Giselle Pellicote picks up her sunglasses and chooses to retaliate

Warning: This story contains descriptions of alleged sexual crimes.

There came a moment, a few weeks into the trial, when Giselle Pellicote decided it was time to take off her sunglasses.

This was no mere acknowledgment of the fading autumn sunshine in the medieval southern French city of Avignon. It was also a sign that she had crossed a milestone – one of many milestones that had taken her from being a quiet grandmother, to a tormented and shame-stricken rape victim, to a frightened court witness, to a woman of courage and defiance. has marked her slow, painful journey to global icon.

“She had these sunglasses that she used to hide her eyes … to protect her intimacy,” said Stephane Baboneau, a young criminal lawyer. He is on trial for allegedly raping her.

“But there came a time when he felt he didn’t need to protect himself anymore. He didn’t need (the glasses),” Mr. Baboneau explained, calling that moment an “honestly…very” slow transformation. Used as a way to represent. “The humble person”, who initiated the lawsuit, was “extremely concerned”, shocked by the glare of publicity, and still felt “deeply embarrassed by what happened to her”.

During the trial, 72-year-old Gisele Pellicot has said almost nothing about her experience, apart from occasional and brief remarks to supporters gathered at the Palais de Justice in Avignon.

But Mr. Baboneau, speaking now with his client’s blessing, has begun to give us insight into how he has handled himself in court, and the way he has slowly and methodically tried to rebuild his life. And have sought peace of mind to some extent.

Another moment – ​​and milestone – has emerged.

This was earlier this year, in May. Mr Babonneau and his colleague Antoine Camus were combing through some of the 20,000 bizarrely explicit videos and photographs police discovered on Dominique Pellicot’s computer hard drive in 2020.

A serious task. Mr Babonneau said the videos were “absolutely disgusting”. But it was the audio that was almost more shocking.

“It is possible to hear Mrs. Pellicott snoring…to hear her breathing. It is even more disturbing to hear her choking sounds when some of the men are abusing her. The sound was very important (evidence).”

Mr Babonneau knew that without those videos, “there probably wouldn’t have been a trial or there would have been a case”.

Mrs. Pellicott also understood this, but could easily and sensibly have decided not to watch any of the footage herself for the sake of her sanity.

Instead, Mr. Baboneau remembers, one day he simply announced: “I’m ready now.”

So, she sat across from the two men in her office as they each presented a carefully selected portion of the video, explaining who the men were, and what she would see them do to her. Then Mr. Babonneau pressed play and pictures of the Pellicotes’ bedroom in their bungalow in the village of Mazan flashed on the screen.

Giselle remained still, watching intently.

“how could he?” At last he asked in his calm voice. It was a phrase she would repeat in the days to come.

Then after a while, he noted the date on a video.

“It was the evening of my birthday.”

“That happened on (my) daughter’s bed. At her beach house.”

Mr. Baboneau remembers Mrs. Pellicott’s constant outbursts, but he also said that she never cried, and that, with the help of experts, she “had managed to create an impressive distance between what she was seeing and her mental health.” “

The lawyers saw the moment as the “ultimate test”, showing that their client had achieved “some kind of equilibrium” in the four years since 4 November 2020, when she was told about her husband’s actions. was informed and “his world was destroyed.”

She was now ready to face the rigors of a public trial.

Mrs. Pellicott wanted to watch the footage to understand who all these people were, and to help fill in the gaps in her memory caused by her husband’s years of drug abuse.

“He has whole pieces of his existence that don’t exist in his mind,” Mr. Baboneau explained.

The same practical concerns shaped his decision to opt for a public hearing in the first place and to insist that the video be shown in open court.

She was definitely extremely angry. But at that stage she wasn’t looking to change the world. She was terrified by the idea of ​​spending months inside a closed courtroom filled with dozens of people who had abused her. He thought there would be less fear from a public hearing.

The first day of the trial was still painful. Wearing sunglasses, Mrs. Pellicott was appearing in public for the first time. And it got worse. Walking with her up the stairs toward the court, Mr. Baboneau saw and recognized some of the masked accused men.

But Mrs. Pellicott only gradually became aware that she was now surrounded by them, elbows bumping to get over those same protective barriers.

“It was stressful for her,” Mr. Baboneau recalled. “She was surprised at how normal everything seemed.”

And then came the moment – ​​for the first time in four years – when Gisele and Dominique Pellicote’s eyes met in the packed courtroom. Their chairs were arranged as if to make such contact inevitable.

“Sometimes I noticed that they would change each other’s faces,” Mr. Baboneau said. Giselle had repeatedly talked to her team about her concerns about how she might react in that first encounter.

Of course, we now know that Dominique Pellicote confessed to everything while testifying in court and begged for forgiveness from his family. We also know that Gisele Pellicote has not forgiven him.

“Of course, no. She can’t forgive him,” Mr. Baboneau said.

And yet, the couple was once deeply in love. They were married for fifty years. And in the courtroom, Mr. Baboneau could tell, the former couple were not able to completely ignore their shared past. So, what did the lawyer see in the eyes of both of them?

Mr. Baboneau said, seeming to say, “Look at us.”

They realized that they were communicating a shared sense of distrust to each other. Almost as if they were, in essence, spectators of the suffering of two strangers.

“How did we get here?”

During the trial, defense attorneys for various accused men tried to suggest that Giselle’s composure, her lack of tears, somehow showed that she was complicit in his abuse. Or that he felt sympathy for Dominique Pellicote.

“When a victim doesn’t cry, or doesn’t cry very much, there’s always something to criticize,” Mr. Baboneau said with a twinge of disdain.

But while the attacks clearly upset Mrs Pellicott, she also told her legal team not to worry.

There was a simple reason for this. Whatever lawyers could throw at her in court could not compare to the worst moment of her life, that day in November 2020, when an officer sat her down at Carpentras police station and showed her the first grim images , which were derived by investigators. From her husband’s hard drive.

“You know I survived November 2, 2020, so I’m ready for everything now,” Baboneau remembers saying.

As the trial progressed, Gisele Pellicot was surprised to find that public and media interest was not waning as she and her team had imagined. Instead, he began receiving letters and gifts and applause from the cheering crowd.

“When he started getting these letters, he felt a kind of responsibility to other victims who had gone through similar things,” Baboneau said.

She understood the uniqueness of her case – that the video evidence meant that it was not simply “the victim’s word against the suspect’s word”, and that she now had a rare opportunity to “change society”.

“I’m fortunate that I have evidence. I have evidence, which is very rare. So, I have to go through (all this) to stand up for all the victims,” ​​she told Mr. Baboneau.

His lawyer, again, noted his client’s “simple,” practical nature. She has no interest in being “an activist”, but is simply thinking that her experience of abusing drugs without understanding it, might now help other women become aware of the issue, and Can pay attention to possible signs of similar abuse.

If she had known then what all France knows now, perhaps she could have put an end to her ordeal.

And maybe now other women can do the same.

As for the future, Mrs. Pellicott may, perhaps, break her silence with some interviews in the coming months. But she has made it clear that she “wants to remain an individual… she wants to live a very simple life.”

And while she may never forgive her once “perfect” ex-husband, she has found a way to manage her memories of him and retain those “happy moments” they once shared. Were.

Some psychiatrists argue that Dominique Pellicott is a relatively typical psychopath – a high-functioning narcissist with no capacity for empathy, who weaves between his sordid hidden life and the self-satisfying role of playing a family man. Is. Gisele Pellicot sees things more simply, adopting the idea of ​​split personality put forward in the trial.

As Mr. Babonneau says, “Dominique Pellicot had two men and she only knew one of them.”

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