so – that he will die despised by his people and “just like a dog” and that today he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
The phrase that Gisèle Pelicot was heard saying this morning, after the ruling, sums up in words the volume of her dignity, her trust in Justice and also the will not to spread hatred or the spirit of revenge. “I wanted, when the doors of this trial opened on September 2, that society could take ownership of the debates that took place. I have never regretted this decision. I am now confident in our ability to collectively build a future in which everyone, women and men, can live in harmony, with mutual respect and understanding.”
To Gisèle Pelicot Age did not protect her from rape culture and patriarchal prejudicessomething that was exhibited during the trial, when she had to answer questions from defense lawyers who only sought to make her uncomfortable and even hold her responsible for what happened. In a brutal way, his case made it clear that machismo is not just a thing for men and also that it is not necessary to be a monster to carry out despicable actions.
Gisèle P. has long been a “totally destroyed” woman, as she once said, but that did not prevent her from being aware that she had an extraordinary opportunity, that of explaining calmly and with dignity that women are never responsible for the sexual assaults that occur. they suffer.
Today she was seen smiling.
