By standing up to her abusers in court and demanding they be ashamed, France’s Gisele Pelicot has become a feminist champion.
Ms Pelicot’s husband orchestrated her sexual abuse by strangers, an action that could have broken her.
More than three months of difficult hearings, including graphic video evidence, are set to culminate when judges hand down sentences.
When the trial of her now ex-husband and 50 other defendants opened in the French city of Avignon in September, journalists saw a woman with short red hair, hiding behind sunglasses.
The main victim in the case that shocked France was a grandmother whose life partner had admitted to drugging her for almost a decade so he and dozens of strangers he recruited online could rape her while unconscious.
But then Ms Pelicot waived her right to anonymity and demanded the public be allowed access to the trial to raise awareness about drug use to commit abuse.
She won support across France and abroad, with art created in her honour, after she said it was her abusers – not her – who should be ashamed.
“I wanted all women who are rape victims to say to themselves: ‘Ms Pelicot did it, so we can do it too’,” she told the court in October.
“It’s not us who should feel shame, but them,” she added, referring to her abusers.
As news of the trial spread, protests erupted across France to show support and people also started cheering her or even greeting her with flowers when she arrived in court.
And over the trial’s course, Ms Pelicot shed her dark sunglasses.
‘Rape is rape’
Ahead of the verdicts, the 72-year-old has made it onto the BBC’s 100 Women list for 2024, alongside fellow mass rape survivor and Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad and Hollywood actor Sharon Stone.
In August, Ms Pelicot obtained a divorce from her husband, who has confessed to the abuse after meticulously documenting it with photos and videos.
She has moved away from the southern town of Mazan where, in her own words, her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot treated her like “a piece of meat” or a “rag doll” for years.
She now uses her maiden name, but during the trial has asked the media to use her former name as a married woman – the one passed on to some of her seven grandchildren.
In mid-September, she dropped her usual reserve to talk of her humiliation and her anger towards several lawyers who had made insinuations about her ordeal.
“Rape is rape,” she said.
In October, she said she was “broken” but determined to change society.
She again told the court last month it was time for a “macho, patriarchal” society to shift its attitude towards rape.
She said the marathon hearings were an examination of the “cowardice” of the men who took part in the assaults.
Many had argued they thought they were taking part in a couple’s fantasy after consent by proxy through her husband.
She expressed her anger that none of her abusers alerted the police about the rapes, which occurred between 2011 and 2020.
Several took part in the abuse six times.
Besides her 72-year-old ex-husband, 50 men are on trial, including one who did not rape Ms Pelicot but repeatedly abused his own wife with Mr Pelicot’s help.
Several of the co-defendants have admitted to rape.
But more than 20 other suspects remain at large as investigators had not managed to identify them before the start of the mass trial.
Memory lapses
The daughter of a member of the military, Ms Pelicot was born on 7 December 1952 in Germany, returning to France with her family when she was five.
When she was nine, her mother, aged just 35, died of cancer.
Her older brother Michel died of a heart attack aged 43, before her 20th birthday.
She met Mr Pelicot, her future husband and rapist, in 1971.
She had dreamt of becoming a hairdresser but instead studied to be a typist.
After a few years temping, she joined France’s national electricity company EDF, ending her career in a logistics service for its nuclear power plants.
At home, she looked after her three children, then seven grandchildren.
After she retired, she enjoyed walking and singing in a local choir.
Only when the police caught her husband filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in 2020 did she find out the true reason behind her troubling memory lapses.