The shocking trial of 51 men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot began on September 2nd, 2024 in the provincial town of Avignon, France, receiving astounding international attention. This is partly due to her courageous decision to forgo the automatic anonymity afforded to her by the French justice system in favour of making her trial public. Her decision to do so has had repercussions that go beyond French borders, igniting a compelling debate about the shame and stigma attached to victims of sexual assault.
This raises the question: why has Gisèle Pelicot’s refusal of anonymity sparked powerful discussion on sexual assault worldwide? Essentially, what’s in a name?
The discovery of Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse began on September 12th, 2020, when Dominique Pelicot was arrested after being caught upskirting several women with a mobile phone in a supermarket in Carpentras, near Mazan, where the couple had retired seven years prior. A subsequent investigation into his electronic devices revealed about 20,000 images and videos meticulously labelled with explicit titles, showing around 70 men having sex with an unconscious woman. This was Gisèle Pelicot, his wife.
Dominique Pelicot stored these files in a folder entitled “Abuse,” further documenting each visit with crude descriptions and captions of the men’s names. These were later used by the police to identify 50 of the men who Dominique Pelicot had been allowing to rape Gisele Pelicot.
The police discovered that from 2011 to 2020, Dominique Pelicot had been frequently drugging Gisèle Pelicot using a mix of sleeping pills and the anti-anxiety medicine lorazepam. Thereafter, Dominique would rape his wife, or invite other men to do the same through an online forum called “à son insu” (“without her knowledge”) on a now-defunct anonymous chat site called “Coco.”
Over this period, Gisèle Pelicot experienced several medical issues such as regular memory loss and extreme fatigue as a result of the frequent drugging and physical abuse she was unknowingly being subjected to. Fearing that she might have Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, she sought consultations with several doctors and neurologists, none of whom were able to explain her symptoms. Throughout, Dominique Pelicot insisted on attending her appointments and assured her that there was nothing seriously wrong with her, even suggesting that her health issues were due to exhaustion from looking after her grandchildren. It was only after the arrest of Dominique Pelicot that she learned the truth.
Gisèle Pelicot’s attorney, Stéphane Babonneau, opened the trial of one of “France’s worst sexual criminals” with these words, powerfully capturing Gisèle Pelicot’s motivation behind forgoing anonymity.
In French law, the dissemination of the identity of victims of sexual assault or abuse is prohibited without the written consent of the victim to reveal their identity. This has been upheld to protect the victim from further demeaning during the legal process following a rape complaint. However, in many ways it has also prevented victims from getting justice by allowing their abusers to stay out of the public eye.
Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to revoke her anonymity has allowed her to share her story, ensuring the men who abused her would not go unnamed. Her determination to help “unrecognised victims whose stories often remain in the shadows” has inspired millions around the world. This included the hundreds of people who gathered outside the courtrooms every day of the three-month-long trial in a show of support, and of disgust towards the 51 men on trial.
The crowd screamed, “Rapist- we see you!”
On 19 December 2024, Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence for rape under French law. 47 of the accused were also found given various length prison sentences, and all were found guilty of either rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
Several groups have been dissatisfied with the results of the trial, arguing that sentencing has been too lenient. However, in 2020, almost 80% of the 44,230 cases which involved an offence of sexual violence were closed without any prosecution at all. This marks the Pelicot rape trial as a powerful step forward in changing attitudes towards the severity of sexual violence and how the perpetrators of such violence should be punished.
Many of the cases in 2020 avoided formal investigation because prosecutors could not identify sufficient evidence that a perpetrator used violence, threat, coercion or surprise: the current definition of rape under French law. Excluded from this definition is the concept of consent, which played a major role in the trial of Dominique Pelicot and the other 50 men.
Several of the defence lawyers in the Pelicot rape trial argued that their clients did not realise that Gisèle Pelicot had not consented, or that the consent of her husband was enough to prevent their assault from being rape.
Following the trial, debate over whether consent should be included in the definition of rape in France has experienced a resurgence. A survey conducted in 2023 prior to the trial found that 89% of French citizens wanted Emmanuel Macron to support a European definition of rape including consent. The widespread publicity surrounding the Pelicot rape trial may push this percentage even higher.
Yet, the issue remains complex. Proponents for the inclusion of consent argue that it could reduce the number of cases dismissed without investigation because there was insufficient evidence towards the perpetrator’s intention to ignore consent. Following the conclusion of the trial, French MPs Véronique Riotton and Marie-Charlotte Garin presented a report of a year-long’s information gathering to advocate for French rape laws to include “the notion of non-consent into the criminal definition of rape and sexual assault.” The report argued that rape culture as a whole in France would never be able to be challenged effectively without a law that is clearer about the importance of consent.
By contrast, Stéphane Babonneau is among those less in favour of changing the definition to include consent. He believes that this would put more pressure on sexual assault victims to prove that they did not consent, and make it more difficult to identify the difference between freely given consent and consent under pressure.
Conversations about the definition of rape and what it represents for sexual assault trials are a large part of what Gisèle Pelicot hoped to encourage through allowing the trial to be public. Her brave decision inspired many in France, with thousands of people taking part in protests across France on September 14th, 2024. Gisèle Pelicot’s image and the message “Shame must change sides” have been increasingly used in street art across France, alongside other messages such as “m’endors pas” (“don’t put me to sleep”). A significant outcome of the trial has been greater awareness of the use of drugs in sexual assault: the anonymous hotline for women who are victims of violence, 3919, has received so many more calls concerning drugging in sexual assault that they organised training for the staff on how to better answer the caller’s questions.
Giséle Pelicot has also received vast international support, being named “Person of the Year” by The New European and appearing on the digital cover of Vogue Germany with the capitalised caption “NO MORE SHAME.” Women’s rights groups around the world have praised her for transforming the narratives of shame and stigma applied to victims of sexual assault. One group, Australia’s Older Women’s Network, sent Giséle Pelicot a scarf featuring the work of Mulyatingki Marney, an 83-year-old Aboriginal artist, as a symbol of solidarity and support.
Giséle Pelicot has proved to the world the incredible effect that the refusal to be anonymous can have. She has demonstrated the power of a name.