Women who are raped are in many countries – perhaps in most – violated and abused again by the legal system. And yet during her reckoning with the crimes of her husband and 50 other men, all now found guilty in a historic set of verdicts, Gisèle Pelicot seized control of the narrative, becoming a hero in France and around the world.
After she discovered her husband had been drugging her and offering her up online to strangers to come and rape while she was unconscious, Gisèle left her home, her marriage and the story she had told herself about her life, and spent some time in seclusion.
When she emerged, she made two key decisions that transformed her into a feminist hero. The conviction of her rapists and the husband who orchestrated them is justice of a sort (despite some of their sentences seeming shockingly short), but it could all have taken place in the context of the same old story: the shaming, blaming and bullying of a woman in court. She broke that story, and wrote her own instead.
One decision was practical: to waive her right to anonymity and go public. Her lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, said that had she kept the matter private, “she would be behind doors with nobody but her, us, perhaps some family, and 51 accused men and 40 defence lawyers. And she didn’t want to be jailed in a courtroom with them for four months, her on one side and 90 other people on the opposite benches.”
It was a bold decision, and one that meant, ultimately, that even if 90 people were on the opposite benches, millions who support women’s rights were with her, offering her flowers, cheers and support as she entered and exited the court day after day; demonstrating in her name, demanding France come to terms with its rampant misogyny. These actions represent another verdict – one that is perhaps even more powerful than the court’s.
This huge public response is a result of Gisèle Pelicot’s other moral and psychological decision: to reject shame. Rape victims are often privately and publicly shamed at every stage after the sexual assault – by the rapist, his lawyer, the police, the court system, the media. They are blamed for what happened and told it was their fault; upbraided for their past sexual activities, their choice of clothing, their decision to be out in the world, to interact – if they did – with the rapist, to not fight even if they were threatened with death. They are routinely discredited if the trauma of the event scrambles their memory. They are told they are not believable, that they are vindictive or unreliable or dishonest. Often the shame that is so prevalent in this society is internalised at the outset, repeating what rape itself does: disempowers, silences, traumatises.
It is against this backdrop that Pelicot’s story electrified women all over the world. She came and went from the court with dignity, accepting her visibility as lines of supporters began to form to cheer her on and brought her flowers. She showed no desire to hide. She declared: “I want those women to say: ‘Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too.’ When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.” For the rapists, she meant, not the raped.
Many women decline to press charges because of a reasonable fear of these consequences. This is not a problem of the past. As recently as 9 December, a woman dropped a federal lawsuit for sexual harassment she had filed against the former governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned after an inquiry found that he sexually harassed multiple women in 2021. Gothamist reported of the former staffer: “Charlotte Bennett and her lawyer, Debra Katz, accused Cuomo of weaponizing the discovery process by making ‘invasive’ requests that were designed to ‘humiliate’ her, including demands for documentation from gynecologist visits and other medical records.” (Cuomo’s lawyers claim Bennett withdrew “to avoid being confronted with the mountains of exculpatory discovery … that completely refute her claims.”)
France has long offered refuge to Roman Polański, who fled the US after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old he had also drugged. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was in 2011 the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a prominent member of France’s Socialist party, was accused that May by a New York hotel cleaner of sexual assault. He denied the charges and she was disbelieved and discredited brutally by much of the press and Strauss-Kahn’s powerful friends, her history as a refugee who had suffered female genital mutilation combed over, while conspiracy theories circulated which exonerated Strauss-Kahn. (The charges in the criminal case were dropped in 2011 with the prosecutors citing substantial credibility issues with the maid’s evidence. The civil claim was settled out of court in 2012.)
France is a country where accusations of male sexual crimes have long been ignored; the accused excused or even celebrated by conflating being libertine with being liberated. Will that change now? Some, I hope; not enough, I expect.
Gisèle Pelicot’s heroic boldness in facing the horrific things that had happened to her – in rejecting shame, in standing up for her rights – is admirable. It’s also not a response available to all survivors. Not every case is so clearcut and so well documented that the public and the law have no doubts about the guilt and innocence, the right and wrong. Not everyone will have the excellent lawyers and public support that she has – in fact most won’t, and more than a few will receive death threats and harassment for reporting sexual assault, as some of Donald Trump’s accusers have. I don’t know that Gisèle Pelicot hasn’t received threats, but I do know she has received an unprecedented amount of support. Despite this support, lawyers for the rapists have made familiar accusations – that she’s vengeful, an exhibitionist for allowing the videos to be shown in court, insufficiently sad (rape victims are always supposed to walk the fine – or nonexistent – line between not emotional enough and too emotional).
What I have written is what a lot of people have written about this case: Mme Pelicot has been extraordinary; Frenchwomen have poured out to support her; women around the world have followed the case, discussed it, thought about it. But have men? Until men engage earnestly and honestly with the pervasiveness of sexual assault and the aspects of the culture that celebrate and normalise it, not enough will change.
Many of Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists denied they were rapists, assumed that her husband was entitled to give them permission to assault her while she was unconscious, and all of them demonstrated that they were eager to have sex with a drugged, unconsenting older woman while her husband watched and recorded their crimes. Their sentences may instil fear of the consequences of committing sexual assault, but will they change the desire to do so?
The criminal justice system cannot change culture and consciousness; that happens elsewhere. Feminism has done astonishing work in changing the status of women these past 60 years, but it is not women’s work to change or fix men. And while many men are feminists, far too many men are immersed in the kind of rape culture on display in this trial. One can at least hope that the Gisèle Pelicot case is an occasion and instigation for this work, these conversations, this transformation.
May her example give weight to those trying to change the culture, may the convictions of her assailants serve as a warning, may her dignity and poise inspire other victims and, most of all, may there be fewer victims in a better culture.
Those are the things I can wish for. It will take the will of many and the transformation of institutions to reach those goals. But the example of Gisèle Pelicot offers inspiration – and hope.
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Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
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