Diane de Vignemont writes:

On my train back to Paris that evening, I sit next to a group of undergraduate students who, like me, traveled to Avignon to watch the trial. They take a break from their homework to talk to me.

They tell me they’ve been following the case through reporters’ “live tweets” from the start. On social media, her supporters petition for Gisele to be made Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, or be given the Nobel Peace Prize. Posts bearing hashtags like #JusticeForGisele and #ShameSwitchesSides routinely go viral, creating a digital chorus of support.

But all four of them still felt compelled to come to Avignon in person. “It’s different when you’re here,” Aurelie confides. “You feel it in your bones.” With her short blond hair, freckles and oversize Squid Game sweatshirt, she looks much younger than her 18 years, the minimum age to sit in on the trial.

“MeToo revealed that every woman can be a victim,” Aurelie tells me while fiddling with her pink highlighter, “but this trial shows us that any man can be a perpetrator.” She then proceeds to list the professions of some of the men on trial, recruited by Pelicot on an online forum brazenly called “Without her knowledge”: a fireman, a lawyer, a nurse, a factory worker, a truck driver, a reporter. They were aged 21 to 68 at the time of the rapes; some are fathers, others grandfathers. Their banality is chilling, Aurelie adds with a shudder. Many returned to Mazan for more. One went six times. None of them reported Pelicot to the police.

“When Gisele opened the doors to her trial,” Aurelie concludes, “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.” That, Aurelie says, is why she traveled to Avignon today.

Gisele began her journey as a shadow. “I have been sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she told the court in the first week of the trial.

After her husband was arrested for filming up four women’s skirts in a local supermarket in 2020, police inspectors discovered upward of 20,000 photos and videos of him and a series of men abusing his sleeping wife. Gisele, drugged unconscious, had no memory of any of it, until a police inspector showed her a first photo and her life fell apart. The retired executive, who’d spent decades in logistics services for France’s nuclear power plants, had contracted four sexually transmitted infections. When the trial opened, she described her life as a “field of ruins.”

Yet, as the days passed, the power dynamics shifted. Long gone is the self-conscious figure who hid behind her two lawyers on the first day of the trial. The men who once viewed her as an object of their abuse now face her as a symbol of unflinching resistance, backed up by the solidarity of a movement that is growing by the day.

“It’s not bravery,” Gisele told the court: “It’s will and determination to change society.” [Continue reading…]