The mass rape trial that has sent shockwaves through France and horrified the world is expected to end on Thursday with the conviction of Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted drugging his ex-wife, Gisèle, and inviting strangers into their bedroom to rape her.
Pelicot, a 72-year-old retired electrician and estate agent, is expected to be given the maximum 20-year jail term the public prosecutor has demanded at the three and a half-month trial in Avignon.
Fifty other men accused alongside him, most of whom deny the charges, face sentences ranging from 10 to 18 years for those accused of aggravated rape and four years for one accused of sexual aggression. One man is on the run and being tried in his absence.
They were invited to address the court for the last time on Monday. A dozen apologised to Gisèle Pelicot, while a handful insisted they ”had not intended” to rape and were therefore not rapists. Others said they had nothing to add.
Dominique Pelicot used his final words from behind the glass dock to salute the “courage” of his ex-wife who he said had faced the “innuendo of complicity”. This followed suggestions early in the trial that she had been a willing participant in her own abuse, suspicions rapidly dismissed by videos he made of the rapes that were shown during the hearing.
“The videos were very well filmed. No one could say you didn’t know what was happening in them,” her lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, said. “She would never consider letting these men into her house, let alone do what they did.”
Gisèle Pelicot discovered her “caring, attentive, perfect” husband of 50 years had been abusing her and inviting other men to do the same after his arrest for filming up the skirts of female customers at a local supermarket in September 2020. When he was taken into custody two months later, police revealed the extent of the drugging and abuse, which lasted almost a decade, and showed her some of the photographs he had taken of her while she was unconscious.
In an unusual move, Gisèle Pelicot waived her anonymity and insisted the trial be open to the press and public. The videos, which the president of the court described as an “attack on human dignity”, should be shown in open court, she said.
During the trial, which opened in September, the court has heard that Dominique Pelicot recruited most of the accused men from an online chatroom called A Son Insu, which translates as Without their Knowledge. They came from within a radius of 30 miles (50km) of the Pelicot’s home in the Provençal town of Mazan, whose most notorious resident until now had been the Marquis de Sade.
The 50 accused are those whom French police identified and traced from Pelicot’s videos. At least 20 more are believed to be still at large.
Over the weeks, Gisèle Pelicot, 73, a grandmother whose insistence that “shame must change sides” has become a global feminist slogan, has grown in confidence and stature, boosted by the overwhelming support she has received from the crowds of women who have turned out to cheer her in and out of the courthouse. Women have arrived each day at dawn and waited for hours in rain, cold and bitter Mistral winds for a seat in the hearing.
“We thought we knew everything men were capable of inflicting on women, but never imagined a husband drugging his wife and offering her up to dozens of predators for 10 years,” one said.
Antoine Camus, a lawyer who also represented Gisèle Pelicot, questioned how the men he described as a “kaleidoscope of French society” could have so little empathy that they treated her as “less than nothing”. “The question isn’t why you went there, but why you stayed?” he said in court.
French and Spanish feminist groups are expected at the courthouse for the verdicts. Among other demands, they are calling for a change in society’s treatment of rape victims before, during and after the legal process.
“How can it not change things?” Camus has asked.