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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
“Merci, Gisèle.” That was the nationwide response in France to Gisèle Pelicot, the 72-year-old French woman whose landmark rape case galvanized France. On Friday, her husband and about 50 other men were declared guilty and sentenced for repeatedly raping her for more than a decade after he drugged her unconscious. A panel of judges sentenced Dominique Pelicot to the maximum 20 years in prison.
The shocking case made headlines around the world. The three-and-a-half-month trial gripped France, with supporters regularly gathering around the Avignon Palais de Justice courthouse to support Gisèle Pelicot, who famously waived anonymity to give a voice to survivors and change the public discourse on sexual violence. She told the court during the trial, quote, “It’s not for us to feel shame — it’s for them,” she said. She also insisted videos of her rapes, that her husband had taken when she was fast asleep, drugged into sleep, that these videotapes be shown in the court as part of the trial. Gisèle Pelicot spoke after the sentencing on Friday.
GISÈLE PELICOT: [translated] I’m thinking about the victims who aren’t recognized and whose stories often remain in the shadows. I want you to know we share the same struggle. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have supported me throughout this ordeal. Your testimonies devastated me, and I was able to pull the strength from them to come back every day to face these long days of the trial.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, some women’s rights activists supporting Gisèle Pelicot said they were disappointed with the verdict. This is Muriel Trichet from the French feminist collective Nous Toutes, Us All.
MURIEL TRICHET: [translated] For crimes, you can get a life sentence without parole for 22 years. And with rape, no. And yet rape destroys lives. We spend our lives trying to get over it. There are secondary victims who have not even been taken into account. And so, the minimum needed was to hit very hard with this justice. … Really very, very, very disappointed. Very disappointed. And once again, well, our thoughts go especially to Gisèle, to Gisèle who we will never thank enough. And on top of that, this verdict is a spit in the face. I have no other words.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Diane de Vignemont, a French journalist who covered the trial in Avignon. Her November piece for New Lines Magazine is headlined “Gisèle Pelicot: Finding Sisterhood at France’s Mass Rape Trial.” She’s based in Paris, but she just flew into New York.
It’s great to have you in studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Diane. Explain the significance of this trial and the bravery of this 72-year-old woman, who did something that most women in France — I mean, most do not bring — do not bring cases against their rapist. But what happens when they go to trial even?
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Hi. Thanks for having me.
So, yes, the case is definitely exceptional, not only in the acts themself, you know, the raping of a woman over 10 years by so many men, but also by the fact that Gisèle decided to make it public. She waived her right to anonymity, which most women in their rape case choose not to do, especially when the video evidence is so graphic.
AMY GOODMAN: And just for people who didn’t follow this case, how can it be, 50 men? In fact, it was something like 70, right? What happened over this decade? And how was Dominique Pelicot, her husband, found out?
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Of course. So, yes, it’s 50 — 70 men, so 20 of whom were not identified because the videos don’t show their face. But Pelicot began drugging her, that we know of, 10 years ago with sleeping pills. And he recruited men on a website called Coco, where people do go for libertinage, like a swingers’ website. And he created a chatroom called “against her will,” ”à son insu” — “without her knowledge.” And there, he recruited men to come in and have sex with his wife. Some of them, he did warn that she was taking sleeping pills. Most of them, he said, too, that she was consenting through the sleeping pills; this was a game that they liked to take part in as a couple.
AMY GOODMAN: That she was faking it?
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yes, that she was —
AMY GOODMAN: That she was faking she was sleeping?
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: No, that she was taking the sleeping pills herself because this is something that she liked and enjoyed. And you can see him on the videos egging the men on by telling them that she likes it, she enjoys it, she wants more.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, you hear in the video this horrific drone of her snoring to see how deeply drugged she was.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Really, really intense snoring, to the point that one of the accused said that he had tinnitus and he couldn’t — he had bad hearing, which is why he didn’t hear her snore, and that was his defense. But you can very, very much hear her snoring. And he recruited them online, and there was a whole process that they had to go through so that she wouldn’t know in the morning that she had been raped. So, they had to not smoke, not wear cologne, cut their nails short, take their clothes off in the hallway, warm their hands before touching her, so that, one, she wouldn’t wake up, and, two, she wouldn’t know the next morning that she had been raped.
AMY GOODMAN: So, she finds out about this because her husband is caught at a grocery store — what, it’s called upskirting? — trying to take pictures with his cellphone up women’s skirts.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: And the police come to the house and take his hard drive, and that’s where they find thousands of videos and photographs of something completely different —
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — his wife being raped.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: He’s caught upskirting. They convince — the vigil who caught him upskirting has to really convince one of the women to go to the police with it. She does not want to, but he pushes her to. And because he’s arrested, they get to go through his phone. And because he’s in police custody, they also get to go to his home, and that’s where they find the hard drive where he had a folder titled “abuse,” where he had methodically catalogued every single videos, over 10 years, videos with the name of the rapist, videos with the name of the act. And she —
AMY GOODMAN: And then you have his children, her children, their children — what, two boys and a girl — and then, they have grandchildren — saying, “Something’s wrong with mom. She is forgetting everything. She is” — and the husband, who’s the rapist and recruiting everyone else to rape her, takes her to the doctor because she’s losing her memory. But this is from being heavily drugged.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Exactly. She wakes up one morning, looks at herself in the morning, and she’s got a haircut that she doesn’t remember getting. She goes to her hairdressers to apologize, and they say, “Yeah, you seemed very odd, like you were out of it.” And so, she, for 10 years, was consulting doctor after doctor after doctor to find out what was wrong with her. She thought she had early-onset Alzheimer’s. But no doctor could figure out what was wrong with her. Her husband kept taking her and kept, you know, making quips about, you know, “What are you doing that you’re so tired? What are you doing at night?” And so, yeah, that’s maybe one of the things that will be beneficial after this case, is that doctors will know to watch out for the symptoms of chemical submission.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about that moment when she decides, “I am not going to be anonymous. I’m going to flip the script. I am not ashamed. I didn’t do this. I was the victim,” when she took off her sunglasses, allowed the videos to be made public?
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: So, yeah, from the testimonies of her daughter and of reporters who first followed the case when it came out in 2021, at first, she was very, very scared of the publicity. Her name, in the article in 2021, is not given. And she spends about two years in hiding. And then, little by little, as her lawyers tell her that she has to watch the videos ahead of time, she has to prepare herself for what’s going to be shown on trial, she starts watching the video with her lawyers. And that’s when she gets progressively angrier and decides not only that she’s going to make it public, but that she’s also going to fight the court to make it public, because they were very, very opposed to it originally. So, it’s not just her deciding, but it’s her fighting for it. For a few weeks, the court took back the publicity of the trial. For a few weeks, it was closed.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the scene in Avignon outside the courthouse, the women there and all over who started to rally around her.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yeah. So, you have to get there very, very early. So, the court opens at 8:00, but you have to be there at 7:00 at the latest to line up by the courthouse. And there’s a side room where the public can go, but there’s only 60 seats in the courthouse. And the day I went, 30 of them was reserved for journalists, because increasingly journalists were coming in from all over the world. There were, I think, 175 that day.
And so, the women are lining up. And I found it really extraordinary in line, sort of a sorority that immediately appeared. Women that I had met two minutes ago were telling me about why they were here, telling me about their rapes, telling me their experience with chemical submission, being drugged one night, waking up in a strange bed. And sort of circles were forming within the line of people talking to one another and supporting one another. And really, we were all here to wait for Gisèle, but we were also all here for one another. It was quite surprising. I thought it was going to be only bleak, but there was this really surprising sorority.
AMY GOODMAN: And you write about how you found sisterhood. Explain.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yeah. So, yeah, I was very distraught going there, distraught while watching the rape videos. I had originally intended to go later on, so that they wouldn’t be showing the videos, but they ran late, and I ended up watching, sitting through them. But the woman next to me was as distraught as I was, and she grabbed my hand as we watched the videos. And that was quite extraordinary. She didn’t let go until the videos stopped playing. And then, everyone, all of the women attending — it’s a small town, and there’s only a small break for lunch, so we all go to try and eat something, despite what we’ve seen, at the same restaurants, the same boulangeries in Avignon. And we really — we stuck together all day. And that was quite extraordinary.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the issue of consent? And talk about French law and how people are trying to change it now. And also men’s responses to this, because, let’s be clear, that website Coco, where the husband recruited all of these rapists — which, by the way, were her neighbors, people she would pass in the street. She had no idea. But Coco was shut down, wasn’t it, by an LGBTQ group, because they saw that gay men were being ambushed, recruited to ambush gay men on that site? It wasn’t shut down by her case.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: No, it very much wasn’t. And even though her case came out in 2021, it was only later that it was shut down.
But yeah, on the issue of consent, it’s quite tricky. We don’t have consent explicitly written into French law. What qualifies a rape and what has qualified a rape since the late ’80s is a sexual act performed via either constraint, menace or surprise. And so, obviously, questions of consent come in to illustrate and sort of try and understand more of that, but it has to be proven that the act was committed by constrained violence or menace or surprise.
And consent not being written in is very important, because in French criminal law — and that includes rape law — the main issue is intent. And so, to prove that you’ve not committed a theft or a homicide, you can try to prove that you didn’t intend to commit a theft or a homicide. And it’s the same for rape. If you can argue that you didn’t intend to commit a rape, you might get a lower sentence. And so, a lot of these men tried very hard to exploit that flaw. One of them was quoted saying, you know, “I didn’t know what consent was before this case. But thank you, Madame Pelicot. You’ve taught me about consent. And once the court frees me, I will create a seminar where I teach other men about consent.” And so, a lot of them were able to say also that they thought that she’d given consent because her husband said that she had.
And so, it’s very, very tricky. Feminists, feminist activists are very, very divided on the issue of whether adding consent to the law would be better or not. They say — some of them say that it might put too much weight on the victim to prove that she was not consenting, rather than on the perpetrator to say that he didn’t ask for her consent, that it might actually not be that helpful to women to add consent to the law, because you might get situations like this man who was saying that, you know, he didn’t know about consent, and so he obviously — it’s not his fault that he raped her. He did not intend to rape her. It was an accidental rape. That’s a sentence that was uttered in court: “accidental rape.”
AMY GOODMAN: And it may be that Pelicot is a murderer, as well, is that right?
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: That his DNA has been matched to a cold case in Paris from something like 10 years ago.
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Very much, and a rape case in Paris, as well, which is why some people are very iffy with the case being described as a Mazan rape trial, because even on Gisèle herself, not all the rapes were committed in Mazan. He had her raped in a car by the sidewalk. He had her raped in a car — in a bedroom in their daughter’s beach house. It’s not all about that one town of Mazon.
AMY GOODMAN: And there were even pictures of her daughter found, who said, “I don’t know this underwear I’m in.”
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: “My father raped me, and he insists he didn’t.”
DIANE DE VIGNEMONT: Yes. So, the kids of Gisèle say that the one who’s really been forgotten and left out of this trial is the daughter, because, yes, there’s pictures of her naked, in her father’s hard drive, wearing underwear that she doesn’t recognize. And she is convinced, and she’s arguing, and she’s founded an association to support people like her, who — she says she’s been raped. She says she’s been chemically subdued. But unlike Gisèle, there’s not a single video, and so you can’t prove anything.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Diane de Vignemont, we thank you so much for being with us, French journalist who covered the Pelicot trial in Avignon, France. We’ll link to her piece in New Lines Magazine headlined “Gisèle Pelicot: Finding Sisterhood at France’s Mass Rape Trial.”
Next up, we go to Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Stay with us.
