Editor’s note: This article reports on a rape trial with some graphic evidence.
When Nicolas F. inserts his fingers into the vagina of a sleeping Gisele Pelicot, the woman next to me starts whimpering. When he puts his tongue into her to the sound of her snores, she leaves the room. A few minutes later, once the video has been turned off, she comes back in. Red-eyed and ashen-faced, the woman sits back down in the small chamber just off the courtroom where we’ve been watching the livestreamed trial unfold on-screen. I give her a weak smile and she grabs my hand. For the next 10 minutes, I hold hands with a stranger — until the court plays the next rape video and she leaves the room once again.
The Mazan trial, named after the small Provencal town in southern France where these and over 200 other rapes took place, is the most significant sexual abuse trial France has seen in decades. It’s not just the sheer number of the accused — at least 83 men were involved, and of those identified two are dead and 51 are on trial, including one on the run and Dominique Pelicot himself, the man who organized a decade of rape and abuse of his drugged wife in their marital bed, their car and their daughter’s beach house. It’s not just the horror of the acts themselves, meticulously documented by Pelicot in thousands of photos and videos methodically cataloged on his hard drive in a folder labeled “ABUSE.” What is most extraordinary about this trial is Gisele Pelicot herself: her decision to waive anonymity and demand that the proceedings — including the video evidence of her own rapes — be made public.
The woman holding my hand knows this — and so do the 60 or so others who came into the room with us. They know the toll this selfless decision has had on the 71-year-old. This is why hundreds of them line up at 7 a.m. every morning outside the courthouse, hoping to secure a seat in the cramped public viewing room or to simply clap and cheer and hand out bouquets to Gisele as she crosses the lobby. Day in and day out, women bear witness to her sacrifice, their presence a quiet but powerful rebellion against the shame and silence that have long cloaked sexual violence in France and across the world.
This trial is not just a pursuit of justice; it is a crucible of solidarity and sisterhood, uniting women from all walks of life in shared outrage and resolve. Gisele’s decision to make public the horrific details of her abuse has transformed her from a private survivor into a reluctant icon, galvanizing a movement of collective reckoning that stretches far beyond the small Avignon courthouse.
Pictures in support of Gisele have popped up across the world — in the streets of Krakow, New York, Milan and elsewhere. Her stylish, cape-wearing figure appears in the dark corners of Lille in northern France, with the reassuring caption “Gisele P., guardian of the street.” In Gentilly, to the south of Paris, her face is at the center of a giant mural. And in the northwestern city of Rennes, activists papered over the Place de la Republique’s blue-and-white street sign with a simple yet evocative message: “Place Gisele Peliqueen.”
By the courthouse, atop the historic ramparts of the “city of popes,” a new modern banner flaps in the wind. “A rape is a rape,” it reads. Next to it hangs a giant red heart made out of cardboard by Virginie, a local police officer (all of the women interviewed on this sensitive topic asked that only their first names be used). “With Gisele,” it reads.
On this cold November morning, the line outside the courthouse is growing by the minute. Several hold handmade signs: “La honte change de camp” (“Shame is changing sides”). Another simply says “Merci, Gisele.” The trial has drawn women from all walks of life to Avignon. Students, grandmothers, activists, retirees and survivors make up the daily crowd. Many arrive with stories of their own, compelled by Gisele’s courage to confront their own traumas. Most refer to her by her first name, like they would an old friend. This ritual has been repeated daily since the trial began in early September and some of these women tell me they will keep coming until it ends on Dec. 20.
“Gisele is doing this for us, and I want to be here for her in turn,” 64-year-old Sonia tells me. Newly retired, she’s been first in line at the courthouse over 20 times, making headlines earlier in November when she gave Gisele a doll in the shape of an angel. “I wanted her to know she isn’t alone,” she explains. At this point, 20-year-old medical student Oceane joins in on our conversation: “We’re all here for the same reasons, really,” she says: “Sorority and solidarity.”
Across the country, hotlines for survivors of sexual violence have seen a surge in calls since the trial began. Activists say this is proof of the trial’s transformative power. “Gisele has given women permission to speak,” Leila, who works as a psychologist in Avignon, tells me. “That’s a gift beyond measure.” In late November, a national march against sexual violence drew almost 100,000 people across the country, an all-time high for such a protest.
The courthouse itself has become a site of pilgrimage for women seeking catharsis and community. In line, they gather in impromptu circles where they share stories of abuse. Over the day of my visit, no fewer than seven strangers open up to me about their own rapes and experiences with the use of drugs to perpetrate sexual assaults, or chemical submission. “I can’t be the only one here who’s woken up in a strange bed with a naked man and no recollection of the previous night,” 43-year-old Julie says to us. Nods, sighs and downcast eyes ensue.
By 8 a.m., we’ve been in line for an hour. The mistral wind is blowing strong and we still have 30 minutes before the doors open. Andre, 49, bought two coffees at the end of his 2 1/2-hour drive from Lyon and offers me his spare. Recently unemployed, this is his first time at the trial, and he wants me — and the American magazine I am writing for — to know that he, too, despairs at how few men are joining the line and, with it, the conversation. When I ask him why he’s driven so far to be here today, he says, almost apologetically: “Gisele’s my mom’s age.” He tells me that reading about the rapes of the 71-year-old retired grandmother of seven triggered something in him and he began to follow the case. What’s more, he adds, Gisele’s tale of abuse, betrayal and deceit reminds him of those his wife and female friends have told him over the years.
“I need to hear this,” he tells me as we finally make it into the courthouse. “It’s time.”
Out of the hundreds gathered, only 30 of us finally make it into the overflow room (where members of the public can sit in on the trial). The tension is palpable. Some take meticulous notes, while others sit in stunned silence. The woman in front of me is pulling out her hair, and a strawberry-blond pile has already started to form by her feet by the time the screen turns on.
The court is examining Nicolas F.’s case today. The 43-year-old freelance reporter is on trial for aggravated rape and possession of child pornography (4,284 images and 262 videos were found on his computer and thumb drives). Like most of the accused, he’s pleading not guilty. Rectangular glasses placed on the tip of his nose, he holds his head high. “My biggest mistake,” he says, “was believing Monsieur Pelicot.”
At this, the room erupts into whispers of outrage, quickly quieted by the officer of the court, though she too lets out a deep sigh when Gisele’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, asks the presiding judge to show the videos of the accused titled “Fingering.” Usually, the officer tells us, she prefers to leave the room. But her colleague is off sick today and she doesn’t have a choice. For the next 60 seconds, she covers her ears so she doesn’t have to hear Gisele’s snores or the whispered encouragement of her camera-holding husband. When the next video — called “Licking” — is played, a journalist who’s been here for the past 18 weeks offers to take her place, and the officer steps out. Gisele’s sons and daughter also leave the courtroom.
“I contest the intentionality of the rape,” Nicolas F. says. In French criminal courts, proof of intent is required; without the intention to commit it, there can legally be no rape.
Yes, he admits, Pelicot had told him that his wife had taken sleeping pills. Yes, Gisele was dead to the world by the time he got into their bed. But Nicolas F., who says he had originally come to “test out homosexual foreplay” with Pelicot, was “unable to say no” when the husband took him into the bedroom and encouraged him to touch Gisele. He did so, but “only because Monsieur Pelicot kept telling me she liked it.”
This argument, which completely disregards the victim’s consent (or lack thereof), has been put forward by almost all of the co-defendants, and has the cramped room bristling with frustration. Consent is not written into French rape law but its potential addition has been a hotly debated topic in Avignon and across the country in recent months.
“‘Intent over consent’ is fucking medieval,” seethes Olivia, the woman holding my hand between gritted teeth. When the court breaks for lunch, she lets go of my hand with a smile and immediately starts lining up for the afternoon session.
There are only a dozen or so restaurants around the courthouse. Though I can’t stomach lunch — I can still picture Gisele’s comatose form, her pink underwear stretched against her thighs, and Nicolas F.’s hands on her — I speak to Nour, a 19-year-old waitress at a nearby bistro. “There have been days when Gisele, a couple of the accused, and a handful of defense attorneys have sat at opposing corners of the restaurant,” she tells me. “The accused keep cracking inappropriate jokes,” she adds, her brows furrowed in anger, “so I made a deal with my boss where I don’t have to wait on them. I just can’t do it.”
There are safe spaces to be found, though. Out on the streets of Avignon, black-and-white collages read, “Gisele, women thank you” and “Gisele, you are stronger than they are.” At night, the local feminist group “Les Amazones” papers the stone-walled city with messages of support, so that every street leading to the courthouse proclaims support for Gisele as she makes her way in on foot.
After our break, about a hundred of us are lining up inside to enter the overflow room when Gisele walks in and the mood shifts. Silence falls over us in an instant as she crosses the security gate. No one has pointed her out but each and every one of us has spotted her.
Dressed for battle, she looks the image of composed and elegant defiance — a grandmother turned revolutionary, in a neat auburn bob and tan sunglasses. Though the glasses come off when she enters, Gisele keeps on her brightly colored silk scarf. The scarf, bearing Aboriginal artwork, was sent to her in solidarity by an Australian organization working to raise awareness of sexual assaults on older women. “If we could be there,” the group’s CEO said in its letter, “we would hold up placards with, ‘We believe you, Gisele’ and ‘You are our champion.’”
When the woman of the hour finally crosses the lobby, the crowd breaks into applause to shouts of “Bravo Gisele!” and “Merci!” Around me, eyes fill with tears when Gisele finally looks our way. “Thank you for being here,” she mouths at us. We can’t hear her over the noise of the cameras and frantic reporters, but we know that’s what she said, because she says it every day. Though Gisele shies away from the press and reserves most of her words for the court, she always makes an exception for those who have gathered to support her.
That afternoon, we hear testimonies from Gisele’s family: her sons, her daughter Caroline (who was also drugged and photographed by Pelicot, who then shared the images online) and her son’s ex-wife, Aurore Lemaire.
Aurore, 37, takes the stand. A victim of intrafamily sexual violence herself, she’s here to speak of Pelicot — the photograph of her found on his phone, nude in her own bathroom with his penis photoshopped in; the time she stumbled across him masturbating in his home office with the door open; the day he offered to buy her daughters candy if they posed for him naked. Her conclusion, though, is not about him.
“I want to tell Gisele that I admire her,” she says. “Not having memories of these rapes could have been her one saving grace in this hell,” she adds. But Gisele chose to confront those memories head-on, to watch those videos alongside the court.
“Hats off, Gisele,” Aurore concludes.
On my train back to Paris that evening, I sit next to a group of undergraduate students who, like me, traveled to Avignon to watch the trial. They take a break from their homework to talk to me.
They tell me they’ve been following the case through reporters’ “live tweets” from the start. On social media, her supporters petition for Gisele to be made Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, or be given the Nobel Peace Prize. Posts bearing hashtags like #JusticeForGisele and #ShameSwitchesSides routinely go viral, creating a digital chorus of support.
But all four of them still felt compelled to come to Avignon in person. “It’s different when you’re here,” Aurelie confides. “You feel it in your bones.” With her short blond hair, freckles and oversize Squid Game sweatshirt, she looks much younger than her 18 years, the minimum age to sit in on the trial.
“MeToo revealed that every woman can be a victim,” Aurelie tells me while fiddling with her pink highlighter, “but this trial shows us that any man can be a perpetrator.” She then proceeds to list the professions of some of the men on trial, recruited by Pelicot on an online forum brazenly called “Without her knowledge”: a fireman, a lawyer, a nurse, a factory worker, a truck driver, a reporter. They were aged 21 to 68 at the time of the rapes; some are fathers, others grandfathers. Their banality is chilling, Aurelie adds with a shudder. Many returned to Mazan for more. One went six times. None of them reported Pelicot to the police.
“When Gisele opened the doors to her trial,” Aurelie concludes, “she forced us to look at the facts: None of these men were monsters lurking in the dark. They’re just … men. Like the ones we know.” That, Aurelie says, is why she traveled to Avignon today.
Gisele began her journey as a shadow. “I have been sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she told the court in the first week of the trial.
After her husband was arrested for filming up four women’s skirts in a local supermarket in 2020, police inspectors discovered upward of 20,000 photos and videos of him and a series of men abusing his sleeping wife. Gisele, drugged unconscious, had no memory of any of it, until a police inspector showed her a first photo and her life fell apart. The retired executive, who’d spent decades in logistics services for France’s nuclear power plants, had contracted four sexually transmitted infections. When the trial opened, she described her life as a “field of ruins.”
Yet, as the days passed, the power dynamics shifted. Long gone is the self-conscious figure who hid behind her two lawyers on the first day of the trial. The men who once viewed her as an object of their abuse now face her as a symbol of unflinching resistance, backed up by the solidarity of a movement that is growing by the day.
“It’s not bravery,” Gisele told the court: “It’s will and determination to change society.”
Through her words, Gisele has made her pain into a warning for others, a roadmap for recognizing and rejecting the violence hidden in plain sight. “One day,” she told the court, “a woman will wake up and not remember what happened the night before. She will think of my story and realize: This is not normal.”
To be sure, Gisele’s newfound visibility comes at a steep personal cost. According to her sons, the 71-year-old has taken to long solitary walks in the Provencal hills, during which she can be found screaming into the wind, asking the shadow of her ex-husband how and why he could have done this to her.
Yet even in her darkest moments, Gisele finds ways to connect with others. One day in early November, after the court played particularly graphic videos, she was seen comforting a group of shaken teenagers. “Forget these terrible images,” she told them. “Enjoy your youth.”
Gisele has no illusions about what the verdict will mean for her personally, but she hopes to make a difference. “I’ve already lost everything,” she has said in court. “My husband, my life — I don’t know where I am, or where I’m going. … But if this trial serves a purpose, if it helps change society, then it will not have been for nothing.”
This week, prosecutors demanded the maximum 20-year jail sentence for Dominique Pelicot, 14 years for Nicolas F. and four to 18 years for his co-defendants. Feminist organizers, though, have been warning Gisele’s supporters that they need to psychologically prepare themselves for much lighter sentences. The French legal system, they argue, has lagged behind civil society, and Gisele’s lack of consent is far from the only thing at play. “With this trial,” her lawyer told the court, “my client wants to make visible not just the crudeness of rape, but also the way in which a rape is defended in 2024.”
Camus told the press that his client “never wanted to be a role model,” but that she is “determined that her suffering not be in vain.” In court, he added that “she has taken the mud they threw at her and turned it into something noble.”
For the women who gather daily in Avignon, Gisele’s courage has created something extraordinary: a sisterhood born of pain and forged in resilience. Together, they are rewriting the narrative of sexual violence, proving that solidarity can rise even from the darkest places.
“Une pour toutes, toutes pour une,” we chant outside the courthouse — “One for all, all for one.”
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