Transcript of France’s Horrifying Rape Trial Has a Feminist Hero

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. As soon as this week, after months of testimony, verdicts are expected in a rape trial that has both horrified and captivated the people of France. Today, my colleague, correspondent Catherine Porter, on the woman at the center of that trial and how, with a single decision, she has turned the power dynamics of the Me too era on their head. It's Wednesday, December 18th.

Katherine, it has been a really long time, and I am very glad to be speaking with you.

Me too. It's nice to be back with you, Michael.

So we're gonna be talking today about a case that when it first began to reverberate outside of France where you are, really shocked the world. And then as even the most shocking things do, it kind of receded from our collective consciousness, but not from yours.

No. Oh my god. And I I think it hasn't receded from the French consciousness either because once you put your mind to it and you lock your eyes on it, it's really hard to tear them away. And this is a story of a rape trial in which 51 men are on trial at the same time for raping or sexually assaulting the same woman. So I think that even if you just hear that much, it's so much to handle.

But there's all these other elements that have made this case impossible to look away from, and the most important 1 is the woman at the center, and the way she has conducted herself throughout this trial, and her decision really to use her own private torment and hell as a force for greater good to change society.

Well, to understand how the woman at the center of this case does this remarkable thing, let's start at the beginning of this case.

Sure. So this case begins in the end of 2020, and it involves a married couple living in the south of France, Giselle Pelicot and her husband, Dominique. They had been married for about 50 years and had retired from the Paris region and moved down to this small idyllic town. And in many ways, they lived a very idyllic life. He was going for long bike rides.

She had become a big walker. They had 3 children who they're very close to and 7 grandchildren who would come down for long weekends. And by all accounts, they were very happy, except for she was suffering some weird medical problems. Her hair was falling out, she had lost quite a bit of weight, but most notably, she had these increasing blackouts, and he was driving her to different medical appointments to try and figure out what was going wrong. And then 1 day in September, things began to really change.

Her husband, Dominique, is caught by security guards filming up the skirts of women in a nearby grocery store, and they call the police. The police come, and they take not only his 2 cell phones and cameras he's using, but they go back to his house and get his laptop and some other electronics. And they discovered something pretty shocking on them. They found these pictures and videos of a woman who seemed to be unconscious being raped, and some screen captures of conversations about raping her.

So there is something very dark happening just under the surface of what looks like this very idyllic life.

Yeah. That is right.

When all this is happening, Giselle is in Paris helping take care of some of her grandkids. So she only learns about it from her husband when she gets back, and he only tells her about the arrest at the store, not anything that the police have found on his electronics because he hasn't been confronted by that either. Mhmm. He says he was caught, you know, filming up the skirts of women, and he's in tears. He apologizes.

And she says her reaction is, I will stay with you because I've always stood beside you, and I will forgive you. And their life kind of returns to what it was beforehand.

Mhmm.

And then, in November, the cops call her and say, do you know what's your husband's been charged for? And she says, yes, I I do. I'm, you know, I'm a little worried about it, but we're talking about it, and we're gonna work on it together. And they say, well, we'd like you to come down when he comes down for his next meeting at the police station. So that morning, they get up.

They have breakfast, she says. Totally normal conversation. They get in the car. They drive to the police station. He goes in to meet with some police officers, and she goes in to meet with others.

And they unload a bombshell to tell her that the life as she has known it is nothing, nothing like what she thinks it is.

What exactly do they tell her?

They tell her that these videos they've been looking at on her husband's electronics are of a unconscious woman being raped by him, and they believe it's her. And they believe not only that her husband has been drugging her in order to rape her, but he has been inviting strangers into their home to join him in raping her.

An unfathomable piece of information to absorb, I have to imagine, because in this moment, she is hearing that her whole life is not what she thought it was and that the man she's married to is a monster.

Not only married to, she's been with him since they were teenagers. She's built her entire life around this man. She has said that she contemplated committing suicide that night

Wow.

Because it would just be almost impossible to conceive of, or to accept that the person that is your person has been so terribly betraying you.

Mhmm. And just to be very clear, because it almost seems impossible to wrap one's head around this. She, if I'm intuiting from you correctly, has no inkling of any of this.

No. And it's even worse than that, Michael. Remember I told you about those horrible symptoms she had been suffering? Mhmm. The hair loss, the weight loss, but most worrying, the blackouts.

Well, in the end, you know, he was driving her to all these medical appointments, and it was the drugs he was mixing into for food and drink that were causing those symptoms in the first place. Wow. And in the meantime, the police are continuing their investigation.

Mhmm.

They find this hard drive in the couple's garage. And on the hard drive, they find about 20,000 photos and videos. Most of them filed in a folder that mister Pelicot had labeled abuse, and these are videos and photos of the rape scenes in that bedroom at night when he's inviting men over. He's cut into a separate little either video or or photo to keep for himself. And through these, you know, 20,000 little data points, plus using his Skype conversations, they start tracking down these men and start arresting them in waves over many months.

And what do we learn about these men accused of this unbelievably horrible act?

Well, in the French press, they started calling them monsieur Toulomond, mister everyman. Because, really, when you look at them, the guys who have been charged range in age from late twenties to in their seventies, their grandfathers. Many of them are fathers themselves. They kind of span all the range of middle class or working class men in small town France. They're truck drivers or carpenters.

1 of them is an IT specialist in a bank. Another is a journalist. Number of them have history of drug or alcohol abuse, and some of them have their own history of sexual assault in their own lives as children. But the thing that's most remarkable about them is that they just seem like, you know, your next door neighbor. They could be your next door neighbor.

And in the end, that's what really shocked a lot of French people is that they were their next door neighbors.

It feels like this is normally the stage in a story like this, as we know from countless me too episodes of this show that we have made, where despite even the unique horrors of of what you're describing here, the legal system kicks in in this kind of predictable way. And the media world starts to pay attention in a way that focuses very heavily on the perpetrators, on the men. And the victim, the woman here, quite understandably, remains anonymous.

Right. Because most victims are offered the right to have a closed trial, and most of them take it. Now I've covered a lot of rape trials in my career and almost never named the victim in them. I can think of only 1 other time because most rape victims don't want their names out there because there's a lot of shame around rape, even though it's completely undeserved. And there shouldn't be shame, but people feel culpable in some way.

And so I fully expected her as a grandmother, as someone who was not a feminist activist before, to take the regular path of deciding to have her case be private. Mhmm. So I wrote the first story, and I was very careful. We didn't wanna identify her. So she had moved out of the town, and she had changed her last name to her maiden name, so we could use her name as Giselle, and that's it.

And then her lawyer said to me that she seemed pretty sure she was gonna go public. And I thought, you know, I just didn't believe it because I thought there's there's no way that the 71 year old grandmother would, once she got into court, decide to use her full name and to be the face of such a traumatic series of rapes.

Mhmm.

But in the end, she decided in a very poignant statement that she wanted shame to change sides. She thinks there's no place for shame on the side of the victim. It should be placed on the side of the accused, and she makes this really brave and unusual decision to open her trial to the public and use her married name.

In other words, to use her husband's name.

Right. So she decides on the day that the trial opens that she will be known publicly as Gisele Pellego.

We'll be right back.

I'm Carol Rosenberg from The New York Times. Right now, I'm sitting alone in the press room at the US Navy Basic Guantanamo Bay. I've been coming here since 4 months after the 911 attacks. I've probably spent around 2,000 nights at this Navy base. It's hard to get here.

It's hard to get news from the prison. Often, you know, I'm the only reporter here. The New York Times takes you to difficult and controversial places, and that takes resources. You can power that kind of journalism by subscribing to The New York Times.

So, Catherine, take us inside the courtroom into this trial and walk us through how this remarkable decision ends up influencing how the case plays out.

Well, it meant that I could be in the courtroom together with many other journalists.

I'm inside the courthouse now. It's a big room. There's a raised bench behind which 5 judges and 2 prosecutors sit, and then the very wide box that was built especially for this trial into the room.

The courtroom was nothing like a courtroom I've ever reported in. It had been retrofitted for all of these accused.

The defendants are starting to come in. Many have hats, sunglasses, and surgical masks on to try and protect their identities, and what's really noticeable is they appear to be full range of ages, styles, looks. Some are very skinny and gaunt, and the other has I'm looking at has quite a big paunch. It's it's a full spectrum, and you really get that sense sitting here where I'm looking around at just all it's like being in a bus. All sorts of people.

They're sitting all around me as a journalist in the back of the room, but also right up against madame Pelicot, who's sitting against 1 wall

Wow.

Behind her 2 lawyers, and in front of her and all around her are the accused men who are charged with raping her.

From what you're saying, the scale, the enormity of the alleged crime here is just physically inescapable in the room.

The enormity of the crime, the number of men, but also what I was saying before, just the fact that you really sort of physically and literally can see this idea of mister every man.

And at the center of it all quite literally, the scene is Gisele Pellecotte.

Yeah. Madame Pellecotte comes in that first day with her 2 lawyers and her 3 children trailing behind her, And she literally embodies this idea of not being ashamed. She's so dignified.

What do you mean?

Well, you know, just imagine. And this would be a a moment of great nervousness, of fury, of anger, of probably emotional crisis. And yet, from the first moment, madame Pelicot has been literally the pitcher of poise and grace and calm. She's like a classic Parisian grandmother. Her clothing is perfectly appointed, not too beautiful, but also just neat and tidy.

Her hair she's got a nice bob. Her head is held high. And when she took the stand the 1st day, she's described how her life had fallen apart that morning when she stepped into the police station and how she is making this decision that she wanted France to look at rape straight, and she thought that this was a time for the country to have a big conversation around what it means to be raped and how prevalent it is.

She says this out loud, which sounds a bit to me like the words of a civil rights figure, not a French grandmother.

Yeah. She says this out loud. And not only does she say this, she and her lawyers fight to have these videos play in court in the public.

Videos of her sexual assault?

Videos of her sexual assaults, many of them, because many of the men are denying that this was rape. They're basically saying they believed that she had consented to this and that they hadn't intended to rape her. And here, they have unlike most rape victims, they have evidence of what had exactly happened in that room. They have videos.

So after lifting the veil of anonymity that so often surrounds the victim, she's now making sure that there is no anonymity whatsoever around the conduct of the accused men.

She's making sure that every graphic horrific detail of this case is aired publicly. And, you know, when they are played in court, this real awkward silence descends. And after a few minutes, many journalists stop looking at the screens because it's so uncomfortable. Her snores are filling the courtroom.

The evidence of her unconsciousness.

It's just she is I mean, 1 of the 1 of the doctors in the case described her as a corpse, and she sits there throughout. I have never seen her leave the courtroom while 1 of those videos is playing.

It's hard for me, Catherine, to fathom what kind of a defense can be put forward by the dozens of men, many of them in this courtroom, knowing what's on those videos, these audible sounds of her being asleep. So what are they saying, or do we expect them to say in this trial in their own defense, if anything?

Right. I mean, most cases of rape are he said, she said. But here is there's a library of proof. And yet, most of the men say what almost every man says in defense when it comes to rape, that they thought she was consenting. Most of them say that they had not come to rape her, but that mister Pelleco had invited them over for a threesome and had either explained to them that she was pretending to sleep, and it was part of their fantasy that she be woken up by this stranger together with her husband.

Or some say that they were told that she had taken a few sleeping pills just as they got there to help her relax because she was shy. And a few, by the end, were saying that they believe that mister Pelicot had also drugged them, that even though in the videos they seemed totally normal and weren't sleeping, were very active, that they have no memory of what happened in there. And they believe that somehow he had slipped something into a glass of water and had drugged them.

And since we're talking about the defense of these men, what has her ex husband said in his defense?

He has plead guilty. He has said that he was traumatized as a child and that he had these impulses that just got stronger and stronger, and he couldn't help himself, and that his wife did not deserve this, and that he loved her despite all the evidence to the contrary.

So he is in no way denying that the worst conceivable version of this is exactly what happened.

Right. He's, in fact, saying that these men who say they were tricked or they didn't understand that she was drugged, that they're all lying. That he says, clearly, I am a rapist, and all of these men in the room are rapists just like me.

You had said that Gisele Pellico wanted to change society with this approach to the trial by letting herself be named, by opening it up to reporters like you. So the question is, has she accomplished that? And if she has, how exactly?

Well, let me tell you what I've experienced going to the courtroom. You know, the first few days, there were just a few reporters, And then by, I would say, the 2nd week, there were not just many more reporters, there were crowds and crowds of mostly women coming to get a seat in this courthouse to watch her.

Wow.

I'm standing outside, the courtroom, and people are are leaving. And there's a a walkway that, has formed of spectators, mostly women outside the and they are applauding Madame Helico. While she walks out, you can hear them applauding, saying Drago. And when she would leave the courtroom at the end of every day, they started to form an honor line and line her route to applaud her and cheer her. And that crowd has not subsided.

You know, I met a bunch of feminists that are part of a small feminist organization in Avignon in the courthouse. They've been going regularly to watch the trial. And at night, they have been taking what they've heard inside the courtroom and pasting it on the walls of Avignon in a way to kind of shock the city, I think, and shock the country to listen to what these men were saying in the rooms. So some of them that I passed on the streets on the way to the courthouse were like, it was an involuntary rape, or it was an accidental rape.

Wow.

Or 1 that really stopped me was I raped her with my body, but not with my mind.

It feels like if this scene outside the courtroom is any indication that what Gisele Pellecotte wants to happen around shame and rape culture, it's actually already starting to happen. She is effectuating this change herself.

Yeah. The response has been enormous. People are talking about this around the dining room table, on the radio, in the newspapers. The stories in the newspapers have just been erupting. Men are talking about toxic masculinity and needing to change it.

Women have been talking about consent and teaching consent in the classrooms because that's something that has not been happening in France. Now she's really launched this very large, profound conversation, and you can feel it reverberating out across the country.

It strikes me that the unintended consequence of these long time practices that we use when it comes to rape, of shrouding a victim in anonymity, which makes so much sense for so many reasons because of the shame you described, that they've had this unintentional consequence that we haven't really thought that much about, which is we end up focused so little on the women who have had this experience because they mostly remain anonymous. We end up spending so much of our time focused on the men. And what's changed here is that Gisele Peleko has said not just that she's gonna switch up the question of shame, but she's gonna switch up the question of basic power.

Right. I mean, it's amazing to watch her in those videos because she's so objectified. I mean, she is not a human being. She is a sex doll, basically. And she is taken something that that she's so objectified and become, you know, a fully formed, very powerful person.

Something else, Michael, that really resonated with me is that 1 of her lawyers said, you know, in most cases, trials, when you keep it private, is just you, the victim, facing the accuser alone in a room. And Giselle Pellecotte invited all of France into that room with her. And all All the world. All of all of us. Right.

And and I think she's felt, incredible support because of that. You know, on the last day of the court before the final statements, the judges asked her if she had anything else she wanted to say. And she got back up, and she said, you know, at the beginning of the trial, her family felt ashamed of the name Pelicot. But she felt that over the past 4 months, she was sure that the name Dominic Pelicot would be long forgotten. But the name that people remember from this court case would be hers, Gisele Pellecotte, and that already her grandchildren are proud to have that name.

Well, Catherine, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Michael.

We'll be right back.

After the movie Free Willy became a hit, word got out that the star of the film, a killer whale named Keiko, was sick and still living in a tiny pool in a Mexican amusement park. Fans were outraged. Kids demanded his release. I'm Daniel Alarcon. From Serial Productions in the New York Times comes The Good Whale, a story about the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean.

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Here's what else you need to know their day. Ukraine says it has assassinated the general who led Russia's nuclear defense force. The general, Igor Kurylov, was killed when an explosive device planted inside a scooter was detonated on Tuesday morning near the entryway to a residential building. It was 1 of Ukraine's most brazen assassinations since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly 3 years ago. And This was a frightening, well planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation.

On Tuesday, New York City prosecutors charged Luigi Mangione with first degree murder in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. The charges branded Mangioni a terrorist and portrayed his alleged murder plot as a political act. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn and Eric Krupke, with help from Rob Zipko and Olivia Natt. It was edited by Lexi Dio and Michael Benoit, contains original music by Mary Lozano, Pat McCusker and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Bruntberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderlane.

Special thanks to Siguilen Lestrade. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.