Editorial: A new feminist hero

Gisele Pelicot’s willingness to face her abuser in the courtroom and waive her right to anonymity was unprecedented in such trials

Gisele Pelicot, the 72-year-old French grandmother, is an unlikely feminist hero of our times. Suffering gruesome sexual violence for years, she has become the voice of the victims in a way that challenges the conventions. By refusing the anonymity allowed to her as a rape survivor under French law, she has come out in the open talking about her ordeal and challenging the narrative on how we talk about rape. “It is not for us to have shame — it is for them,” was how she famously told the court. In a world where rape victims suffer silently while the excruciatingly slow justice system often lets the perpetrators off the hook, her bold stance is more relevant than ever to bring a radical change in the societal approach. In one of the most disturbing rape cases in recent history, Gisele’s then-husband Dominique Pelicot had been drugging her for nearly a decade — from 2011 to 2020 — until she was practically comatose, then inviting men he had recruited online to come to his house and rape her while he filmed them. Of the 72 men in the videos, the police have identified 51 and put them on trial. Pelicot has been sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment for the crime. By refusing to be anonymous, Gisele has taken control of the narrative of her life and is reminding the world that the shame of rape does not fall on her but on the men who raped her.

The case also came as a grim reminder that for some women the most unsafe place is inside their own homes. In India, as in the rest of the world, a majority of the perpetrators of sexual violence are known to the victims. Most cases go unreported. What makes the Gisele Pelicot case particularly alarming is not just the horror of the crimes, but the larger question of how such atrocities could go unnoticed for so long. At the heart of the case is Gisèle who, in a brave yet tragic decision, chose to make her ordeal public. Her willingness to face her abuser in the courtroom and waive her right to anonymity was unprecedented in such trials. In doing so, the septuagenarian victim has forced the world to confront the grotesque reality of sexual violence. The trial has sparked widespread outrage and debate over the gaps in legal and societal frameworks regarding sexual assault. France, like many countries, defines rape as an act of sexual penetration committed through violence or coercion. However, this narrow definition of rape, which does not explicitly include the absence of consent, has proven to be a significant flaw in prosecuting sexual violence cases. This case also underlines the inadequacy of a system that allows perpetrators to escape full accountability by using manipulation and deception to justify their actions.