French judges plan to deliver hugely anticipated verdicts on Thursday (December 19, 2024) in a historic drugging-and-rape trial that has turned the victim, Gisèle Pelicot, into a feminist hero.

Everything about the trial in the southern French city of Avignon has been exceptional, most of all Ms. Pelicot herself.

She has been the epitome of steely dignity and resilience through the more than three months of appalling testimony, including extracts from her now ex-husband’s sordid library of homemade abuse videos.

Dominique Pelicot carefully catalogued how he habitually tranquilized his wife of 50 years during their last decade together, so he and dozens of strangers he met online could rape her while she was unconscious.

Staggeringly, he found it easy to recruit his alleged accomplices. Many had jobs. Most are fathers. They came from all walks of life, with the youngest in his 20s and the oldest in their 70s. In all, 50 men, including Dominique Pelicot, stood trial for aggravated rape and attempted rape. Another man was tried for aggravated sexual assault.

“They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag,” Gisèle Pélicot testified in court.

Sifting through the charges, the evidence, the backgrounds of the accused and their defenses took so long that Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot had birthdays during the trial, with both turning 72.

The five judges are ruling by secret ballot, with a majority required to convict and also on the sentences of those found guilty. Campaigners against sexual violence are hoping for exemplary prison terms and view the trial as a possible turning point in the fight against rape culture and the use of drugs to subdue victims.

At protests during the trial, demonstrators held up pop-art images of Gisèle Pelicot with her bob haircut and round sunglasses, along with slogans such as, “Shame is changing sides” and “Gisèle, we believe you !” They also booed defendants as they entered the courthouse yelling, “We recognize you” and “Shame.”

Dominique Pelicot’s meticulous recording and cataloguing of the encounters — police found more than 20,000 photos and videos on his computer drives, in folders titled “abuse,” “her rapists” or “night alone” — provided investigators with an abundance of evidence and helped lead them to the defendants. That also set the case apart from many others in which sexual violence is unreported or isn’t prosecuted because the evidence isn’t as strong.

Gisèle Pelicot and her lawyers fought successfully for shocking video and other evidence to be heard and watched in open court, to show that she bore no shame and was clearly unconscious during the alleged rapes, undermining some defendants’ claims that she might have been feigning sleep or even have been a willing participant.

Her courage — one woman, alone, against dozens of men — proved inspirational. Supporters, mostly women, lined up early each day for a place in the courthouse or to cheer and thank her as she walked in and out — stoic, humble, and gracious but also cognizant that her ordeal resonated beyond Avignon and France.

She said she was fighting for “all those people around the world, women and men, who are victims of sexual violence.”

“Look around you: You are not alone,” she said.

Dominique Pelicot testified that he hid tranquilizers in food and drink that he gave his wife, knocking her out so profoundly that he could do what he wanted to her for hours.

In his medical records, police investigators found that he had been prescribed hundreds of tranquilizer tablets as well as the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. He told police that he started drugging his wife in 2011, before they left the Paris region to retire in Mazan, a small town in Provence where he invited other men to rape her in their bedroom.

In the videos, police investigators counted 72 different abusers but weren’t able to identify them all. Dominique Pelicot told investigators that he also shared advice with people about drugging techniques and provided tranquilizers to others, too.

Gisèle Pelicot told investigators that the blackouts she suffered grew more frequent after they retired to Mazan in 2013, but that they stopped after her then-husband was taken into custody in 2020.

Spurred on by the trial, France’s government this month helped roll out a media campaign alerting the public to the dangers of chemical submission, with a number for victims to call. The campaign poster reads: “Chemical submission takes away your memories but leaves traces.”

Although some of the accused — including Dominique Pelicot — acknowledged they were guilty of rape, many did not, even in the face of video evidence. The hearings have sparked wider debate in France about whether the country’s legal definition of rape should be expanded to include specific mention of consent.

Some defendants argued that Dominique Pelicot’s consent covered his wife, too. Some sought to excuse their behavior by insisting that they hadn’t intended to rape anyone when they responded to the husband’s invites. Some laid blame at his door, saying he misled them into thinking they were partaking in consensual kink. And some suggested that perhaps he had also drugged them — which he denied.

Campaigners refused to buy it. “A rape is a rape” read a large banner hung opposite the courthouse.

Prosecutor Laure Chabaud appealed to the judges for a verdict that will make clear “that ordinary rape doesn’t exist, that accidental or involuntary rape doesn’t exist,” according to French media that followed the daily proceedings.

What Gisèle Pelicot initially described as a happy marriage to “a great guy” started to unravel in September 2020, when a supermarket security guard caught Dominique Pelicot surreptitiously filming up women’s skirts.

Police investigators called her in for questioning and confronted her with the unfathomable — some of her husband’s secret photos of her.

She left him, taking just two suitcases, “all that was left for me of 50 years of life together.”

Prosecutors have asked for the maximum possible penalty — 20 years — for Dominique Pelicot, and sentences of 10-18 years for the others tried on rape charges.

“Twenty years between the four walls of a prison,” Mr. Chabaud, the prosecutor, said. “It’s both a lot and not enough.”

Paris:

Around late September, staff manning the phones at 39 19, France’s main anonymous hotline for women who are victims of violence, began noticing a new type of case.

“The caller thinks she’s been drugged and potentially raped. She had suspicions a few months ago and all the information around the Mazan trial has helped her put the pieces together,” a staff member detailed in a write-up of one of several calls seen by Reuters.

The trial, in which Dominique Pelicot has admitted to drugging his wife Gisele and recruiting dozens of men online to rape her while she was unconscious over nearly a decade, is reaching its end. Dozens of verdicts are expected on Thursday.

The mass rape trial has shocked France and its implications will be felt far beyond the Avignon courthouse where judges have heard and seen more than three months of evidence. Gisele Pelicot, 72, has become a feminist hero both at home and abroad for waiving her right to anonymity and standing up to her abusers in court.

There are also signs that the case has started shifting social and medical practices in France around drug-facilitated sexual assault, according to 10 doctors, social workers and activists Reuters spoke with.

Women’s rights group Solidarite Femmes, which runs the 39 19 hotline, said it had noticed a clear increase in women reporting suspected cases of “chemical submission” – the act of drugging someone without their consent for criminal purposes – as well as sexual violence within a couple.

“Women call us citing the trial, saying it resonates with their experience,” Mine Gunbay, the head of the organisation, told Reuters.

To better answer these callers’ new questions, Solidarite Femmes organised a training for its phone counsellors in early December.

Lucie, who declined to share her full name due to regular threats received by 39 19 staff, attended the training in Paris. Among other things, she said she learned that most drug-facilitated assaults take place at home rather than in bars.

She also learned about the legal and medical resources that exist to help suspected victims. Two days later, she was able to point a caller in the right direction with her new knowledge.

CHANGES IN MEDICAL CARE

The Pelicot trial has also prompted soul-searching among some in the medical community, with doctors seeking to deepen their understanding of chemical submission.

Doctors failed to identify the years of drugging and sexual assaults committed against Gisele Pelicot, who was tested for Alzheimer’s and brain tumors in an attempt to find the cause of the mysterious blackouts she suffered at her home in the southeastern village of Mazan.

Leila Chaouachi, a pharmacist who founded the CRAFS, a centre opened this year to provide information for medical staff and potential victims on the issue of drug-facilitated assault, said doctors and nurses were eager to improve their knowledge in the wake of the Pelicot case.

“We are overwhelmed with training requests from all over the country,” Chaouachi said. The trainings include understanding what drug-facilitated assault symptoms can look like and how to collect evidence of the drugging when possible.

In late November, the government announced measures to ensure potential victims have better access to testing for the presence of drugs in their system, pushed in part by Gisele Pelicot’s daughter’s advocacy work through M’Endors Pas (Don’t put me to sleep), a group she launched last year to raise awareness on drug-facilitated assault.

An amendment to create a pilot scheme offering free blood tests to those who suspected they had been drugged and assaulted was included in the 2025 budget bill, but the legislation failed to pass in the political turmoil that toppled former Prime Minister Michel Barnier earlier this month.

The proposal must now wait for fresh talks over the 2025 budget, expected to begin in January. But measures already adopted are testament to the impact of the Pelicot case on French attitudes to drug-facilitated assault, said Christine Louis-Vahdat, a representative of France’s Medical Association.

“Without the trial, it would have probably taken much longer to obtain the funding,” she said.

Louis-Vahdat said the proposed measure, that could be scaled up in the future, would be a crucial step to ensuring doctors have the means to spot cases of drug-facilitated assault.

“The trial has put a spotlight on doctors’ lack of tools,” she said.

The case has also inspired academic research. Doctors at Geneva University Hospitals have recently incorporated chemical submission into an ongoing study on sexual abuse cases after receiving data requests from reporters covering the trial.

“This trial will, I hope, be a point of no-return,” said Chaouachi.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

The daughter of the French man standing trial for enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily-sedated wife on Tuesday clashed with her father at his trial, shouting in the courtroom that he would “die in lies”. 

Since early September, Dominique Pelicot has been in the dock along with 49 other men for organising the rapes and sexual abuse of his now ex-wife Gisele Pelicot. In a closing statement, Dominique Pelicot again admitted to the accusations, saying that his “motive” was wanting to satisfy a “fantasy”.

“I came to do what I did through people who willingly accepted what I proposed,” he told the court.

Dominique Pelicot, as in previous statements, went back to his past, saying that he was affected throughout his life by a rape he said he suffered at the age of nine in hospital, and then at the age of 14 being forced to witness the gang-rape of a young girl at a building site.

“I don’t know when I’ll get out, but if I do get out (of prison), I don’t have any plans. What saddens me the most is that people think I’m capable of certain things that I’m not capable of doing,” he added.

Family lawyer Antoine Camus then interjected that Dominique Pelicot’s daughter Caroline Darian, joined in court by her brothers David and Florian, needed an “audible and human response” to the actions she says she is “convinced” she suffered at his hands.

Caroline Darian, a pen name, in 2022, wrote a book “Et j’ai cesse de t’appeler papa” (“And I stopped calling you dad”). She believes she was also assaulted by her father who took intimate photographs of her.

“I am not going to try to convince her with perverse answers,” Dominique Pelicot replied.

“I don’t remember taking these photos. I tell her straight in the eyes that I never touched her.”

He then turned to her directly and said: “Caroline, I have never done anything to you.”

But she interrupted, saying: “You lie, you don’t have the courage to tell the truth! Even about your ex-wife!” 

“You will die in lies! Alone, alone in lies Dominique Pelicot!”, she continued before being interrupted by judge Roger Arata.

Nude photos taken without her knowledge and photomontages of Caroline Darian with lewd titles were found on her father’s hard drive. In some, she appears asleep, sometimes wearing her mother’s underwear.

A total of 51 men, including Dominique Pelicot, are on trial, with one defendant still at large.