Another Guilty Verdict After Appeal in Gisèle Pelicot Rape Case

The trial ended much as it did last year, pronouncing an unemployed builder guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot when she was in a drugged, near-comatose state.

It took the jury and the judges less than three hours on Thursday to condemn the man, Husamettin Dogan, for a second time. He was among the 51 convicted in a mass trial last year. The court sentenced him to 10 years in prison, adding one year to his previous sentence.

As she did at the end of the last trial, Ms. Pelicot stepped out of the courtroom into throngs of clapping and singing supporters. She made no public statement.

Testifying in court a day earlier, she vibrated with frustration, reacting to Mr. Dogan’s statement that he considered himself a victim who had been tricked into a crime.

“I am ashamed of you,” she said.

The case, first tried last year in Avignon, shocked the country and the world. Ms. Pelicot’s husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, admitted to having mixed crushed sleeping pills into his wife’s food and drink for almost a decade to rape her when she was unconscious. Then, he invited dozens of men he met online to join him, charging them nothing but regularly filming the encounters.

After a four-month trial, all of the accused were convicted, most for raping Ms. Pelicot, and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 15 years, except for Mr. Pelicot, who received the maximum prison term of 20 years.

During the initial trial, Ms. Pelicot was transformed from a private, unknown retired manager and grandmother to a feminist icon. She insisted that her personal horror be opened to the public and that the videos her husband took of strangers penetrating her limp, snoring body be played in the court as evidence. She said she wanted to force the country to confront and discuss rape.

She achieved that goal: The spectacle of 51 men all on trial at once — a representative cross-section of working- and middle-class France, tradesmen and truck drivers, ages 26 to 74 — caused a deep reckoning in France about rape culture, the notion of consent and the use of prescription drugs to victimize people in their families.

While last year’s trial spanned four months and involved 51 defendants, with Mr. Pelicot at its center, the appeal lasted just four days and focused on one: Mr. Dogan. He is a 44-year-old married man, with a difficult childhood, and was the main caregiver for his severely disabled son.

In essence, Mr. Dogan’s defense was the same made by dozens of defendants last year: that he was tricked by Mr. Pelicot, described by Mr. Dogan’s lawyers as a sadistic sex-addicted psychopath, into thinking that he was joining a playful sexual threesome, and that Ms. Pelicot’s sleeping state was part of the libertine scenario.

They contested the chilling videos that had been played as evidence, saying they were partial, and had been carefully edited by Mr. Pelicot. They asked, Why would Mr. Dogan have agreed to being filmed, if he had known he was committing rape?

“How can we believe Dominique Pelicot when we know it was him who orchestrated this all?” asked Sylvie Menvielle, one of Mr. Dogan’s two lawyers. “The videos are the final touches of his criminal masterpiece.”

Mr. Dogan was so shocked by his arrest two years after the encounter that he developed rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease, Ms. Menvielle said.

Through the trial, Mr. Dogan entered the courtroom gingerly, using a single crutch, and then sat slumped in a chair. He managed to stand to deliver his final statement before the jury began its deliberation. “I never wanted to hurt this woman,” he said.

Chief Prosecutor Dominique Sie argued that Mr. Dogan’s continued denial of raping Ms. Pelicot was an exemplar of rape culture and warranted an even greater sentence.

“Mr. Dogan, perhaps you are not uniquely responsible for the destruction of a woman, but you contributed to it,” Mr. Sie said Thursday. “And you refuse to admit it, like the other patriarchal dinosaurs.”

“It remains to be seen how it will evolve,” he added, “this rape culture to a culture of consent.”

In his own closing statements, one of Ms. Pelicot’s two lawyers, Antoine Camus, said he hoped a second conviction would send a clear message that consent must be given personally and that there are no minor kinds of rape. “You don’t need to be Dominique Pelicot to be a rapist,” he said.

Each night, as the court closed for the day, crowds filled the courthouse lobby and the street outside to applaud and cheer Ms. Pelicot, as they did during the earlier trial. Feminist activists sang songs, hoping the trial’s attention would push further changes in French society.

Among them was Yaël Mahmani, 55, who said she was shocked at how little Mr. Dogan had reflected on his actions since last year’s trial. “We won’t be able to progress collectively unless men collectively and individually ask themselves, At what point have I committed acts that are reprehensible?” she said.