As Gisèle Pelicot made her final statement to the Avignon court in November, she was clear on what she hopes the outcome of the trial will be. “It’s time that the macho, patriarchal society that trivialises rape changes,” she said. “It’s time we changed the way we look at rape.” Gisèle’s decision to waive her right to anonymity and to open the court room to the world’s media have made her a feminist folk hero. No one has been able to look away from so much horror laid bare.
The verdicts, due to be handed down to the 51 men on trial for raping her, are coming in. Gisèle’s former husband, Dominique Pelicot, 71, has admitted to the charges of drugging his wife of over 50 years and inviting men on the internet to rape her. “I am a rapist,” he told the court, “like the others in this room.” He has been given the maximum sentence for rape under French law: 20 years.
Pelicot kept extensive video evidence of all the crimes, labelled on a USB stick in a file name “abuses”. But despite this seemingly irrefutable evidence, only 14 of the 50 other men on trial have admitted to raping the 72-year-old grandmother in 92 verifiable incidents between 2011 and 2020. At least 22 of the men were never identified.
Some of the accused have claimed that that they believed that a husband’s consent was enough to have sex with an obviously unconscious woman. Others that they believed Gisèle was only pretending to be asleep, as part of a “libertine” sex game played by the couple. Defendants have claimed that they were manipulated into the scenario by Pelicot and felt to afraid to do anything but proceed with the sexual abuse. A couple of them claim they were drugged, too. None of them reported anything to the police. They all face potential sentences of between four to 18 years in prison.
Consent has become a central discussion around the Marzan rape trial. Mainly because it is one of the few angles available to the men’s defence lawyers. The wording of the French law around rape has come under scrutiny because its current definition of rape requires an intent. This loophole has allowed the men on trial to argue that if they didn’t believe they were committing rape, or had a desire to rape, it wasn’t rape. Some activists are now petitioning for the addition of a consent clause to the French penal code, while others argue that this would place undue burden on victims to prove they did not consent.
French law may well be re-written after Gisèle’s case (she chose to use her old married name for the trial to bring pride to her grandchildren, but has changed it since the divorce), but it has shone a light on a whole host of issues about rape and a culture that allows it to flourish in the shadows.
Pelicot was only caught because he committed a different sex crime – one he had committed before. In 2010, he was arrested for filming underneath women’s skirts (upskirting) in a supermarket near Paris. But he was only fined €100, and Gisèle never found out. He was caught doing it again in 2020, but this time his arrest also led to the seizing and searching of his phone and computer, which revealed the video evidence of his ten-year campaign of abuse against his wife.
This was not because the police were just more thorough the second time around. One of his 2020 victims filed a complaint against him. And in September of 2018, France had brought in a new law about upskirting, introducing fines of up to €15,000 and potential prison time for filming someone under their clothes without consent. The change in legislation had partly been inspired by the campaign in the UK to criminalise upskirting. British activist Gina Martin had been working since 2017 to make upskirting illegal after being assaulted at a music festival where police had failed to intervene, despite Martin presenting the man’s phone with the photos of her on them. The Voyeurism Act, which made upskirting a criminal offence in England and Wales, wasn’t passed until 2019. Conservative MP Christopher Chope had blocked the bill passing through the House of Commons.
So, until just five years ago, this form of public sexual assault was basically entirely legal. Which seems baffling, given that catching these technically more minor offences provides an opportunity for intervention. Predatory behaviours such as voyeurism and exhibitionism (flashing people, for example) are regarded by forensic psychologists as gateway activities to further, more extreme sexual offending.
In Pelicot’s case he had already escalated well beyond secretly filming women. Videos of Gisèle being assaulted date back to 2011. Pelicot’s DNA, swabbed during the 2010 arrest, was found to match a sample found at the scene of the sexual assault of an estate agent near Paris in 1999. The evidence was sent to prosecutors, but as the case was closed it was ignored. Pelicot, who worked as an estate agent, has confessed to the crime. He denies involvement in the 1991 Paris rape and murder of estate agent Sophie Narme. The DNA evidence from her killing was allegedly destroyed by a forensics agency soon after it was collected.
These frustrating missed opportunities to apprehend a sexual predator mid-spree brings to mind the case of Sarah Everard. Everard was abducted, raped and murdered in 2021 by a serving police officer Wayne Couzens. An inquiry found that Couzens was a serial sexual offender. In the days before he attacked Everard, Couzens exposed himself to women working at a fast food drive-through, part of a repeated pattern of behaviour. Despite handing his credit card number and car number plate to the police, no action was taken and Couzens was free to escalate to kidnap and murder.
The police taking sex crimes of all kinds extremely seriously, and following up rigorously when they are reported, must be one of the changes heralded by Gisèle’s case if real change is to be made.
Medical staff will also need better training to recognise signs of chemical sedition, sexual abuse within the family, and the potential for coercion. Gisèle sought regular medical attention for her unexplained blackouts, memory loss, and gynecological issues, but her doctors never flagged anything. She contracted four sexually transmitted diseases from the men who came to rape her, but no alarms were raised. Her husband accompanied her to the appointments with neurologists and gynecologists, playing the part of a concerned husband while presumably controlling the narrative around her symptoms. This was yet another missed opportunity for intervention.
Addressing all forms of sexual violence and child abuse, including crimes with male victims, also needs to happen to change the culture. Many people following the trial were angered when the alleged rapists, including Pelicot, recounted stories of their own experiences of assault while in the dock. To be clear, being abused does not turn people into abusers, and most abuse survivors do not go on to hurt others. But a clear pattern emerged during the trial that points to rampant physical and sexual abuse of young boys by family members or trusted authority figures.
Lionel R alleges he was abused by the president of his village’s pétanque club when he was 12. Simoné M alleges he was raped at 11 years old by a family friend. Adrien L alleges he was sexually abused by his cousin when he was 10. Fabien S alleges he was raped by his foster parents as a child, an assault he only recognised as such during court-ordered appointments with a psychologist. Jean-Pierre M alleges he was sexually abused by his family as a child. Fabien S alleges he was sexually abused by his father from the age of two. Jérôme V, who admitted to raping Gisèle six times, reported a history of childhood physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his parents. Mohamed R, one of the defendants claiming Pelicot tricked him, alleges he was abused as a child. Cédric G, who was given drugs by Pelicot to use on his girlfriend, alleges he was abused as a child. Cyrille D was beaten so badly by his father he was placed in care as a teen. And Pelicot himself alleges he
What was done to Gisèle by her husband and all these strangers was unforgivable. But they are not monsters in the sense that they are outliers or pariahs. Until the trial, they lived ordinary lives in the local area. Some of these ordinary men may have suffered childhood trauma and externalised it by brutalising women. Breaking the cycle will require society to look at how it tries to disavow how frequent abuse within the family unit is. Men don’t just need to learn what consent is in regards to their adult relationships – they need to be taught as boys so they can report when their own consent is violated.
Men were the chosen victims of the UK’s worst rapist, Reynhard Sinaga, who was may have attacked as many as 195 people and was jailed in 2020. Like Pelicot, Sinaga drugged his victims – drunk and vulnerable young men on nights out near his Manchester flat – and like Gisèle many of them didn’t know anything had happened to them until the police knocked on their door. The case didn’t garner much national, let alone international coverage, because the four seperate trials (so numerous were the victims) were subject to a media blackout until a verdict was reached. Gisèle’s brave decision to waive anonymity and let the world into the courtroom has demonstrated the power of letting the aftermath of rape become visible.
The prevalence of drugging in such cases suggests that greater education must be provided to the public about the symptoms of drug-facilitated assaults. Abuse hotlines in France have already reported an uptick in callers reporting that they may have been abused through "chemical submission". Again, healthcare providers and emergency services will need more training in this area to spot the signs and offer appropriate testing and support.
Websites like the one Pelicot used to recruit potential rapists also need to be tackled through legislative changes. French NGOs had been warning of the dangers of coco.fr since 2013, but platforms are ultimately responsible for regulating themselves unless the internet provider is served a court order. While the site was finally shuttered this summer, experts warn that more will pop up in its place.
In the UK, where the court backlog for rape means victims won’t have a chance at justice for years, more funding and resources are desperately needed.
There will be more Dominique Pelicots out there – there already are. There are the 22 men in the videos who were never found. The men on the forums who swapped tips on how to drug their partners. Seemingly normal, trusted men with families and relationships. As Gisèle herself told the court: "The rapist is not the one you meet in a parking lot, late at night. He can also be in the family, among friends". In order to make change, we may have to look harder and the most horrible parts of society and enact deep cultural change and institutional reform.
