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Opinion|Gisèle Pelicot Has Changed France
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/opinion/gisele-pelicot-rape-trial.html
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Guest Essay
Dec. 19, 2024, 1:46 p.m. ET
By Megan Clement
Ms. Clement is a journalist who writes about gender inequality. She wrote from Paris.
It is over. Dominique Pelicot has been found guilty of orchestrating and participating in the mass rape of his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, in their home in the quiet town of Mazan in the South of France. He has been given the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. All of the co-defendants have been found guilty of sexual assault, attempted rape or rape.
The trial is a story of what ordinary men did to one ordinary woman. The defendants represent a broad cross-section of French society. Ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s, they include a nurse, a factory worker, technicians and shopkeepers.
It is also the story of what at least 51, but almost certainly more, men did to one woman while she was drugged. And because Mr. Pelicot filmed and kept records, many of the precise details of what they did were inescapable — an extraordinary wealth of evidence. This was a case that France could not ignore.
At first it seemed that we were doomed to bear witness to a grim spectacle, a media frenzy over the appalling details of a nauseating crime that left its victim, in her own words, “a field of ruins.” But there was one more extraordinary element that soon came to light: the strength of Ms. Pelicot.
First, she refused anonymity. Then, with patient, powerful insistence that rapists be held accountable for their actions — “It’s difficult for me to hear that it’s basically banal to have raped Madame Pelicot,” she said — she opened up a conversation about sexual violence in a country where a serious reckoning was well overdue.
Convictions for rape are rare in France — 94 percent of reported cases were dropped in 2020, according to a 2024 report by France’s Public Policy Institute. The same report estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of rape complaints ended in a criminal conviction. Speaking after the verdicts were handed down, Ms. Pelicot paid tribute to those who have been denied justice: “I think of the victims, unrecognized, whose stories often remain hidden. I want you to know that we share the same struggle.”
