Gisèle P., the woman who is shifting the direction of shame

Gisèle Pélicot was retired and living a quiet life. She had three children and a wonderful husband and she enjoyed her grandchildren on weekends while her husband went out cycling with friends on the roads around Mazan, the village in the south of France where they had moved eight years earlier from Paris.

Then one morning she got a call from the police. “You need to come and see some footage,” a police officer told her. Videos had been found in thousands of files on her husband’s computer. They showed her lying on her bed in a comatose state while she was sexually assaulted by dozens of men whom her husband had contacted online. She remembered nothing. But as she watched, the past 50 years of her life, spent with a man she described as a great guy, began to crumble.

The case came to light in 2020. But Gisèle, now 72, has kept a low profile in the interim — that dark place reserved for victims of sexual violence. It was her daughter, Caroline Darian, who was determined the case should not get buried. She wrote a book and gave interviews on chemical submission, a crime of which little was known in France. Harboring suspicions that she had been raped by her father, Darian created the association Don’t Put Me To Sleep. She also convinced her mother to transform the trial that began last week in Avignon into a symbol of the fight against this type of crime, one that often remains under wraps when it occurs in a domestic environment with the home medicine cabinet providing the perfect arsenal for rapists.

Trials of this type always take place behind closed doors and with strong measures to protect the victim’s privacy. But recently divorced, Gisèle wanted the trial to be public, which means journalists are in the courtroom, taking note of every detail. “Shame must change sides,” Gisèle’s lawyer declared, in a phrase that feminists in France have been repeating for years and that sums up the historical relevance of this trial. “I am doing this in the name of all those women who may never be recognized as victims,” she proclaimed at the courthouse gates.

As Gisèle’s daughter anticipated, the trial has received global media attention. And her mother’s stance has become symbolic of the fight against shame for rape victims. “This process deserves to go beyond the event and become a political matter,” says journalist Helène Devynck, who wrote a long piece about it in Le Monde, pointing out the patriarchal violence involved in defending the rapist in this case.

“I don’t know if she knew what she was getting into,” says Devynck. “Nothing had prepared her for this: a retired woman with a normal life, a husband, grandchildren.... That is also the strength of the story,” adds the author of Impunity, a book in which she accuses the famous presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (PPDA) of rape with testimonies from dozens of women.

Journalists from all over the world have been attending the Avignon trial. Muriel Salmona, psychiatrist and founder of the Association Mémoire Traumatique et Victimologie, flags up some of the issues specific to the case. “In this case, the defense will not have the courage to resort to certain arguments,” she says. “The aggressors’ shame is unavoidable. In rape culture, there are misrepresentations: it is often said the victim was asking for it, or that she should not have done a certain thing. But this process is very particular because there is nothing that can be blamed on the victim: all the evidence, the confessions, videos and photos... it is clear consent cannot be given by a person who is asleep or drugged, almost to the point of being in a coma. It departs from the stereotypical situation,” she says.

Chemical submission is also shrouded in myth, says Salmona, author of The Black Book of Sexual Violence. “The problem is that the phenomenon is often associated with having a drink spiked in a bar, but it is also very common in domestic environments. It is even used on children: they are given benzodiazepines, which act as relaxants, and so the rape leaves no physical telltale signs,” she says.

Feminist associations throughout France have praised Gisèle P.’s courage and some have accompanied her daily to the courthouse gates. Elsa Labouret, spokeswoman for the association Osez le Feminisme, believes that the case marks a before and after in the feminist struggle. “Her attitude is extremely dignified. She rejects shame, because it is those who raped her who must bear that burden. Shame is one of the great obstacles to reporting and fighting these aggressions. We are made to believe that we deserve them, even if we have done nothing. We are told that being a victim of violence has an impact on our virtue, on our body, it makes us dirty. In the end, this shame plays a big role in the impunity of the aggressors,” Labouret points out.

According to experts, Gisèle’s courageous stance cannot be expected of all victims. “It is a very personal decision,” Salmona explains. “It cannot be asked of everyone. It is exemplary of a certain way of being and can be done by certain people. What this woman is doing is torture. It is completely traumatizing. Even when we are not conscious, there is a structure in the brain that turns on in the event of danger. That part of her brain was recording what was happening. And it becomes a traumatic memory. The drugs she was taking, anxiolytics, put her in a comatose state. She cannot have any conscious memory of what was happening. It’s like an amnesic stroke. They are physical memories. The mental memories are being built now in the courtroom as she faces media outlets from all over the world.”

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