PARIS – France’s president on Friday thanked Gisele Pelicot, the woman who was drugged and raped for a decade by her now ex-husband and strangers he enlisted online, for the strength and poise she showed during a trial that shocked the world.
“Thank you Gisele Pelicot… For all of us, because your dignity and your courage have moved and inspired France and the world”, Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media platform X, a day after her former husband Dominique Pelicot and 50 other defendants were found guilty after a three-month trial.
Gisele Pelicot, 72, became a hero in France and abroad after she waived her right to a closed trial, insisting that shame should trade sides from rape victims to perpetrators.
Her husband of decades, Dominique Pelicot, 72, had admitted to drugging her for almost a decade so he and strangers he recruited online could rape her.
He was found guilty by a court in the southern city of Avignon on Thursday and jailed for 20 years.
His 50 co-defendants — dubbed “ordinary men” during the trial as they came from all walks of French life — were also all found guilty and handed sentences of between three and 15 years.
