In a historic set of verdicts that resonated across France and around the world, Gisèle Pelicot’s 51 rapists, including the husband who drugged her and orchestrated the assaults, have been found guilty. Yet beyond the courtroom, Mme Pelicot’s heroic response to unimaginable violation has galvanized women, electrified a nation, and opened a pivotal front in the battle against misogyny. By seizing control of her story, she has emerged as an iconic figure – but true transformation will require French men to finally confront the toxic culture that enabled such evil.
Rewriting the Script of Victimhood
From the outset, Gisèle Pelicot upended convention, making two key decisions that altered the typical trajectory of a rape trial. First, she waived her right to anonymity, ensuring she would not be, in her lawyer’s words, “jailed in a courtroom” with her accusers. More profoundly, she rejected the shame so often weaponized against victims.
“When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them,”
– Gisèle Pelicot
With this declaration, Pelicot seized the moral high ground, walking into court each day with poise and purpose as throngs of supporters cheered and proffered bouquets. Her dignity in the face of horrific crimes soon made her a heroine to women across France and beyond.
A System Stacked Against Survivors
Yet for all her strength, Pelicot’s case also laid bare the daunting barriers victims face in a legal system and society still mired in misogyny. Her rapists’ lawyers trotted out timeworn tactics: painting her as vengeful, an exhibitionist, insufficiently sorrowful. It’s a playbook that silences many survivors.
Even high-profile victims routinely see their lives dissected and credibility impugned, from the New York hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the women who came forward against Andrew Cuomo. Small wonder most never press charges at all. Against this backdrop, Pelicot’s boldness was all the more extraordinary.
A Reckoning Long Overdue
France has long been a haven for men like Roman Polanski, who fled US justice. Sexual crimes by the powerful have been winked at, libertinism conflated with liberation. The Gisèle Pelicot case may mark an inflection point in this sordid history – but only if French men finally engage in painful self-examination.
Her rapists’ blithe sense of entitlement to an unconscious woman’s body, at the invitation of her husband no less, points to rot that runs deep. Their prison terms may instill fear of consequences – but can they instill understanding of why their actions were so abhorrent? This is where men must step up.
A Clarion Call for Collective Transformation
The criminal justice system can only do so much. It is in the sphere of culture, in the conversations men have amongst themselves and the examples they set, that the most vital change must take root. This is not women’s work. It is men’s moral imperative to confront the attitudes and norms that degrade half of humanity.
“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.”
– Rebecca Solnit
The outpouring of support for Gisèle Pelicot shows the hunger for a new paradigm. Her grace under the most grievous of circumstances has given voice to the voiceless and emboldened others to come forward. Yet much as her individual courage inspires, the sea change we need will take the collective courage of men choosing a different path.
French men must engage honestly with the pervasive sexual violence in their midst. They must challenge the cultural currents and social circles that normalize assault. They must raise a generation of boys to view women as full equals deserving of bodily autonomy and profound respect. And men everywhere must undertake this same reckoning.
Then, perhaps, we may realize the vision Mme Pelicot so powerfully invoked in the crucible of the courtroom: a world where shame attaches not to victims, but to perpetrators, and where women may walk through their lives with the same unshakeable dignity she showed in the face of the very worst of male cruelty. Her heroism has shown us the way. Now men must do the hard work of forging a culture worthy of her example.
