Gisèle Pelicot at the Court of Avignon – ANSA
During the hearings, she often said she was “destroyed”, but everyone now points to her in France as the new “spokesperson” and “heroine” of the cause of sexual violence against women. Surrounded by journalists, Gisèle Pelicot even smiled a few times as she arrived in the courtroom this morning for the long-awaited verdict of the so-called “Mazan rape trial”, named after the small village in the Midi which became the scene of the crimes.
The main accused, Dominique Pelicot, Gisèle’s ex-husband, was found guilty for the aggravated rapes committed by drugging his wife, as well as for having invited dozens of other men via the internet to do the same, then even filming the violence, along about ten years.
As many as 51 male defendants appeared in court, following intense weeks of a shocking trial that received exceptional media attention, including on an international scale.
Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence, on all counts. Penalties sometimes exceeding 10 years also for other defendants, but in the majority of cases well below what had been requested by the prosecution.
For this reason, the verdict soon aroused the indignation of part of the crowd gathered around the court. An audience sometimes even arriving with banners, to say “thank you” to Gisèle. Not only within the feminist front, the most repeated key message for weeks remains: “Shame must move to the other side”, that of the attackers.
Aware of the climate of expectation in public opinion, the president of the Criminal Court explained in detail the reasons for the convictions of all the defendants.
In France, no trial of this kind had ever received such attention, stimulating, among other things, a public debate on the need to legally define in an even more precise and unequivocal way the set of crimes connected to sexual violence against women.
