"The facade is solid, but inside, it's a field of ruins." Upright in the center of the criminal court's pretorium, in southeast France, Gisèle Pélicot stood on the witness stand. She's a woman in the midst of rebuilding herself; who marvels at being "still standing."
"Nothing bothers me," she tells the judge. Not the pressure of the 51 men, most of them wearing surgical masks, sitting behind her, accused of raping her while her husband drugged her. Nor the gaze of her husband, a gray-haired 71-year-old leaning against a corner of the detainees' box. She wanted to tell all, was ready to face all questions, including the most intimate ones about her sexuality, she who confesses to having been "the woman of only one man."
To sum up the "tsunami" she experienced when the facts came to light and over the last four years, Gisèle Pélicot evoked the same image several times: "I'm like a boxer who falls down and gets back up again." So, in a clear, precise voice, this woman, who will celebrate her 72nd birthday in December, told the story of a "betrayal."
On November 2, 2020, when she went with her husband to the police station in Carpentras in southeast France, she thought she was there "for a formality." Dominique Pélicot was summoned that day to explain why he taken pictures up the skirts of several shoppers in a supermarket on September 12 of that year. Gisèle Pélicot, who in 50 years of married life had "not one obscene word, not one inappropriate gesture" to reproach her husband for, she said, decided to overlook what Dominique Pélicot called "a silly mistake." "I'll forgive you this time, but there won't be a next time," she warned him. "And apologize to those women!"
At the police station, she spoke of her husband as "a nice guy, a thoughtful man," before the police lieutenant questioning her slid a first photo in front of her. "Is this your room?" he asked. "I don't know the person next to me," she said of the picture. A second photo was shown: "I'm being raped. The trauma is enormous, I want to go home," she recalled of the picture. It wasn't until May 2024, as the trial approached, that her lawyer convinced her to watch the videos recorded, archived and captioned by her husband, with the precision of a documentalist.
Not once during her hour-and-a-half-long testimony, which Gisèle Péricot ended "for fear of putting the audience to sleep," did she abandon her clear, dignified tone, even when talking about being raped. "I was sacrificed on the altar of vice. It's a dead woman on a bed. This isn't a bedroom, it's an operating theatre. They treat me like a garbage bag, a rag doll. These aren't sex scenes, these are rape scenes, it's unbearable, unbearable."
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