DAILYMAIL
By her own description she had always been ‘a prude’ and had only allowed two men to touch her – one of whom was her husband, sitting, shamefaced, to her left in the dock.
Yesterday, however, Gisele Pelicot stood amid a sea of previously faceless men, all of whom had allegedly raped her while she slept, and calmly confronted them with the anguish they had caused her.
In a 90-minute testimony, praised by the chief prosecutor as ‘dignified and courageous’, the 71-year-old grandmother said: ‘I was sacrificed on the altar of vice.’
‘I was a dead woman and these men take advantage of me, they defile me, they treat me like a bin bag. It is unbearable and I don’t know if I will ever be able to get up (off the floor) again.’
Dismissing the claim made by some of them – that she had really been conscious and aware of the degrading acts to which she was subjected – she said: ‘My body might have been warm, but I was like a dead person.’
The court had heard how her husband Dominique Pelicot, 71, drugged her to be raped by 50 men who are now on trial with him.
‘I was anaesthetised like when you go into the operating theatre – afterwards you don’t remember the operation. That is exactly what happened to me.’
For the men to suggest she had been conscious and perhaps even complicit was ‘an insult to my intelligence’ she said. ‘These people knew exactly what they were doing and how lethargic I was. They didn’t rape me with a gun or knife to their heads – they raped me in full consciousness. They treated me like a rag-doll.’
When Judge Roger Arata gave her the opportunity to address her alleged defilers directly, she told them they had caused her ‘unbearable’ pain and feelings of ‘disgust’, calling on them to finally ‘face the responsibility of their acts’.
Mme Pelicot’s victim statement at the Avignon court hearing was the most electrifying moment so far in an already emotionally-charged trial that is scandalising France. Perhaps to enhance her show of indomitability, she chose to wear a vivid orange dress beneath her stylish white jacket.
Though she was driven to the brink after learning how her husband allowed dozens of men to abuse her over ten years, she spoke yesterday with great composure, in the mellifluous tones of provincial, middle-class France.
Her demeanour contrasted with that of her daughter, Caroline Darian, now in her 40s, who wept softly throughout her mother’s long statement.
With her brother, Florian, and other relatives also moved to tears (and even the occasional wipe of a rheumy eye from Pelicot – deemed by psychologists to ‘lack empathy’) the family were a tableau of utter despair.
