Trial that turned wife raped by strangers into a feminist icon
by Sally Williams In Avignon · Mail OnlineWhen Dominique Pelicot and his wife Gisele retired from their jobs as an electrician and a secretary, respectively, life settled into a new pattern.
Every few weeks or so, Gisele would travel from her home in Mazan, a quiet village in the hills of Provence, and stay in Paris to help look after her grandchildren. The couple have three children and five grandchildren.
On her return, her husband – a man she once described as 'a great guy' – would often be particularly loving.
He'd collect her from the station in Avignon and drive her home, a round-trip of an hour, and cook her favourite food for dinner.
Then he'd add crushed-up sleeping pills to the dish before serving, or save them for her hot chocolate. Once, he put them in a glass of beer but they turned it blue. Gisele now knows why he threw it away.
After she'd slipped into unconsciousness, her husband of over 40 years set to work. He'd invite a man he'd met on a chat-room into his home and film him raping his wife.
Once on a mattress on the kitchen table, then the sofa, but usually in the marital bed.
On some evenings, two men would turn up, one after another. One man clocked up six visits. Dominique even arranged a session when the couple were on holiday on the Île de Rè.
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More than 80 men are alleged to have raped Gisele between 2011 and 2020. The youngest was 21; the oldest 72.
Most lived within 10 km of Mazan. The accused include two firemen, an electrician, a gardener, a journalist and a delivery van driver.
Only three who turned up at the house declined the offer of sex with Gisele. None went to the police.
The trial of Dominique Pelicot, 71, and the accused Mazan rapists has shocked the world.
The sheer number of men involved; the length of time it went on; that a husband, described by his family and friends as a good father and loving grandad, could do this to his own wife.
Above all, the shocking realisation that the accused rapists were not 'monsters' but 'ordinary men' who showed exactly what 'ordinary men' are capable of.
'It demolishes the myth that rapists are monsters who live in another world. They are 'nice guys' who are here among us,' says Blandine Deverlange, 56, a teacher and founder of Amazones d'Avignon and member of Osez Le Feminisme 84 (Dare To Be A Feminist), the groups behind the growing numbers of women who turn up at the court each day to support Gisele.
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These women clap and cheer the bravery of Gisele, who asked for the trial to be made public. She wants people to know what happened: she wants it to be a warning.
'I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,' Gisele has said. Men treated her 'like a rag doll' for more than ten years.
A 72-year-old mother and grandmother has become a symbol of resilience and courage and seized our imagination in such a troubling way.
Feminist campaigners point to the way in which the case has revealed the 'banality of male violence' against women.
It is the normality of the lives these men led that has caused such horrified soul-searching across France.
Time and again the accused are described as 'family men' by locals who knew them. Construction worker Cyrille Deville, who's 54, was 'a monsieur tout-le-monde' (a Mr Average), for example, while former supermarket employee and father-of-three Lionel Rodriguez, 44, was 'upright and honest, a loving husband and father'. Yet both now stand accused of raping an unconscious woman.
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Fresh graffiti in Avignon, where the trial is being held, reads: 'Hello to those ordinary men capable of horrible crimes.'
'The good news is there is so much evidence,' Blandine says. 'Dominique Pelicot kept footage of each rape on his computer in an unencrypted file called 'abuses'.'
There is so much of it – a full record of the events. 'We have the videos, the details of the Skype calls, the proof,' says Blandine.
But more than 30 rapists – seen in Dominique's footage but not yet identified, are still at large.
It's Friday afternoon, day 14 of the trial, and I'm sitting with Blandine in the sunlit foyer of the Palais de Justice in Avignon. It's beautiful; a high white space with lush plants and a soaring ceiling.
Supporters fill a room at the back where proceedings are being live-streamed onto a plasma screen. Inside Court A, Gisele sits with her lawyer and daughter. Gisele herself is seeing her abusers for the first time: 50 men are here today.
When the court rises for the day, the foyer is transformed by a stream of people: lawyers, family members, press with identity cards swinging from long cords around their necks.
A young woman with shiny black hair, loafers and black gown around her shoulders comes out with them.
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'She's one of my former students and is a lawyer for one of the rapists,' says Blandine. 'I know it's her job and they have to be defended, but it's very sad for me.'
She stops. There is a commotion and suddenly the men are here.
'These men are rapists,' Blandine hisses, as three of them slide behind a pillar where we're sitting.
I don't know what I was expecting but they look ordinary. Not incel types – incels being the name given men who gather online to voice their rage in violent, misogynistic ways at women who won't have sex with them.
These are just ordinary men. I shudder.
In all, 32 rapists walk out of the court and into the sunshine. In Covid masks and hoodies. One is dressed in a Lacoste T-shirt.
Another slouches out, hands thrust deep in pockets. Some look around nervously; others look ahead with eyes that show no expression. A few have taken to not hurrying away. They stop to film local journalists and activists on their iPhones.
'I'm going to rape your mother,' one shouted at Blandine, a few days ago.
Gisele emerges from court A with her daughter. The crowded lobby is filled with clapping. She has an elegant dress and well-cut hair. But I cannot block out of my mind the idea of the limp figure of Gisele.
She was only pretending to be asleep because she was shy, one of the defendants told the court, suggesting it was an erotic game.
Another said in court he did not feel he'd raped Gisele because she had been 'offered' to him by her own husband.
No condoms were used. Gisele suffered from gynaecological problems and memory lapses from all the drugs she'd been given. She had four sexually transmitted diseases.
The crime was uncovered only after Dominique was arrested for filming up women's skirts in supermarkets. It was then police found the footage on his computer.
To clear my head, Blandine and her friends take me to a cafe. We sit at an outside table and order pac a l'eau, a local speciality of lemon cordial and ice. Teenagers buzz by on mopeds. Children head home from school. Outside, life beyond the trial goes on.
But for the women of Avignon, life is completely changed.
'We are shell-shocked,' says 48-year-old Fanny Foures, who works in adult education. 'Traumatised. Everyone is talking about it. It feels like there is no normal life, only rape and violence. Only 51 have been charged: where are the other men?'
'I am afraid,' says Isabelle Boyer, 63, a retired French teacher. She is divorced with two daughters. 'When I go places and look at men, I think: 'Is it him? Him?' They were fathers, brothers, sons. It's horrible.'
'The problem is not Mazon,' says Blandine, who is married to a retired fighter pilot with three children, aged 28, 23, 21.
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'It's everywhere in the world. Women now understand there are men willing to rape them as long as they are asleep or vulnerable.'
Some commentators have been quick to label this a French issue. Misogyny, they argue, has always been part of the French culture.
Look at how the country reacted to the #MeToo movement, with top actresses including Catherine Deneuve signing a public manifesto denouncing anyone who spoke out.
Certainly the trial resonates with women in France – thousands of whom have taken to the streets in Marseille and Paris in support of Gisele with banners that read 'Je suis Gisele' and 'Not all men, but always a man'. And it's not just France.
The trial has appalled women in many countries, forcing them to look around at the men in their lives – colleagues, neighbours, husbands – and ask whether they, too, are capable of such heinous acts of violence against women.
In chatrooms and on social media, many women are also asking why men aren't talking about it in the same numbers and with the same sense of outrage.
'It clearly shows what too many men will do if they think they won't be found out,' wrote one poster on a lengthy Mumsnet thread. 'All the men were from the local area. He didn't have to cast his net very wide,' replies another.
Britain is certainly not immune. In the past five years, in England and Wales, violent crimes against women and girls increased by 37 per cent.
Violence against women is a 'national emergency', police chiefs recently declared. 'A threat to society on the same scale as terrorism.' A bold statement, given the police harbour offenders of their own.
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Yet the rate of conviction is shockingly low. According to Rape Crisis, fewer than three in 100 rapes reported from April 2023 to March 2024 in England and Wales resulted in someone being charged that same year.
These failures of the law reinforce what feminists call 'rape culture' – the idea that sexual violence is normalised and downplayed.
'Ordinary men think, yeah, we can do that too and it's not going to get us into trouble,' says linguist and Oxford University Professor Deborah Cameron, author of Language, Sexism and Misogyny.
The rise in misogyny, she believes, is part fuelled by the success of women. It's a backlash against feminism.
'Resentment of women has increased as institutional forms of misogyny have been taken down by women's own efforts,' she says. 'You hate women more when you think they're a threat to your position.
'In most cases, it's not possible for men to be the Taliban any more. They can't say: 'Get back in the kitchen, get back to the home, cover yourself up' or whatever.
What they can do is objectify women and abuse them. It's like, let's stress the one form of power that we do unequivocally still have over women – the fact that we can rape.'
At the same time, she says: 'The availability and quantity of porn online has allowed a much larger proportion of the male population to develop really, really fringe interests.'
The website Pelicot used to contact other men last year counted 500,000 visitors a month. Yet not a single one of those who saw his post inviting men to have sex with his wife 'without her knowledge' reported it.
'There is a reason why Pelicot filmed the rapes,' Professor Cameron believes. 'So he could masturbate to it later and remind himself of how he masterminded this grand scheme. It's not just sexual gratification: in men it's often connected to the sexual thrill of having this absolute power and being able to do what you want.'
The defence lawyers have started to chip away at Gisele. Last week, one lawyer insinuated she was a sexual exhibitionist who liked attention.
Didn't she allow her husband to take photos? Gisele was forced to remind the court that she was not on trial after facing what she called 'humiliating questions' from the bench and defence lawyers about her clothes, her drinking.
The trial is due to continue until the end of December. Blandine hopes each rapist will get between 15 and 20 years; life for Dominique.
'But anything can happen. Dominique could commit suicide. Gisele could get sick.' In the meantime, she and her friends draw up rotas to make sure someone is always at the court.
'At the first day of the trial it was just a few of us,' Blandine says. 'Now there are 100 or so who come here every day. Feminists, young women who want to know what happened, women who've been raped. We want Gisele to know that we are here for her, waiting for her and supporting her. Every day we clap.'