When the lawyer Stéphane Babonneau took on what would become the most horrific case of his career, he faced a dilemma. He knew his client Gisèle Pelicot had to be told details of the hundreds of rapes her husband had subjected her to while she was unconscious over the course of almost a decade, but how could he possibly do so without causing her even more harm?
By 2022, when Babonneau took the case, Gisèle knew that her husband, Dominique, had drugged her and invited strangers he met online into their home to assault her, but she had no idea of the specifics. Babonneau would find out after watching many of the 20,000 videos and photographs Gisèle’s husband had made over the years. “Everyone was extremely worried she could have a nervous breakdown,” Babonneau says. “What would happen when she was faced with the full truth and scale of what was done to her?”
As a seasoned criminal lawyer, Babonneau says he is “used to seeing very disturbing things, but this level of depravity and inhumanity and trauma? I had never seen anything like it before.”
Dominique was first interviewed by French police in September 2020, when he was arrested for filming under the skirts of female customers in a supermarket. It was only when the police examined his phone, computer and an external hard drive that evidence emerged of his abuse of his wife. Two months later, he was taken into custody and Gisèle, 72, learned the truth about the man she had considered a “perfect, caring, attentive” husband, father and grandfather during their 50 years of marriage.
Police used facial-recognition software to identify 50 of the 70-plus men captured on the thousands of videos Dominique made of his wife being raped and sexually abused. He admitted to drugging his wife with anti-anxiety medication and sleeping tablets, dissolved into her evening glass of wine, her breakfast or the sorbet he would bring her for dessert. She would wake up from her near coma remembering nothing – and became increasingly afraid that her memory loss was due to a brain tumour or Alzheimer’s disease.
Sitting in the lounge of a hotel in Avignon, near the courthouse where the trial is taking place, Babonneau tells me he took on the case at the end of 2022, when his friend and colleague Antoine Camus approached him about working on it together. Camus had heard that Gisèle was looking for a new lawyer. Camus had trained as a criminal lawyer, but was working in corporate litigation and felt he did not have enough criminal experience to take on such a complicated sexual abuse case alone.
When first handed the files, Babonneau says he had trouble believing what he was reading. “I thought: ‘How is this possible?’ It was hard for me to understand how something like this could even happen,” he says. By the end of 2022, the French investigation was heading into its third year. Unlike the British legal process, a criminal investigation is overseen by a juge d’instruction – an investigating magistrate. By the time a case reaches court – which can take years – all the evidence has been compiled.
Babonneau and Camus went to meet Gisèle. “She was such a straightforward, genuine person … We felt she was lost in the legal process. She needed to be advised and accompanied by people she could trust.”
Babonneau, 42, was born and educated in Paris, with a Mexican mother and a French father. He began his career in “the shiny world of corporate law”. After two years with a French firm in Beijing, he returned to Paris and spent six years acting for the state in tax evasion cases before establishing his own criminal law firm in 2016. “I was more interested in humans than money,” he says.
One of Babonneau’s and Camus’s first concerns when they took the case was a challenge by the accused men’s lawyers to have the videos ruled out as evidence, as the police search for the hard drive they were on was, they alleged, not legal. “We knew that if there were no videos, there was no case,” Babonneau says. The defence’s challenge failed.
The investigating magistrate told Babonneau and Camus that they had to watch all the videos in advance of the trial. “‘You cannot understand the case if you don’t,’ she said. When we started watching them, we realised she was right.” Then came the task of disclosing to Gisèle the full horror of what had happened to her. “Gisèle knew she had been put to sleep, but not the lingerie, the degrading words, the paper [over her face] …
“We had to prepare her for the fact she was not only sexually abused, but that there was a real intention to degrade her.” Babonneau refers to videos filmed “on the night of her birthday; on New Year’s Eve; on Valentine’s Day; in her daughter’s bed; on her dining room table; in her car at a motorway service station”.
Gisèle’s reaction to the footage was complicated. “I remember her being profoundly disturbed by the fact she was snoring. There she was, naked, there were penetrations, she is filmed choking with a penis in her mouth and Dominique Pelicot is telling the man ‘gently’ and ‘let her breathe’, and she knew people would watch that – but what she was most ashamed of was her snoring,” Babonneau says.
“She was also terrified of what people would think about her – and her family. Would people think she was stupid to have let what happened to her happen for 10 years? How could she have been raped for 10 years in her sleep?”
Babonneau and Camus were aware that this was exactly where the defence would be going, too. “We were preparing for a line of defence that she was somehow faking being asleep and was a willing participant. We knew this argument would be presented in court and videos would be needed to tear it apart.”
The lawyers say that, overall, they were surprised with her reaction to the videos. “She was strangely calm,” Babonneau says. “Later, we understood why. She was an ordinary woman, a pensioner living in the south of France, and what could she expect from life? No trauma, no dramatics, a nice house in a nice village. She thought this would be her life for ever.” Then, on 2 November 2020, she got up and had breakfast with her husband. “They had been called to the police station and Dominique told her it was about the upskirting. He had said they could go shopping afterwards, in the afternoon. It won’t be pleasant, but by noon we will be home, he said.”
That day would be the last time Gisèle would see Dominique until the trial. The couple’s divorce came through in August this year, a month before the trial opened. “Nothing could be more violent than that day,” Babonneau says. “If she could survive that, if she could survive the turmoil of the following months, she could face whatever would come.”
She has coped, Babonneau suggests, “by being deeply indignant: how could he? How could they claim they didn’t rape me?” It was this indignation that persuaded Gisèle to change her mind about remaining anonymous during the trial.
“She felt what she had been through should not be discussed behind closed doors,” Babonneau says. If the trial had been closed, without the presence of the press or public, “she would be behind doors with nobody but her, us, perhaps some family, and 51 accused men and 40 defence lawyers. And she didn’t want to be jailed in a courtroom with them for four months, her on one side and 90 other people on the opposite benches.
“I felt that by opening the doors of the court, it would create a safer space for her,” Babonneau says. “And it is true she felt that shame must change sides. She wanted people to see that it was these men touching her intimately, that they should be the ones feeling ashamed … She thought these men should explain themselves publicly.”
A closed court would also mean that “while there would be some press attention on the first day, everyone would leave, because there would be nothing to see or discuss. It would become a terrible faits divers [downpage news story]. She came to the conclusion that if she had heard about a case like this, maybe she would have been able to stop what she went through long before. Other women who had strange memory loss would think about this woman Gisèle Pelicot. Her attitude was: ‘What has happened to me must never happen to anyone else and for this to happen normal people need to read about it.’ She told us: ‘I could never imagine such a thing was even possible – and by my own husband.’”
This change has already happened, says Babonneau. “It is no longer possible that if someone wakes up and can’t remember anything, and they have gynaecological issues, that they will not think of Gisèle Pelicot. Rape trials will be held in public and exposed thanks to Gisèle Pelicot.”
In waiving her anonymity and insisting the hearing be held in open court, Gisèle has made herself not just a victim of a horrific crime, but a feminist icon and inspiration for other rape survivors. The trial has raised issues of consent, chemical “submission” and the treatment of sexual abuse victims in France, where the #MeToo movement has struggled to make headway since it emerged in 2017. Feminist groups say the trial is already encouraging other victims of sexual abuse to come forward, even if, according to the Institute of Public Policies, an estimated 86% of complaints of sexual abuse and 94% of rapes are not prosecuted and never reach court.
As word of the trial has spread, Gisèle has grown in confidence, stopping to thank the crowds of mostly women who cheer and clap her each day, offering her flowers and even, one afternoon, an olive tree.
“The whole world has been impressed by her dignity and resilience. People come up to her all the time – not just at the court, but in the street, to thank her,” Babonneau says. “Some of the young women are in tears. She thought nobody would be interested in her: ‘Why would they?’ she said. She has had a great deal of psychological support, but she is of the generation that didn’t complain, didn’t make a fuss, but just got on with things, and that is what she is doing now. This is why she is there every day in court. She could have gone along for the first few days or weeks and then left us to do our job, but felt she owed the legal system the respect to participate in the case.”
Babonneau says Gisèle has taken comfort in the outpouring of support she has received. During the four-month trial, Babonneau and Camus have picked apart the explanations presented by the 50 men in the dock with Dominique. All but one of them is accused of aggravated rape and most of them deny all charges. They await a verdict that is due on 20 December.
In his summing up, Camus told the court: “Gisèle Pelicot has every reason in the world to hate. Who could blame her? She would have every reason to pit men and women against each other and to castigate the male sex in general. But she has chosen, despite what she has been through, to transform this mud into noble matter, to go beyond the darkness of her story to find meaning in it.”
Babonneau says the verdict will be “part of the testament we pass on to future generations, who, I am sure, when confronted with this phenomenon – which will not disappear in a generation – will undoubtedly judge the lessons that will have been learned from our debates and the actions that will have been taken to deal with this scourge”.
He adds: “They will then discover the name of Gisèle Pelicot, her courage and the price she paid to ensure that society could change.”
