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Justice was served on Dominique Pelicot today when a court in Avignon, France found him guilty of raping his ex-wife, Gisèle, over a ten-year period, and enlisting more than fifty other men to molest her as she slept.
From 2011 to 2020, the seventy-two-year-old Pelicot drugged his wife of thirty-eight years and invited men he had met online to rape Gisèle. She had no idea of the abuse that was being inflicted on her, nor why she was suffering from memory loss and blackouts. His depravity came to an end in 2020 when he was arrested for filming under a woman’s skirt in a supermarket. When police examined his phones and laptop, they discovered more than 20,000 videos and photos of his wife being raped by him and others. It is believed that as many as thirty more men raped Gisèle but have not been identified.
How could so many men, ordinary men — fathers, husbands, brothers — participate in such a debauched crime?
Pelicot was sentenced to twenty years in prison at the end of a trial that began in September and came to grip not just France but the wider world. How could so many men, ordinary men — fathers, husbands, brothers — participate in such a debauched crime? “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” Gisèle told the court, early in the trial.
Gisèle watched as the defendants were all found guilty and given sentences ranging from three to twenty years. It’s reported that Gisèle’s children are disappointed with some of the short sentences handed out to defendants.
The men in the dock represented a broad cross section of society: there was a soldier, a plumber, a retired firefighter. The youngest was in his late twenties the eldest in his seventies. There was a Jerome and a Mohammed, an Adrien and an Ahmed. Some showed contrition, others didn’t.
One, Simone Mekenese, was sentenced to nine years. The father of six lived next door to the Pelicots and, like most of the defendants, blamed Dominique Pelicot for manipulating him.
The trial has raised questions in France about the “pornification” of society since the internet enabled users to access all manner of hardcore pornography. Pelicot used an illicit chat forum called Coco to recruit his fellow rapists. The site, which was founded in 2003, was eventually shut down this year but in its twenty years of existence it became an online community for rapists, pedophiles and homophobes. According to French prosecutors, Coco was implicated in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity involving nearly 500 victims.
Gisèle Pelicot has become a feminist hero and, according to one French broadcaster, her “refusal to be shamed has won her international acclaim.” So it should. Her courage has been remarkable and inspirational. “I wanted all women who are rape victims to say to themselves: ‘Mrs. 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.”
France’s political class are for a rare moment united in their response to the verdict, and in particular the dignified stoicism of Gisèle Pelicot. The trial, announced Manuel Bompard of la France insoumise, “must be a turning point in the fight against the rape culture that is corrupting society as a whole. I admire Gisèle Pelicot, her courage, strength and determination. Thank you, Madame.”
