Gisèle Pelicot, who survived almost a decade of rape involving dozens of men after she was drugged by her ex-husband, will attend court in France again on Monday after one of the men convicted of raping her faces a second trial after appealing against his verdict.
Pelicot became a feminist hero after she decided to waive her right to anonymity in the 2024 trial of her former husband and 50 other men last year.
Her lawyer Antoine Camus said she would have preferred not to face the ordeal of attending another trial but would be present at the four-day trial at Nîmes court of appeal in southern France.
“She will be there to explain that a rape is a rape, that there is no such thing as a small rape,” Camus told Agence France-Presse.
Husamettin Dogan, 44, a builder who was sentenced to nine years in prison for raping Pelicot, has appealed against his conviction.
The first trial last year heard he made contact with her then husband, Dominique Pelicot, in a chatroom and drove to the couple’s home the same night in June 2019, telling his wife he was going out. He was convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot while she was unconscious.
Dogan told the first trial last year that he thought it was just a game. “I’m not a rapist, that’s too heavy for me to bear,” he said. His lawyer declined to comment before the appeal trial.
At first, 17 of the 51 convicted men said they would appeal against the verdict, but 16 gradually dropped out, leaving only one appeal.
Dominique Pelicot, one of the worst sex offenders in modern French history, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drugging his then wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her in her home in the south of France over a period of almost a decade of their marriage.
Last year’s trial in Avignon heard that Dominique Pelicot had crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into Gisèle Pelicot’s mashed potato, coffee or ice-cream and invited dozens of men to rape her in the village of Mazan in south-east France, where the couple had retired. A total of 50 other men were found guilty.
Now serving a prison sentence in solitary confinement, Dominique Pelicot will appear as a witness at the appeal court trial. He is expected to repeat what he said at the first trial: “I am a rapist and all the accused men in this room are rapists.”
Gisèle Pelicot, 72, a former logistics manager, had insisted the first rape trial in 2024 be held in public to raise awareness of drug-induced rape and abuse. “It’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them,” she said in court.
The case had a massive impact worldwide, with feminist groups on all continents backing Gisèle Pelicot and world leaders issuing statements in her support.
But campaigners and lawyers said the case was a glimpse of how widespread and commonplace rape and sexual violence remains.
Last month, a 46-year-old man in Normandy was sentenced to 12 years in prison for raping his partner while she was asleep on several occasions in 2022. Like Dominique Pelicot, he first came to the attention of police for filming up a woman’s skirt in a supermarket. Like Dominique Pelicot, investigators then found videos of the rape of his partner on his electronic devices.
The appeal trial in the Pelicot case takes place amid growing criticism of the French justice system’s treatment of rape. Several damning reports since the first trial last year have shown that the French system is continuing to fail rape complainants on a large scale.
The European court of human rights this year condemned France for “failing to protect” the rights of three teenagers who reported rape.
One teenager who accused more than a dozen firemen of abuse was found to have suffered “secondary victimisation and discriminatory treatment” by the French justice system, which failed to protect her dignity “by permitting the use of moralising and guilt-inducing statements, which propagated gender stereotypes”.
In another case, that of an assistant hospital pharmacist who filed a rape complaint against her head of department, France was found to have violated the European convention on human rights.
This month, the High Council for Equality, an advisory body attached to the French prime minister’s office, found in a report that despite a threefold increase in rape complaints in France since the worldwide #MeToo movement in 2016, the number of cases going to trial remained dangerously low, and the number of rape convictions amounted to only 3.3% of complaints.
More than 130 feminist groups are campaigning for sweeping reform of every level of the French justice system in dealing with rape, calling for major funding increases and better state support and prevention.
Among these campaigners, Anne-Cécile Mailfert of the Fondation des Femmes said the Pelicot rape case last year “was a kind of electric shock, it allowed a lot of people to talk about rape and marital rape. However, there has not really been a political response. There is a great deal lacking in France, and serious dysfunction [in the justice system].”
Separately, parliament is currently debating adding a consent-based definition of rape to the wording in French law.
Marie-Charlotte Garin, a Green MP who backs rewording the law, said the Pelicot case had transformed French society’s understanding of consent and changing the law’s wording would help “a cultural change to move from a culture of rape to a culture of consent”.
But Garin said wording was not enough to address persistent “failures” of the entire French state towards rape survivors. “We need a revolution in the system to improve how we deal with rape,” she said.
