Gisèle Pelicot Returns to Court to Confront Assailant in Rape Case

Speaking out for the first time since dozens of men, including her ex-husband, were convicted of raping her while she was deeply sedated, Gisèle Pelicot rose in another French courtroom on Wednesday to denounce the single man who is appealing his conviction.

She spoke quickly. She was angry.

“I would have thought in one year, he would have reflected on what happened and not be in denial,” she said.

“You haven’t understood. When are you going to recognize you raped me? It’s a crime to rape an unconscious woman. When did I ever give you consent? Never.”

Ms. Pelicot, 72, became a national hero in France last year as a victim of serial rape who announced she would not feel ashamed, allowed her name to be made public and opened her personal horror to the public.

Dominique Pelicot, her husband at the time of the crimes, admitted to mixing drugs in her meals and drinks for almost a decade, and then offering up her unconscious body to strangers he met online.

In December, Mr. Pelicot and dozens of other men were found guilty of rape, and given prison sentences ranging from three to 20 years. One of them, Husamettin Dogan, is appealing the verdict and his nine-year sentence.

The case has been heard by three judges and a jury in the appeal court in Nîmes this week. A verdict is expected on Thursday.

Unlike most rape victims, Ms. Pelicot, who divorced her husband in 2024, has a library of evidence in the form of thousands of videos and photos Mr. Pelicot took of the encounters. As in the trial last year, Ms. Pelicot pushed for the videos to be viewed in the open courtroom.

On Wednesday morning, more than a dozen were played, clearly showing Ms. Pelicot on a bed in a deep state of sleep, dressed in lacy garters and multicolored sandals and a black blindfold. The sound of her snores filled the courtroom at times, while Mr. Dogan penetrated her limp, unmoving body in different positions. The judge pointed out she was “nearly suffocating.”

A couple of times, Mr. Dogan was seen smiling toward the camera.

Mr. Dogan, 44, is a married father of a child with severe disabilities for whom he is the main caregiver. He told the court he had taken part in a number of sexual liaisons with couples he had met online and had arrived at the Pelicots’ house in southern France on a summer night in 2019 for what he thought was a consensual threesome.

He said that he had found it strange that Ms. Pelicot was so asleep that she “seemed dead,” but that Mr. Pelicot had reassured him, saying that it was part of their game and that she had taken relaxants and would wake up “little by little.”

Mr. Dogan said he believed Ms. Pelicot had consented, because he thought he had communicated with her as well on the website where he met Mr. Pelicot, and he had heard her voice in the background when the two men had spoken on the phone to arrange their date.

“I fell into his trap,” he said.

After watching the videos in the courtroom, he said that what he had done to Ms. Pelicot was a sexual act, but not rape. He defined rape as “someone who is tied up and forced.”

“I never raped,” he said.

When asked by one of Ms. Pelicot’s lawyers if he thought he was also a victim, he said: “Yes. I’m a victim.”

Though her decision to open the trial to the public, in order to start a discussion about rape in France, has made her internationally lauded, Ms. Pelicot has avoided public attention since the original trial ended last December.

From the stand in the middle of the courtroom, she said she had been trying to rebuild her life, and thought she was on the “right path” after discovering that the man she was married to for decades, whom she said she had trusted completely, had betrayed her in such a profound way, shattering their family. In addition to raping his former wife and disseminating illicit images of her, Mr. Pelicot was convicted of raping another woman, and of capturing indecent images of his daughter and daughters-in-law without their permission.

Ms. Pelicot said she thought that when the police arrested Mr. Pelicot and showed her some early evidence, she dissociated, her brain building a wall to protect her. She added she was lucky that she had suffered no flashbacks.

When a defense lawyer, Jean-Marc Darrigade, said Mr. Dogan believed he had been manipulated, she cut him off. “He knew very well what he did,” she said.

At one point, Ms. Pelicot pointedly addressed Mr. Dogan, who sat with his back to her. “When you said you were a victim, a victim of what?” she asked. “The only victim in the room here is me.”

When Mr. Darrigade asked if Mr. Pelicot had been violent and if she had suspected him of drugging her, implying she had perhaps overlooked signs, she said, “It’s always the victims who have to justify themselves.”

She pointed out that she had worked her whole life, raised three children and then cared for grandchildren, and that she had “sufficient personality” to have taken action if she believed her husband had drugged her.

“I would have gone to the police,” she said. “We are really in the world of the absurd.”

When the lawyer said she had become a feminist icon, Ms. Pelicot cut him off again, saying she was “an ordinary woman” who had decided to make her trial public. She said, “I am not an icon.”