Gisèle Pelicot lifts her sunglasses and chooses to fight back

Warning: This story incorporates descriptions of alleged sexual offences.

There was a second, a number of weeks into the trial, when Gisèle Pelicot determined it was time to take away her sun shades.

It wasn’t simply an acknowledgment of the fading autumn sunshine within the medieval southern French metropolis of Avignon. It was additionally a sign that she’d handed a milestone – one in all many who have marked her gradual, painful journey from serene grandmother, to anguished and shame-haunted rape sufferer, to fearful courtroom witness, to international icon of braveness and defiance.

“She had these sunglasses she used to hide her eyes… to protect her intimacy,” mentioned Stéphane Babonneau, the youthful felony lawyer who for 2 years has guided Mrs Pelicot via the case in opposition to her ex-husband, Dominique, and fifty different males now on trial for allegedly raping her.

“But there was a point when she felt she no longer needed to protect herself. She didn’t need [the glasses],” Mr Babonneau defined, seizing on that second as a technique to illustrate the gradual transformation of a “sincere… very humble person”, who had begun the trial “extremely worried”, shocked by the blaze of publicity, and nonetheless feeling “very ashamed of what had happened to her”.

Over the course of the trial, Gisèle Pelicot, 72, has mentioned virtually nothing about her ordeal, past the occasional and transient remark to supporters gathered in Avignon’s Palais de Justice.

But Mr Babonneau, talking now together with his shopper’s blessing, has begun giving us insights into the best way she’s dealt with herself in court docket, and the best way she has slowly and methodically sought to rebuild her life and, to a restricted extent, her peace of thoughts.

Another second – and milestone – stands out.

It was earlier this 12 months, in May. Mr Babonneau and his colleague Antoine Camus had been trawling via a few of the 20,000 grotesquely express movies and pictures that police found again in 2020 on Dominique Pelicot’s pc exhausting drive.

A grim job. The movies had been “absolutely disgusting,” mentioned Mr Babonneau. But it was the audio that was virtually extra stunning.

“It’s possible to hear Mrs Pelicot snoring… to hear her breathing. It’s even more disturbing to listen to her choking when some of the men are abusing her. The sound was very important [evidence].”

Mr Babonneau knew that with out these movies, “most likely there would have been no trial, no case”.

Mrs Pelicot understood that too, however may simply and understandably have determined, for her personal sanity, to keep away from watching any of the footage herself.

Instead, Mr Babonneau remembers, she merely introduced in the future: “I’m ready now.”

So, she sat down beside the 2 males, of their workplace, as they launched a fastidiously chosen portion of every video, explaining who the boys had been, and what she can be seeing them do to her. Then Mr Babonneau pressed play and pictures of the Pelicots’ bed room, of their bungalow within the village Mazan, flashed up on the display screen.

Gisèle remained nonetheless, watching intently.

“How could he?” she finally requested, in her quiet voice. It was a phrase she would maintain repeating over the approaching days.

Then a bit later, she famous the date on one of many movies.

“That was my birthday evening.”

“That happened in [my] daughter’s bed. In her beach house.”

Mr Babonneau remembers Mrs Pelicot’s sustained indignation, however famous too that she by no means cried, and that with the assistance of specialists, she’d managed “to put an impressive distance between what she was seeing and her mental health.”

The attorneys noticed this second as a “final test” that confirmed their shopper had regained “some kind of equilibrium” within the 4 years since 4 November 2020, when she’d been knowledgeable about her husband’s actions and “her world was destroyed.”

She was now able to face the rigours of a public trial.

Mrs Pelicot had needed to observe the footage with a view to perceive who all these males had been, and to assist fill within the gaps in her reminiscence, brought on by the years of being drugged by her husband.

“She has entire pieces of her existence that don’t exist in her mind,” defined Mr Babonneau.

The similar sensible issues first formed her choice to go for a public trial, and to push for the movies to be proven in open court docket.

She was past offended, for positive. But at that stage she wasn’t seeking to change the world. She was merely nervous concerning the concept of spending months inside a closed courtroom filled with dozens of her abusers. A public trial would, she thought, really feel much less intimidating.

The first day of the trial was nonetheless traumatic. Sunglasses on, Mrs Pelicot was revealing herself in public for the very first time. And it acquired worse. Walking beside her up the steps in the direction of the courthouse, Mr Babonneau observed and recognised a few of the accused males, in masks.

But Mrs Pelicot solely slowly turned conscious that she was now surrounded by them, elbows bumping as they jostled to get via the identical safety limitations.

“It was stressful for her. She was surprised how casual everything seemed to be,” recalled Mr Babonneau.

And then got here the second – the primary in 4 years – when Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot’s eyes met throughout the crowded courtroom. Their chairs had been organized as if to make such contact unavoidable.

“I saw sometimes that they exchanged looks,” Mr Babonneau famous. Gisèle had spoken repeatedly to her crew of her concern about how she may react in that first encounter.

We know now, after all, that whereas giving proof in court docket Dominique Pelicot confessed to every thing and that he begged his household for forgiveness. We additionally know that Gisèle Pelicot has not forgiven him.

“For sure, no. She cannot forgive him,” mentioned Mr Babonneau.

And but, the couple had been as soon as deeply in love. They had been married for 50 years. And within the courtroom, Mr Babonneau may inform, the previous couple weren’t capable of ignore their shared previous completely. So, what did the lawyer see in these glances they exchanged?

It was like they had been saying “look at us,” mentioned Mr Babonneau.

He felt they had been speaking to one another a shared sense of disbelief. Almost as in the event that they had been, briefly, spectators watching the agonies of two strangers.

“How did we end up here?”

During the trial, defence attorneys for varied accused males tried to counsel that Gisèle’s composure, her lack of tears, one way or the other implied that she was complicit in her personal abuse. Or that she felt sympathy for Dominique Pelicot.

“When a victim doesn’t cry, or cries too much, there is always something to criticise,” mentioned Mr Babonneau, with a flicker of contempt.

But whereas the assaults clearly rattled Mrs Pelicot, she additionally informed her authorized crew to not fear.

There was a easy motive for that. Nothing that the attorneys may throw at her in court docket may ever examine with the very worst second of her life, that day in November 2020, when an officer had sat her down at Carpentras Police Station and confirmed her the primary grim pictures that investigators had extracted from her husband’s exhausting drive.

“You know I survived 2 November 2020, so I’m ready for everything now,” Babonneau remembers her saying.

As the trial went on, Gisèle Pelicot was shocked to search out that public and media curiosity was not drifting away, as she and her crew had imagined it could. Instead, she started receiving letters and items and applause from cheering crowds.

“When she started receiving these letters, she felt some kind of responsibility for victims who had suffered similar things,” mentioned Babonneau.

She got here to grasp the distinctiveness of her case – that the video proof meant it was not merely “the word of the victim against the word of the suspect”, and that she now had a uncommon alternative “to change society”.

“I’m lucky to have the evidence. I have the proof, which is very rare. So, I have to go through [all this] to stand for all the victims,” she informed Mr Babonneau.

Her lawyer observed, once more, his shopper’s “simple,” sensible nature. She has no real interest in being “an activist”, however is solely considering of how her expertise of being drugged with out realising it, may now assist make different girls conscious of the difficulty, and look out for attainable indicators of comparable abuse.

Had she recognized then what all of France is aware of now, maybe she may have put an finish to her ordeal.

And possibly different girls can now do the identical.

As for the long run, Mrs Pelicot could, maybe, break her silence with a number of interviews within the months forward. But she’s made it clear she desires “to remain an individual… she wants to live a very simple life.”

And whereas she could by no means forgive her as soon as “perfect” ex-husband, she has discovered a technique to handle her reminiscences of him and to cling on to the “happy moments” they as soon as shared.

Some psychiatrists argue that Dominique Pelicot is a comparatively typical psychopath – a high-functioning narcissist with no capability for empathy who weaved between his sordid hidden life and the self-gratifying position of enjoying of a household man. Gisèle Pelicot sees issues extra merely, embracing the thought, put ahead on the trial, of a break up persona.

As Mr Babonneau places it, “there were two men in Dominique Pelicot and she only knew one of them.”

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