This is partly due to her courageous decision to forgo the automatic anonymity afforded to her by the French justice system in favour of making her trial public. Her decision to do so has had repercussions that go beyond French borders, igniting a compelling debate about the shame and stigma attached to victims of sexual assault. A subsequent investigation into his electronic devices revealed about 20, images and videos meticulously labelled with explicit titles, showing around 70 men having sex with an unconscious woman.
These were later used by the police to identify 50 of the men who Dominique Pelicot had been allowing to rape Gisele Pelicot. Throughout, Dominique Pelicot insisted on attending her appointments and assured her that there was nothing seriously wrong with her, even suggesting that her health issues were due to exhaustion from looking after her grandchildren.
It was only after the arrest of Dominique Pelicot that she learned the truth. In French law , the dissemination of the identity of victims of sexual assault or abuse is prohibited without the written consent of the victim to reveal their identity. This has been upheld to protect the victim from further demeaning during the legal process following a rape complaint. However, in many ways it has also prevented victims from getting justice by allowing their abusers to stay out of the public eye.
This included the hundreds of people who gathered outside the courtrooms every day of the three-month-long trial in a show of support, and of disgust towards the 51 men on trial. On 19 December , Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison , the maximum sentence for rape under French law. Several groups have been dissatisfied with the results of the trial, arguing that sentencing has been too lenient. This marks the Pelicot rape trial as a powerful step forward in changing attitudes towards the severity of sexual violence and how the perpetrators of such violence should be punished.
Many of the cases in avoided formal investigation because prosecutors could not identify sufficient evidence that a perpetrator used violence, threat, coercion or surprise: the current definition of rape under French law. Excluded from this definition is the concept of consent, which played a major role in the trial of Dominique Pelicot and the other 50 men. Following the trial, debate over whether consent should be included in the definition of rape in France has experienced a resurgence.
