Trigger warning: Some readers might find details of this report disturbing. Discretion is advised.
Gisele Pelicot, who was drugged by her former husband who then invited several men to rape her, took the stance at a French court in the mass rape trial, saying the shame of rape should be on the perpetrators, not the victims.
Noting that rape exists at all levels, the 57-year old grandmother said victims of rape should be able to say that “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,” she said during the detailed, harrowing and often emotional testimony.
Watch: France: Mass rape shocks nation, support pours in for survivor Gisele Pelicot
About her former husband Dominique Pelicot, she said that so many times, she told herself how lucky she was “to have you at my side,” assuming that he was supporting her when she felt sick with neurological issues that later turned out to be resulting from him drugging her.
“He was someone I trusted entirely,” The Guardian newspaper quoted her as saying. “
How can the perfect man have got to this? How could you have betrayed me to this point? How could you have brought these strangers into my bedroom?”
Pelicot, who has support from scores of women who now consider her a feminist icon, said it’s not bravery, but “the will and determination to change society” that led her to take the stand.
It was pointed out in the court that Dominique Pelicot was caught filming up women’s skirts in 2020, but Gisele said she thought it was the first time and she could forgive him.
But it was found out during the police probe that he had done the same offence a decade ago in a supermarket.
Gisele said, if she had been informed about that incident in 2010, she would have left him instead of enduring a decade of rape since then, adding she lost 10 years of her life.
The disturbing testimony included questions about a video that had been shown to the court in which she is heard asking to stop.
“It was rape,” she said, when asked if her words amounted to consent.
Describing herself as a woman who is ‘totally destroyed,’ Gisele said rapists could be in families ‘and among our friends’.
“This man, who came to rape an unconscious, 57-year-old woman…I am also a mother and grandmother…I could have been his grandmother,” she said about one of the accused.
Her private life was dragged into the court too, including questions about her extramarital relationship.
She said she had told her former husband about it.
She noted it was very hard for him. “He couldn’t imagine for a moment I could do that.”
The question about the extramarital affair was raised in the context of an accused man saying Dominique Pelicot had acted out of revenge over it.
There was also a question about what she was wearing in the videos recorded by Dominique Pelicot during the assaults.
The court heard last week how Dominique Pelicot would take off her pyjamas and dress her up in undergarments after drugging her, and before the assaults took place.
She told the court that the undergarments in the videos were not hers, as the man must have kept them somewhere and dressed her up when she was sedated andn unconcious.
Once, she said, he insisted on driving her to a hairdresser, and afterwards she didn’t remember the rest of the appoinment at the place.
The court had been told that Dominique Pelicot kept the drugs in the house and mixed it in meals or ice cream after dinner.
She said he had made a lot of meals, which she saw as a sign of him being caring.
On one occasion when she returned after a visit to her grandchildren, he had already made a meal of mashed potatos, she told the court.
Often, he would bring her ice cream after dinner. “And I thought, ‘How lucky I am, he’s a love.”
She said she hardly had any inkling of having been drugged, as she never felt her heart flutter.
“I didn’t feel anything, I must have gone under very quickly. I would wake up with my pyjamas on. The mornings I must have been more tired than usual, but I walk a lot and thought it was that,” she told the court, as per the Guardian report.
Gisele Pelicot is expected to return to the court and make more statements as the trial that gripped France and the world would continue into December.
(With inputs from agencies)