Gisele Pelicot gives closing argument in shocking French trial

For more than two months, Gisele Pelicot sat in the courtroom while a video shot by her husband showing numerous men sexually abusing her was played in court.

She was asleep during all of these rapes.

Pelicot did not leave the courtroom when these films were shown. In fact, she fought hard to have the videos shown to the public.

On Tuesday, Pelicot made her closing statement in court in the trial of the 51 men accused of rape after her husband drugged them for nearly a decade and invited the men to his home to abuse them. The case has gripped France and beyond, sparking feminist protests and sparking a debate over the prevalence of rape and sexual violence.

When Pelicot spoke in court during the trial, she never shied away from shifting full responsibility and shame back onto the accused rapists, inspiring the slogan “Shame Must Switch Sides” adopted by feminist protesters. Your closing remarks were no exception.

“It is time for society to confront this patriarchal, macho society and change its view of rape,” she said.

In the courtroom were many of the defendants, men from different walks of life, professions and backgrounds. During the trial, they said that they thought they were just participants in their husband’s sexual games and did not know that what they were doing was rape.

Pelicot directly criticized her “cowardice.”

“If you walk into a bedroom and see a motionless body, when (do you decide) not to react? Why didn’t you go and report it to the police immediately?”

More: “We are all Gisèle”: French women rise up against “rape culture” during Gisèle Pelicot trial.

“For me it is the process of cowardice, there is no other way to describe it,” she said.

The “lack of understanding of what abuse is” showed that a perpetrator could be “anyone,” even someone “who does not see themselves as an abuser,” said Violette Perrotte, director of Le Maison des Femmes, a French nonprofit organization The company runs health centers for women who have been victims of violence.

“We always say that when it comes to domestic violence, there is not just one type of victim and one type of perpetrator,” she said. The trial “showed the diversity of people who can abuse.”

“Our family was destroyed”

Until she was contacted by police, Gisele Pelicot believed she had a happy marriage to her husband Dominique Pelicot. She believed that the memory loss and worrying symptoms she suffered for years had nothing to do with it at all and caused her to fear she had a brain tumor or Alzheimer’s and to see many doctors, The New York Times reported.

But the statement came in 2020 after officers arrested her husband when he was caught filming women’s skirts in a supermarket. On his confiscated electronic devices they found around 300 photos and videos showing her being abused by 72 different men.

Dominique Pelicot made contact with the men on Coco.gg, a now-closed anonymous chat site that has been implicated in a series of murders, rapes and assaults.

Dominique Pelicot, for his part, took direct responsibility in court weeks ago: “I am a rapist, just like everyone else in this room,” he said.

But in his closing statement, Pelicot claimed he was innocent of abusing her daughter, who goes by the pseudonym Caroline Darian, or her grandchildren, even though nude photos of Darian were found in her father’s possession.

“You don’t even have the courage to tell the truth!” Darian shouted in the courtroom. “You will die in a lie. You are alone in your lie.”

“Our family has been destroyed,” David Pelicot, one of her two brothers, said in court Monday. He said he expects the trial to punish the accused men, including his father, whom he referred to as “that man,” for “the horrors they inflicted on my mother.”

When his father interrupted his statement to apologize, David Pelicot shot back: “Never!”

“It’s been four years since I lost my father,” Florian Pelicot, the couple’s other son, said in court. He said he hoped the court would give his father a severe sentence to encourage other rape victims to speak out.

Perrotte said she believes the trial will have some impact, such as highlighting that most rapists are already known to their victims and that there is no “perfect victim” or “perfect crime.” For example, her organization now trains professionals in “chemical submission,” the term used to describe the administration of drugs to a rape victim.

“Patriarchy still has very bright days ahead of it, but it has definitely had an impact on how we view perpetrators,” she said.

Contribution: Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Gisele Pelicot slams ‘patriarchal society’ in shocking French rape case