“La honte doit changer de camp,” or “Shame must change sides.”
Gisèle Pélicot has a message for the world: “La honte doit changer de camp,” or “Shame must change sides.”
Pélicot, a French grandmother, age 72, says she was “sacrificed on the alter of vice” after she discovered that her soon-to-be-ex-husband had drugged her into unconsciousness and then invited more than 80 men to rape her while he filmed them over a period of about a decade. She chose to forgo a private trial, the kind her former husband was hoping for, and instead is holding a public trial, testifying, she said, “for all women” who had been assaulted while drugged, and to ensure that “no woman suffers this.” Her attorneys say that she wants to make sure that shame does not fall on the side of the victim, but the side of the accused. There are so many men on trial that the court had to build a second glass box in the courtroom for those in custody.
As the trial opened, Gisèle’s supporters were outside the courtroom, calling for French law to be changed to redefine rape as any sex without consent. The current law defines it as “penetration by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”. They want the law to state explicitly that a rape is committed if the perpetrator uses drugs to “impair the judgment” of the victim, according to U.K.-based The Times.
Ms. Pélicot did not find out about the abuses until she was contacted by police. They had seized Dominique Pélicot’s phones, cameras and other electronic devices after he was caught filming up the skirts of women in supermarkets in September 2020. On his devices, in a folder labeled “Abuses,” police found 20,000 videos and photographs dating back to 2011. From those, they identified 92 rapes, committed by 83 men, ranging in age from 26 to 74. The alleged perpetrators include builders, office workers, retirees, a soldier, a journalist, a nurse, a prison guard, an electrician, a fireman — and her neighbor. Many are in stable relationships and have children, according to The New York Times. French police notified Ms. Pélicot about what they found in November 2020.
As the trial began last week, Ms. Pélicot told the court that she thought they were a strong couple, that she trusted Mr. Pélicot completely and that she believed they had everything they needed to be happy. After she retired in 2013, they moved from the Paris region to the area of Provence in southern France, landing in Mazan, a small town of about 6,000 people.
It was after the move that she began experiencing strange symptoms. She was losing weight. Her hair was falling out, she began having gynecological symptoms and, she told the court, she was most worried about losing her memory. She would sometimes awake in the morning with no recollection of saying goodbye to her children, watching a movie or getting into bed, she said. Her husband drove her to appointments with specialists to check for a brain tumor, or the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. When she tested positive for four different sexually transmitted diseases, he accused her of having affairs.
When Gisèle Pélicot called her daughter, Caroline Darian, to tell her what police had shown her in November 2020, Gisèle testified in court that “When I told my daughter, she screamed like a wild beast. I will never forget this.” Shortly after the horrific revelation, the daughter was frantically working with her two brothers to move her mother out of the home when she received a phone call from the police saying they needed to talk to her in person. Darian testified on Friday that besides the thousands of photos and videos of her unconscious mother being abused, the officers had discovered two photos of another naked woman asleep in bed, with the covers off and the lights on.
“There, I discovered myself and I understood that the man who was my father, in whom I had total confidence, who I thought had integrity, who respected his daughter, who was proud of her, who had always encouraged her, I discovered that in fact, my father had photographed me without my knowledge, naked,” reports The Independent. He also had naked pictures of his daughters-in-law.
Dominique Pélicot, 71, has already admitted that he put her to sleep, offered her to other men he found via online chatrooms, and filmed them. Pélicot is also facing trial for an attempted rape in 1999 and a rape and murder in 1991, having recently been identified through DNA traces recorded at the time. He admits the attempted rape and denies the rape and murder.
Fifty-one men are on trial for allegedly taking part in the rape and abuse, while more than 30 were unable to be identified or traced by police. Only three men fled the house after finding Ms. Pélicot unconscious. Yet, there is no evidence they, or any of the many others who saw the “advertisement” Mr. Pélicot put in chatrooms ever called police. If convicted, Mr. Pélicot and the other men face 20 years in prison. The trial is expected to last four months.
Originally published in the Deseret News