PARIS — At the head of the March 8 International Women’s Day march in Paris this year, Gisèle Pelicot walked slowly through the crowd, flanked by her daughter, Caroline Darian. Around them, thousands of demonstrators filled the streets, their placards raised above a sea of purple flags: “Shame is changing sides,” “Listen to women,” “We are unstoppable.”
Gisèle Pelicot became a global figure in the fight against sexual violence after she opened the trial of her ex-husband and the 50 men he recruited to rape her in her sleep to the public. She joined the ranks of the Fondation des Femmes as the Parisian procession prepared to set off, at around 2:30 p.m. The foundation fights against gender-based violence. “We will not let up!” Gisèle (who has since dropped her husband’s last name) told the crowd at the start of the demonstration. Protesters responded with cheers, and some shouted, “Thank you,” as she and her daughter set forward.
For a moment, the noise of the march — drums, chants, whistles — seemed to fold inward, concentrating around the two women. Strangers reached out as they passed, some applauding, others shedding tears. The trial of Pelicot’s abusers, which had begun a year and a half earlier in a courtroom in Avignon, had spilled irreversibly into the street.
Photojournalist and feminist activist Anna Margueritat, who covered the Pelicot trial and wrote a book about it titled “Pour que la honte change de camp” (So That Shame Switches Sides), attended the march. “The emotion in the crowd was palpable,” she told Truthdig. “Activists needed a face to embody their fight against sexual violence. With Gisèle, they’ve finally found it.” “The emotion in the crowd was palpable.” Just a little over a year earlier, in November 2024, a prosecutor had stood before a different crowd, in a different setting, and issued a stark appeal. “With your verdict,” Laure Chabaud told the court, “you will make clear that women are not doomed to suffer, and that men are not doomed to perpetrate.”
Three weeks later, in the southern France courthouse of Avignon, all 51 men were convicted.
At the center of the case stood Dominique Pelicot, who for over a decade had drugged his wife and enlisted strangers to rape her while she lay unconscious. The crimes unfolded not in dark alleys, hidden basements or anonymous hotel rooms, but in the most intimate spaces of ordinary life: the family home in the quiet Provençal town of Mazan, the marital bed, the car, their daughter’s holiday house.
The scale alone made it one of the most consequential sexual violence cases France has seen in decades — one victim, more than 200 assaults, at least 83 men involved, 51 identified and tried. So too would the evidence: thousands of photographs and videos, meticulously catalogued by Dominique Pelicot in a folder titled, with chilling administrative clarity, “ Abuse .” But what truly made the trial seismic was what it forced into the open: the ordinariness of the perpetrators, the violence embedded in the judicial process itself, the ravages of drug-facilitated sexual abuse. And, above all, Gisèle Pelicot herself.
At 72, the grandmother of seven made a decision that would alter the course of the trial — and, in many ways, its meaning. Gisèle refused anonymity and insisted that the hearings be public, demanding that the footage of her own rapes be shown. In doing so, she shifted the proceedings beyond the strictly judicial and into something closer to a collective, national confrontation. For 16 weeks, journalists from around the world — most of us women — chronicled the hearings in real time, sitting side by side in a courtroom that often felt too small to contain the magnitude of what was unfolding.
I covered part of the 2024 trial in Avignon, and the appeal trial in Nîmes the following October, returning day after day to a space where the unbearable nature of Gisèle’s ordeal coexisted with the sad procedural banality of a rape trial. Just over a year later, a key question still hangs over France: What, if anything, has changed? Are women still doomed to suffer? Are men ever going to hold themselves accountable?
(Not) all men?
“Men see this case as just another sordid, isolated incident,” Bernadette Teyssonnière told me when we first met outside the Avignon courthouse in October 2024, a month into the trial. “We women,” the 69-year-old added almost matter-of-factly, hugging herself against the cold, “don’t have that luxury.”
I met Teyssonnière at dawn, queuing outside the courthouse on my first day at the trial. A recent retiree from the pharmaceutical industry living in Sarrians , 25 kilometers from Avignon, she had been attending the hearings daily since their start in September to better understand how rape cases are tried in France, and described herself as a “veteran.” Bundled up in a stylish gray coat and a bright red scarf, she smiled at me reassuringly as I joined the line for the first time, and we talked as we waited, a slow procession of (mostly) women gathering in the half-light. “Men see this case as just another sordid, isolated incident.” “During the first few days of the trial,” Teyssonnière told me then, “we had no way of knowing whether the men sitting next to us in court were attendees, reporters — or rapists.” In those early weeks, the boundaries blurred. Any man she came across in the courtroom or on the streets of Avignon could, in theory, have been one of Gisèle’s abusers, walking free, awaiting his sentence. At a talk at the American Library in Paris on March 17 titled “Speaking Out: Women and Justice in France,” in front of a crowd almost exclusively made up of women, New York Times France correspondent Catherine Porter said that she, too, had been struck by that same realization when she first sat in the cramped Avignon courtroom. “That view into just how many men had been in Gisèle’s bedroom, and how normal they all looked,” she said, “was visibly chilling.” Despite having covered several rape trials in her career, she told the audience this was the first time she felt the scale of the issue translate so viscerally into the everyday. The Pelicot trial, she understood then, would “raise existential questions and lead to a reckoning across the country.”
French feminist philosopher Manon Garcia, like many scholars and activists both in France and abroad, has long insisted that rapists are not aberrations lurking at the margins of society, but rather embedded in the fabric of everyday life — fathers, colleagues, neighbors. But the Pelicot trial made that reality impossible to ignore and forced it into public view — to the point that her work was cited by Gisèle’s defense during their closing arguments.
Garcia herself traveled to Avignon to cover the trial as a philosopher. Her book “Living With Men” is an account of both the trial and its impact on French society. “One question keeps nagging at me, haunting me, returning when I least expect it,” she writes. “Can we live with men?” And if so, at what cost?
Not everyone was ready to ask those questions. As the trial unfolded, the now-familiar refrain — #NotAllMen — resurfaced across social media , a defensive reflex that sought to contain the implications of what was being revealed. Dominique Pelicot was cast as an anomaly, a once-in-a-generation pervert, “the ogre of Mazan ,” his crimes framed as exceptional rather than systemic. Much of the mainstream media coverage followed suit, dwelling on the logistics of the rapes — the drugs, the chatroom, the scheduling, the recordings — rather than the cultural frameworks that had allowed Dominique Pelicot to continue plotting his wife’s rapes, undetected and unreported, for over a decade.
But the facts resisted containment. Thanks to Gisèle’s decision to go public, France would come to learn that her rapists, recruited by Dominique Pelicot on an online forum brazenly called “ Without her knowledge ,” formed a perfect cross section of French society. Among these “ Mr. Everyman ” — as they were called by some French media — were a firefighter, a lawyer, a nurse, a factory worker, a truck driver and a reporter. They were between 21 and 68 years old at the time of the crimes. Some were fathers, others grandfathers. Several returned more than once. One came six times. Not one reported what they saw. “This trial shows us that any man can be a perpetrator.” “This trial reminded us of something we already knew, but that we need to be reminded of often to actually absorb it,” Margueritat told Truthdig : “That there’s no such thing as a ‘typical rapist.’”
On my train back to Paris after my first day in court, I ran into Aurélie M., an 18-year-old student whom I’d met in the courtroom. Aurélie, who asked to remain anonymous, had been following the trial for weeks through reporters’ live tweets before deciding that she wanted to witness it for herself. Sitting across from me, her math homework spread out on the table between us, she paused, highlighter in hand, to search for the right words. “#MeToo revealed that every woman can be a victim,” she told me, “but this trial shows us that any man can be a perpetrator.”
“When Gisèle opened the doors to her trial,” Aurélie concluded, “she forced us to look at the facts: None of these men were monsters lurking in the dark. They’re just … men. Like the ones we know.”
A year later, at the American Library, Porter told the audience she still carries that realization with her to this day. “I think about it every time a man sits next to me on the Metro,” she said.
Gisèle’s pedagogy of justice If the trial forced a social reckoning, it also exposed something more structural: the limits of the law itself.
At the event at the American Library, panelists were asked whether Dominique Pelicot’s crimes could have happened anywhere, or whether there was something particularly French about the case. The response was a resounding “No, but ….” No, the crime itself had nothing particularly French about it; but the way it was tried belied and laid bare the fragility and violence of rape trials in 21st century France.
Despite the overwhelming evidence — videos, photographs, her ex-husband’s confession — Gisèle was subjected to the familiar mechanisms of suspicion. Questions lingered about her marriage, her sexuality, the possibility of her complicity. The burden, subtly but persistently, shifted back onto her throughout the trial.
At the heart of this lay the legal definition of rape. In French criminal courts as a whole, proof of intent is the gold standard. For decades, rape trials hinged on proving that the perpetrator had intentionally used one of four definitional elements: “violence, constraint, threat or surprise.” Until recently, this meant that, without the intention to commit it, there could legally be no rape.
The Pelicot trial exposed the limits of that framework in real time. One defense lawyer argued that her client may not have intended to rape Gisèle because he believed she was awake — pointing to footage in which the unconscious woman’s hips appeared to move . This, despite her droning snores, which I sometimes still hear in my sleep over a year later.
“Closed doors at a trial don’t protect the victim,” Margueritat said, “They protect society from knowing just how horribly rape victims are treated.”
For years, feminist activists had pushed for a consent-based definition of rape, so that lack of intent could no longer serve as a legal defense despite the victim’s obvious lack of consent. Well before the Pelicot trial, grassroots movements such as #NousToutes, alongside nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, spent years denouncing what they described as a “rape culture” embedded in both society and the legal system and pleading for a “ culture of consent .” In 2023, in the National Assembly, Deputies Marie-Charlotte Garin and Véronique Riotton had launched a parliamentary inquiry for the inclusion of consent into the law, following in the path of Sweden, Germany, Spain, Britain and a number of other European countries where consent-based rape law already exists. But it was in Avignon, faced with the accumulation of such arguments, that the urgency became undeniable. Despite the overwhelming evidence … Gisèle was subjected to the familiar mechanisms of suspicion. Anticipating this shift, and though it had no bearing as of yet, the president of the court decided to question each of the accused: “Did Madame Pelicot give you her consent?”
Some claimed her consent had been implied in text messages. Others said it had been granted by her ex-husband. A few admitted they did not know what consent meant at all. Sitting in the courtroom, I was struck not by the incoherence of these responses, but by their logic. These men were not improvising; they were articulating a shared understanding — one in which women’s consent could be assumed, delegated as a shared commodity, or simply bypassed.
Their answers revealed the scale of rape culture to the wider public.
When the verdicts were handed down in December 2024, feminist collectives — Les Amazones, Les Tricoteuses Hystériques, Nous Toutes — protested in front of the courthouse. Activists felt that the prison sentences — 20 years for Dominique and between three and 15 years for his accomplices — did not fully reflect the gravity of what had been revealed, and that the accused had gotten off too easy by leveraging lack of intent over lack of consent.
However, in part thanks to the trial, in fall 2025, France adopted a new legal definition of rape, signed into law by President Emmanuel Macron, that incorporated the absence of consent — a shift that only months earlier had seemed politically uncertain. Not everyone in France agreed that the changes to the penal code were for the better, with Garcia arguing in a Le Monde column that rape definitions shouldn’t depend on the behavior of the victim — but at least the case led to a broader discussion about consent.
Last October, a year after the original trial, a single defendant appealed his sentence at a court in Nîmes, in southern France. The appeal added yet another layer to this evolving legal landscape. Reduced to a single defendant, it brought the mechanics of a rape trial into sharper focus. From the outset, the defense sought to introduce images of Gisèle taken years before the crimes — photographs of her in lingerie or swimming nude. The strategy was familiar: to sexualize the victim, to sow doubt, to suggest complicity.
But Gisèle’s lawyers pushed back. “I thought we were past such maneuvers,” Maître Stéphane Babonneau argued, warning that showing the images would amount to secondary victimization — the retraumatization of a victim through the judicial process itself. The court agreed. The images were deemed irrelevant and excluded. In doing so, her lawyers helped articulate a new boundary — one that acknowledges that the pursuit of truth does not require the repeated reenactment of violence.
“The hope,” Margueritat said , “is that this refusal of secondary victimization trickles down into other trials, and that society as whole grants rape victims the same right to dignity it did to Gisèle.”
Chemical submission in the limelight
Teyssonnière, with whom I reunited in Nîmes, doesn’t believe the Pelicot trials will lead to societal change. “What will change things,” she told me in October, “will be sexual education in schools and special training courses for future doctors to better detect chemical submission.”
If one aspect of the Pelicot case has most radically altered public awareness in France, it is what the French call “chemical submission” — drug-facilitated abuse. For nearly a decade, Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife with powerful anxiolytics, crushing the pills into her food and wine until she slipped into a state of near-total unconsciousness. It was in that condition — unable to resist, unable even to register what was happening — that dozens of men entered her home, her body, her life. In court, experts described the effects clinically: memory loss, confusion, dissociation. But what the trial revealed, with devastating clarity, was how easily such a state could be produced, and how difficult it is to detect, both for the victim and for medical professionals.
For a long time, chemical submission was treated as marginal — associated with spiked drinks in nightclubs, a risk supposedly confined to young women in public spaces. The Pelicot case shattered that perception. It showed that the most sustained form of chemical control could take place in the home, administered not by a stranger but by a husband.
What also emerged was the extent to which such practices circulate and are shared. In Germany, investigators uncovered online groups where tens of thousands of men exchanged accounts of drugging women — sometimes their partners, sometimes family members — alongside practical advice on dosages and substances. The scale is difficult to comprehend, but it points to something the Pelicot case forced into view: that chemical submission is not an isolated pathology, but a practice embedded within networks, facilitated by digital anonymity, and sustained by a culture that continues to minimize it. For a long time, chemical submission was treated as marginal. In the aftermath of the trial, Gisèle’s daughter, Darian, founded the association M’endors pas (or Don’t put me to sleep). The organization has worked to document cases, support victims and push for recognition of chemical submission as a public health issue. Darian has insisted, repeatedly, that what happened to her mother is not exceptional — only exceptionally documented.
That argument has found an unlikely echo in the political sphere. The case of Sandrine Josso, a member of Parliament who reported being drugged by a senator, brought the issue into the National Assembly in 2024 — just months before the Pelicot trial had started.
Since then, Josso and Darian have advocated for stronger legal frameworks, clearer protocols for testing and better training for medical professionals. As a result, new guidelines have been circulated urging doctors to recognize the signs of chemical submission — unexplained memory gaps, chronic fatigue, sudden behavioral changes — symptoms that, until recently, were often dismissed or misattributed and that, for Gisèle, were never caught.
I asked my local pharmacist, Sophie M., who requested her last name not be used, whether the trial had had an impact on her day-to-day work. She told me she had noticed a shift almost immediately after the hearings began. “When you get a patient coming in saying she can’t remember what she did after a party the night before,” she told me, “you send her to emergency services — that’s a no-brainer.” But in recent months, she told me, she’s begun to look differently at certain symptoms — memory gaps, unexplained fatigue, recurring injuries — that might once have been dismissed or attributed to other causes. “These things now set off an alarm bell they didn’t before,” she said.
Shame must change sides
In some ways, the Pelicot trial was a turning point for France. The law has shifted. Awareness of rape culture and of chemical submission has deepened. The language of consent has entered both courtrooms and everyday conversation. Shame, as Gisèle demanded at the trial, has begun to change sides, from victims to perpetrators.
And yet, if shame has begun to shift, awareness and concern has not followed it as equally. Shame, as Gisèle demanded at the trial, has begun to change sides, from victims to perpetrators. In the months since the trial, I have found myself scanning Metro carriages, cafés, waiting rooms — noticing who is reading the dozen or so books published about the trial, who is talking about it, who is carrying this story forward. Almost without exception, it is women. Women who, as Teyssonnière told me on that cold morning in Avignon, do not have the luxury of looking away. Earlier this month, I noticed that one of my male students at the Sorbonne was reading Gisèle’s memoir, “A Hymn to Life” (released on Feb. 17) , over lunch. When I asked Yasser B., who requested his last name not be used, why he had picked it up, he told me that his mother had given it to him. “She asked me to read it,” the 22-year-old said, “because though she’d already discussed it with all her friends, she wanted a young man’s opinion on Gisèle’s ordeal.”
He said he’d noticed several of his female friends reading it when it came out in February, but that he had not originally planned to read it himself. Now, about halfway through the book, Yasser tells me that he’s already bought two more copies to give to his friends. “I used to think that Gisèle opened the doors to her trial to empower other women,” he told me. “Now,” he says, “I understand that she did for all of us.”
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