It is a crime so brutal and depraved it defies words – so outside the court, they applaud instead.

Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual abuse

Since September, people have lined the route in Avignon clapping as Gisele Pelicot walks past. It is a wordless act of support for the 72-year-old woman at the centre of a mass rape trial that has sent shockwaves across France.

It is a message that she, not the rapists, holds the power. An echo of Gisele’s rallying cry that “shame must change sides”.

For four months, she has sat through the case of her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted drugging and raping her for almost a decade and inviting other men to do the same.

Fifty men were accused of rape and sexual assault. The majority denied the charges.

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When Gisele walks into court now, her head is up, her eyes look ahead. In the earlier days, she often hid behind sunglasses.

Her legal team has suggested removing the glasses was about more than a change in seasons. It marked the moment she no longer felt the need to protect herself and hide her eyes.

After waiving her right to anonymity so the trial could be heard in public, Gisele’s face has become one of the most recognisable of the year, graffitied on walls, held on placards at demonstrations, emblazoned on the front cover of Vogue magazine’s German edition.

It is a monumental shift from the life the mother-of-three was living just four years ago.

A monster in the house

In early 2020, Gisele Pelicot lived with her then husband Dominique in the pretty Provencal village of Mazan, their pale yellow bungalow nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac.

It was here the couple spent their retirement after moving from Paris in 2013. Gisele remembers it as a happy time. Her friends and family liked Dominique, and they had seven grandchildren.

After meeting when she was just 19, Dominique claimed it was “love at first sight”. Gisele believed he was “the perfect husband”.

Then on 12 September 2020 her life began to unravel.

A shopping centre security guard spotted Dominique Pelicot trying to film up the skirts of women using a phone hidden in a bag.

He had been arrested for a similar upskirting offence near Paris in 2010. Back then, he was fined €100 and kept it a secret.

This time, police seized Dominique’s phones, computer and storage devices, uncovering a meticulously organised library of 20,000 images and videos, many showing different men having sex with one woman who appeared unconscious.

The woman was his wife, Gisele. Officers wondered – was this consensual, or had they found evidence of years of abuse? Two months later, they’d built their case.

In the end, one of France’s most serious sexual offenders was caught by chance.

For Gisele, the secrets uncovered by investigators would reveal her marriage was a lie, her happy home was hiding horrors.

Her perfect husband was a manipulative villain who had violated and betrayed her in the most unimaginable ways.

‘A horror scene’

When Gisele was called to talk to police in November 2020, she thought it was about the upskirting allegations, which she knew about.

As her husband left to be questioned, she had no idea this was the last time she would see him as a free man.

After confirming she was the wife of Dominique Pelicot – telling police he was a “super guy” – detectives explained they had found thousands of photos and videos. They showed her a photograph. Then a second, and a third.

“I asked him to stop. It was unbearable. I was inert in my bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart,” Gisele later told the jury.

She described the images as “a horror scene”.

For almost a decade, Dominique had arranged for dozens of men to come to the couple’s home and have sex with his sedated wife as he filmed them, keeping the footage to fulfil his own fantasies.

“I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she said. “They regarded me like a rag doll, a garbage bag.”

Dominique pleaded guilty to drugging and raping Gisele, and inviting around 70 men to have sex with his comatose wife. Fifty of those were identified and arrested.

At the start of the trial in September, Dominique said: “Today, I maintain that I am a rapist, like those concerned in this room. They all knew her condition before they came, they knew everything, they cannot say otherwise.”

He met most of the men on a French swingers website using an email account entitled “Fetish45”. The planning was detailed and chilling. Using a chat room called “Without her knowledge”, he recruited other men.

Dominique demanded they didn’t smoke or wear any fragrances, and instructed them to park down the street. The common line of defence was that Dominique had told the co-defendants they were taking part in a couple’s fantasy and Gisele had consented.

In most cases, the men didn’t wear condoms. Medical expert Anne Martinat told the court Gisele was “very lucky not to have contracted HIV, syphilis or hepatitis” – but noted she did get four different sexually transmitted infections.

Gisele told the jury: “I feel betrayed and raped. I’m betrayed by this man who I thought I’d spend the rest of my days with.”

Talking about how she was drugged, she explained how Dominique was always willing to cook while she looked after their young grandchildren.

She described going to bed early one evening after a dinner Dominique had cooked, and him bringing her ice cream: “It was my favourite, raspberry and mango sorbet. I thought ‘wow’ I’m so lucky to have a husband who looks after me like this.”

The court heard Dominique sedated Gisele by concealing drugs in desserts or drinks.

“The meals, then the ice cream – then I woke up in the morning in my pyjamas, often tired but I thought it was because I had walked a lot the day before.”

For years, Gisele was repeatedly drugged, and raped as many as 100 times without knowing what was happening to her body.

Laure Chabaud, lawyer for the prosecution, said Dominique was prescribed Temesta, an anti-anxiety drug, by his doctor.

He began experimenting with drugging and raping Gisele when they still lived in Paris in 2011. He gradually found the right dosage and was able to obtain more than 700 tablets from the pharmacy.

For the next two years, he raped his sedated wife while filming the abuse. When they moved to Mazan, he escalated his activity and began inviting others to join in.

They walk among us

The harrowing details have prompted questions: how could a man do such things, and how did no one notice?

We want monsters to be easily identifiable, but as Gisele told the court: “The profile of a rapist can be normal, can be a friend or a family man.”

Dominique’s lawyer Beatrice Zavarr suggested there were “two Dominiques” – a family man and a man with a certain “perversity”.

“People aren’t born perverted, they become it,” she said, repeating her client’s words and suggesting a traumatic childhood had damaged his brain and left him with a split personality.

Dominique’s flawless facade of a family man meant no one suspected a thing.

When Gisele suffered from memory lapses and blackouts due to the drugs and feared she had Alzheimer’s disease, he stood by her side. When she experienced gynaecological problems due to the sex attacks he had orchestrated, he held her hand at the doctor.

But in secret – in a file called “abuse” – he was collating videos of assault. In some, he could be heard telling the men what to do to his comatose wife.

The court also heard he helped school a so-called “disciple” called Jean Pierre M in how to drug and rape his own wife.

Kerry Daynes, a leading forensic psychologist, told Sky News the contrast between Dominique’s public persona and his perverted behaviour is not a surprise.

“Sexual offenders are very good at compartmentalising,” she said, calling the idea of him having a split personality “absolutely ridiculous”.

“It implies there’s some sort of underlying psychiatric condition. There’s not. He is, quite simply, a sexual deviant who hates women and wants to abuse and degrade them.”

Dominique’s crimes did not start with Gisele. Giving evidence, he said at 14 he was forced to participate in rape which he said created “a crack”.

“The fantasy I indelicately revived is similar to that,” he said.

His DNA was matched with blood found at the scene of the attempted rape of a woman in Paris in 1999. After investigators underlined the evidence against him, he admitted he was there.

He has also been accused of the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Paris in 1991, which he has denied.

The trial heard he also secretly filmed his son’s wives, one of whom was pregnant, and shared naked photos of them online.

He also took photos of his adult daughter, Caroline, semi-naked while she was asleep. She is now terrified that he drugged and abused her, although he has repeatedly denied this in court.

Dominique would have engaged in “psychological acrobatics”, Kerry Daynes said, to justify his behaviour to himself, “thinking if I’m offending against Gisele, then I’m not offending against other women, or at least I’m keeping it in the family”.

She added: “This is how sex offenders operate. They’re not monsters lurking in alleyways. They are the men that we share our lives with.”

Considering the impact of Dominique’s traumatic childhood, Daynes said “these situations obviously affected him” – but “it’s wrong to say that there’s a simple cause and effect here”.

“If that were the case, everybody who has been the victim of childhood sexual abuse and trauma would be abusing other people, and that’s just not the way it works.”

As for the 50 others found guilty after the trial, they have no obvious linking factors besides mostly living within 30 miles of the Pelicots’ home.

Their ages range from late twenties to mid-seventies. Some come from broken homes, had drug or alcohol problems or were abused as children. Some now have families of their own. Most have jobs – among them a journalist, lorry drivers, soldiers, a nurse, firefighters and a DJ.

They’ve been dubbed “Monsieur Tout-Le-Monde”, or Mr Everyman. They are the fathers, the husbands, the boyfriends and the brothers that walk among us.

The majority denied the charges, arguing they were manipulated; they believed there was consent; they hadn’t “intended” to commit rape or what they did wasn’t rape.

However, the fact so many men with no common thread could be involved has prompted questions about whether these crimes were bred from something rotten deep within French society.

A rallying cry

By waiving her anonymity, Gisele has forced France to discuss its rape culture. She said in court: “I wanted all victims of rape to be able to say: ‘If Mrs Pelicot can do it, we can do it’… Because when you’re raped, you feel ashamed, but it’s not us who should feel ashamed, it’s them.”

Some defence lawyers have tried to undermine that strength, grilling Gisele on whether an affair inspired Dominique to seek revenge – something they both rejected.

On another occasion, Guillaume de Palma, a lawyer for several defendants, said “there is rape, and then there’s rape”, implying a man unaware he was committing rape could not be judged for the crime.

“When you see a woman deeply asleep on her bed, isn’t there a moment when you wonder, ‘Isn’t there something wrong here?'” Gisele angrily fired back from the stand.

“Rape is rape,” she said.

That simple phrase has become a battle cry for women across France, with tens of thousands joining demonstrations against sexual violence.

Among them in Paris was Miranda, who said France was “sexist and misogynist… but we are starting to speak out”.

Many protesters are demanding consent is added to the French legal definition of rape, which is currently defined as “sexual penetration, committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”.

Gisele said: “I hear lots of women, and men, who say, ‘You’re very brave’. I say it’s not bravery, it’s will and determination to change society. This is not just my battle, but that of all rape victims.”

Her story has already given strength to domestic abuse survivor Latika, whose real name we are withholding for her safety.

She discovered her ex-husband was drugging her evening tea. He’d wait until she passed out and rape her. But one night, the tea was spilt and she didn’t get the full dose.

“It started with slaps, then he belittled me, humiliated me and then he isolated me,” she said.

“In the middle of that night, I woke up and he was on top of me, raping me. He was close to finishing the act, and I was shocked, paralysed. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.”

When she reported the violence and attacks to the police she said they tried to persuade her not to include the rape allegation, saying she had no proof.

For two years she has been receiving therapy at Lucky Horse centre, which supports domestic abuse survivors. It’s on the edge of Mazan, minutes from the Pelicots’ former house.

When they heard about Gisele’s story, the women organised a silent march in her honour. Gisele visited them to show her appreciation.

Latika says she has been empowered by her courage: “She has helped women to find their voice and speak out about what has happened without shame.”

A ‘destroyed woman’ – now a hero

France’s new justice minister Didier Migaud recently said he is in favour of updating the law, as has President Emmanuel Macron, after France blocked the inclusion of a consent-based rape definition in a European directive in 2023.

Last month, the government unveiled measures to help combat violence against women including raising awareness of using drugs to commit sex attacks. The changes include state-funded test kits, the ability to file complaints at more hospitals and increased emergency aid.

“These last months the French have been deeply moved by the incredible courage of Gisele Pelicot,” said then prime minister Michel Barnier as he made the announcement.

Today, the so-called Monster of Mazan, Dominique Pelicot, has been found guilty of aggravated rape and sentenced to 20 years in prison – the maximum sentence available. He was also found guilty of the attempted aggravated rape of the wife of one of the co-accused, and taking indecent images of his daughter and his daughters-in-law.

The other 50 men who faced trial with Pelicot have been jailed for a collective total of 421 years.

The court found 46 men guilty of rape, two guilty of attempted rape and two guilty of sexual assault.

As many as 30 other men seen in the videos are yet to be identified. But as the weeks and months go by, it is not the rapists’ names that will be remembered. They will not be the ones left wielding the power.

That lies with Gisele. It is her name that people will utter when they call for change. It will be Gisele other victims think of as they summon courage.

The 72-year-old has said she is seeing a psychologist and takes long walks as she tries to rebuild what others stole from her. She does not know if she will ever recover.

“I am a destroyed woman,” she once said.

But to many in France, she is so much more: she is the woman who pushed shame back on the rapists, a survivor, a hero.

Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK

If you think you’re experiencing domestic abuse, you can contact the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247

The Rape Crisis National Helpline can be contacted on 0808 802 9999