Whenever they denied it was rape or claimed they knew nothing about the state I was in, my lawyers requested that one of the videos be shown. The judge described the contents beforehand. Each time I saw Jean-Loup discreetly leave the courtroom. I had made him repeat his promise not to watch them. Whichever of my children were there also stood up and left, as I had asked them to. The judge gave them time to leave the courtroom before turning on the projector. The screens began to crackle. I lowered my eyes, stared fixedly at my phone, flicked through photos of my grandchildren, the sea around the Ile de Ré, even the landscape of Mont Ventoux we could see from Mazan. I took my mind to safe places. But I could still hear the snoring of the heavily sedated woman echo around the courtroom. I was horribly ill at ease, embarrassed that everyone would notice that I snored, seized with shame, the shame of women who are supposed to leave snoring to men, even as I was being tortured on the screen. I could hear the murmuring voices of the accused as they raped me. Ghastly as this was, it was a searing refutation of all the devious falsehoods they had invented for the trial – that they were afraid of Dominique, that under his tyrannical command they had been given no choice.

  ‘Move her leg,’ one of them tells Dominique, to make it easier to penetrate the unconscious woman. I remember a few of them sticking their thumbs up. A compliment from the husband: ‘Nice one.’ So pleased with their performance.

  * * *

  • • •

  My friend Pascale came and sat down beside me to offer me moral support. She squeezed my arm. I gently lifted her hand and moved it off me. As usual I was shunning the embrace of someone who loved me. She apologised later. I assured her it was fine, I just didn’t want to feel her stress on top of my own, or I feared I might drown. I needed to face the situation alone, seated behind my lawyers. At the end of the first week, the children had to return to their lives and their responsibilities. That was unavoidable, of course. But they would be back.

  I was dignified, according to the media. The word kept being used to describe me. I don’t know if it’s accurate, though. It is perfectly reasonable to collapse, and apparently tears can make you feel better. But as I told the judges, I can’t cry in public. I am like a Russian doll: inside me are my grandmother in her black mourning clothes, Maman smiling even as she is dying, Papa with all his military stiffness. I hold myself together.

  Nonetheless, as the days went by, with all the attacks, insinuations and humiliations, I trembled beneath my armour. I often found myself gripping the edge of my seat. Antoine and Stéphane were right in front of me, but facing the courtroom and focused on reacting when required, so they couldn’t help me. We had some respite at lunchtime, when we gathered in a restaurant in Avignon that had become our regular spot. We would prepare for what was coming next, but we also managed to laugh at the preposterous things we’d heard that morning. It was vital, a way to calm our nerves.

  I was so happy to get home every evening and to take Lancôme out for a walk in the fields behind our rented house. There was no forest or beach where I could go on long walks any more. And now my face was on television and plastered all over the newspapers the whole time. It was difficult to breathe. Everywhere I went I was that raped woman. I felt invaded, oppressed. I no longer had all the safeguards I had established over the past few years. Fortunately, I did have Jean-Loup, though I knew it was very hard for him too.

  We both eventually agreed to accept the assistance offered to us by the Association for Mediation and Victim Support in Avignon. There is one attached to every court, simply providing information or offering concrete assistance. This was how Anne-Sophie Langlet – an incredibly kind young woman who talked and listened, took my mind off the proceedings, and explained the significance of things I didn’t understand – came to be sitting next to me in the courtroom. When Anne-Sophie was unavailable, Candice Del Degan, the head of the service, filled in for her so I wouldn’t be alone. Both were very familiar with the court’s rituals. ‘That’s normal, part of the game, it’s always like that,’ Anne-Sophie would reassure me. ‘Of course they’ll be found guilty,’ she promised. She took my hand while the videos were being shown. I let her. When her palm was in mine, I didn’t feel my whole life drain away as I did when it was Jean-Loup, or one of my children, or a dear friend. For her, it was a professional act. I was just going through a difficult time.

  * * *

  • • •

  I can’t remember the day I first heard the applause as I walked into the Palais de Justice. I realised that the people around me, mostly women, were forming a guard of honour, something I had never imagined or expected. I could feel the warmth of their bodies, their emotion and vulnerability melding with mine. I think it must have been mid-September, because we had just changed our plans and decided to extend the rental agreement on the house. Our lawyers had cancelled all their other commitments; my family and I had decided to stay in Avignon for the entire trial, which was expected to last four months. We felt we couldn’t just be there for the first two weeks and then come back for the summing-up, which had been our original plan.

  Something was happening. The story was taking on a magnitude that we hadn’t anticipated. Every day more foreign media outlets arrived to cover the trial. I had to embody it, set upright with my presence the tortured body that was being talked about all the time, give it a voice, a face, consciousness, elegance too, all the things that rape seeks to destroy. And more important than anything, there was that crowd of women…Morning, noon and night, they queued up in the hope of getting a seat in the overflow room that had been opened to the public. At the end of the day they hung around outside the court building, unwilling to go home, where no doubt plenty of obligations awaited them – food shopping, children maybe, all the things that mean we are constantly run off our feet. But now they seemed in no hurry to return to their daily lives.

  The Palais de Justice in Avignon was suddenly at the epicentre of women’s suffering. People even addressed letters to me there. Not long after the trial began, I started to be presented with a bundle of correspondence at the end of each day. When we got home Jean-Loup would open the envelopes with a letter opener, and together we would read the stories sent to me by women from all over France. I preferred to read their letters rather than the newspapers; they gave me the chance to listen to the women’s voices.

  I couldn’t stop and greet all the people who came every day to stand outside the Palais de Justice – I had to keep moving, to refrain from talking when I was surrounded by so many cameras and microphones. I kept pace with my lawyers. How could I tell the women waiting to thank me for my courage – when I had no claim to any such thing – that their presence outside the courtroom eased for me what was happening inside, that the long-buried stories they came to lay on the steps were the best possible response to the denial and bravado of the men flexing their muscles inside? I stopped wearing a mask after the first few days, took off my sunglasses to make eye contact, and smiled to let them know I felt less alone with them there. ‘No more smiling, Gisèle. We have to focus,’ Stéphane murmured, apprehensive and protective. A battle was being waged around how I presented myself. If I smiled brightly, if I wore a new dress, it was immediately used against me by the defence to minimise both the trauma and the crime.

  Inside the courtroom, I was gradually getting used to the crowded conditions, the proximity of the rapists, their baleful eyes that seemed to say, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I held their gaze. Those men wanted to destroy me. I was going to fight. The cowards’ litany resumed, followed by more crackling of the video screens. The images were so damning that the accused had to try to use them to their own advantage in their defence. ‘Zoom in on my eyes, you can see I was drugged,’ one said. ‘Look at my pupils, I only came round when I got into my car,’ said another. Both men were incarcerated in the same prison, had the same defence lawyer, and were obviously using the same strategy.

  I heard everything. I ended up leaving the room one day when one of the heavyweights in a black gown pointed out that my pelvis was moving in one of the videos, clear proof that I was conscious, and perhaps even a sign of encouragement. ‘I’m going to explode!’ I muttered under my breath to my lawyers before exiting the courtroom in protest. I did that only twice in the four months of the hearing.

  The defence lawyers were becoming increasingly vehement. They too began demanding that intimate photos taken by Dominique while I was awake – with or without my knowledge – be shown. They were insinuating that I liked it, that I had exhibitionist tendencies, maybe even that I had agreed to be used as bait on the internet. One even went so far as to ask me if I locked the door when I went to the toilet. ‘You asked for it, Madame Pelicot!’ they would crow vengefully, one after another. It was gruelling, and I wasn’t sorry that the trial was open to the public; on the contrary, I realised that it would have destroyed me if no one had been there to hear it all. I told the court that now I understood why many rape victims don’t press charges, since so often they end up feeling as if they are the ones being accused. The defence just didn’t let up. Sometimes at the end of the day they’d announce a new piece of evidence for the following morning, which would throw the entire case into disarray. And so it was that a defence lawyer promised that a sequence in which I could be heard speaking would be shown the next day, offering irrefutable evidence, he said, of my complicity.

  We had no idea which video he was referring to; there were so many that even my lawyers had only watched the many videos that the investigators had selected as incriminating evidence. They noted down the reference. I had to watch it with Antoine that evening, before it was played in the courtroom the next morning. It shows just Dominique and me on the sofa in our living room as I am slowly succumbing to the sleeping pills he had put in my food – he sometimes drugged me for his own pleasure. My body, clothed in a nightdress, slumps, my limbs droop, my eyes are closed, but presumably the sedatives haven’t taken full effect, because I grimace as he sodomises me. In a weak voice, I murmur, ‘Stop it, you’re hurting me.’ Hearing myself suddenly brought my tormented body to life. This was the first time I had braved watching the recordings in someone else’s presence. When it was over we sat there in silence, but neither of us wanted to be there. We said goodbye. I left the room. Through the window I saw that Antoine hadn’t moved. I could tell he was very upset, trying not to cry. Later, he said to me, ‘This time, it’s you we see on screen. Not a dead woman. You’re talking, you say no, you tell him to leave you alone. But Dominique Pelicot takes no notice. It’s you he’s raping.’

  * * *

  • • •

  Obviously, the video did not help the defence. But it didn’t stop them from trying again. Late one afternoon a request was made for a video of Madame Pelicot performing oral sex on Monsieur Pelicot and actively participating in a threesome to be shown the following morning, proof if it were the case that I was fully aware that my husband was filming. We left the court that day surprised, again wondering which sequence they were referring to. I pre-empted my lawyers’ questions: I had never, ever agreed to be filmed by my husband during a sexual act. Jean-Loup and I went to bed perplexed.

  Around one in the morning Florian, who had come back to Avignon for a few days, knocked at our bedroom door and told me that Stéphane and Antoine needed urgently to speak to me. I sat up, arranged my pillows behind my back and patted my hair, then opened my laptop. Stéphane and Antoine, their faces drawn with fatigue, informed me that their colleagues Morgane and Adrien had found the two videos. ‘Can we show them to you? You must tell us the truth, Gisèle.’ A close-up appeared on the screen, exactly what one would imagine. ‘Look carefully. Is that you?’ Her hair was the same colour as mine. But it wasn’t my nose that ‘barks at the sky’, as one journalist described it. It wasn’t my bedroom. Nor was that a picture of my dog in the photo frame. No, that wasn’t me. They told me there was another image of the same woman, sitting naked on a swing in our garage in Mazan.

  ‘Go on then, we’ve come this far, Stéphane. Show me the picture.’

  It was definitely our garage. She had the same haircut as me, but her figure was a little fuller, she was younger than me, and she still didn’t have my upturned nose. It was a close-up of her stomach that finally convinced everyone: she didn’t have a mole above her navel like mine. We were so relieved we burst out laughing, Jean-Loup and me in our bedroom, the two of them in their hotel. What a relief to laugh at the whole situation. We all slept well that night, if only for a few short hours.

  In the morning, as every day, the alarm was set for 5.45. I had breakfast and got ready. The more people talked about my elegance – the implication being that a woman who had been so tormented would not have the resilience to care about her appearance – the more attention I gave to what I wore.

  The day got off to a comically bizarre start. Before the morning session began, we met in the little side room that was reserved for us. Stéphane wanted to take a photograph of my mole, so I unbuttoned my trousers and lifted my shirt. The videos were shown at the start of the session, but they carried no weight because it had already been established that the woman in the videos was not Madame Pelicot. Dominique had been interrogated and had revealed that the woman who looked like me was called Nadine. She and her husband were a couple of swingers he used to spend time with when I was in Paris looking after our grandchildren. He said that two of the accused, whom he didn’t name, were also there in the garage that day.

  The woman standing naked and blindfolded on a swing with her hands tied above her head was ultimately the only woman who had freely chosen to appear in the sordid videos he made and distributed. But seeing her offered up like this to the sleazy men around her made it look as if she were destined for abuse too. And it occurred to me once again that Dominique had always had the means to satisfy his urges without resorting to chemical submission, but it had not been enough for him: his obsession was me. I was hoping to hear him admit it.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was not called to give evidence again until October 23rd. Stéphane offered to stand beside me as he had done the first time, but I told him that I would be fine on my own now. After six weeks of relentless attacks, I was no longer afraid. I even corrected the judge; I told him that what we were talking about were not ‘sex scenes’ but rape. I said that it was not a case of ‘There’s rape and there’s rape’, as one of the defence lawyers had dared to claim. I said it felt as if I were the one being accused in this courtroom, with fifty-one victims facing me.

  It was no problem for me to find the right words. They had been sharpened by the rapists’ testimonies, nourished and warmed by the crowd outside that grew larger every day, the crowd of women who escorted me each morning to the entrance of the Palais de Justice. For the last four years I had fled the stifling embraces of my loved ones; I wanted no one’s compassion, preferring to rely on my own strength and, no doubt, on my capacity to forget. But this crowd had had enough of forgetting, of the way we are cut out of life and left to suffer alone in unacknowledged pain. This crowd saved me.

  It was – and still is, for me – an enveloping, comforting throng. But it also drew attention to a disturbing chain of unacknowledged tragedies, of which we see only the tip of the iceberg, those who came to witness our world on trial. It leaves me with a memory of a few faces that stood out particularly clearly to me and which I will never forget. Like that of the young woman I saw one afternoon as I was leaving the court, tears rolling down her cheeks. She must have been about twenty-five. As I passed, I heard her say that she could never be as brave as me. I stopped. I had to speak to her. By chance there were no cameras or microphones following me, so I went up to her and said she mustn’t cry, or I would too, and I needed to stay strong. With a finger I gently wiped the tears away from under her eyes.

  It was that young woman – her terror, her youth – I was thinking of when I addressed the court midway through the trial. I had prepared some notes, in which I had jotted down words that I was using for the first time in my life: ‘Every day people thank me for my courage. I want to tell them this is not courage, but a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.’ These were words I would never have uttered before.

  Seventeen

  ‘Monsieur Pelicot, you’re not watching the videos?’ the presiding judge asked one day.

  ‘No, I’m worried I’ll still find them pleasurable to watch. I have a lot more work to do on myself with the psychologists.’

  He sat alone in a glass-panelled box, in a large armchair that he was allowed to use because of hip pain, on a platform that gave him a slightly elevated position. This reinforced his role as the ringleader he had once been. He even set himself up as an accuser assisting the prosecution: each time one of his former acolytes denied all responsibility for raping me with the excuse that he had been trapped, or even denied that it was rape at all, Dominique would interrupt him to reassert with authority that his accomplice had come of his own volition, knowing exactly what he was going to do. In relation to the crimes against me, Dominique admitted everything. He even recognised that he still felt aroused on viewing the atrocities he’d inflicted on me.

  I still chose not to watch the videos when they were shown in court. But I hadn’t forgotten how sadistic and terrifying my husband looked in that footage, I hadn’t forgotten those indelible images I had seen once, just once: his hand supporting my limp neck to help one of the rapists forcefully penetrate my mouth, or his fingers, on which his wedding ring still glinted, guiding a stranger’s penis into my vagina.