In her closing statements of a trial that has appalled France, the 72-year-old condemned the “cowardice” of those accused of attacking her.
Gisele Pelicot has said the case against her then husband and fellow alleged abusers has laid bare a “macho society” in which rape is “trivialised”.
Throughout the 11-week trial, she has sat in the criminal court in Avignon, southern France, to face her ex-husband, who she officially divorced on September 2, and 49 other men. One defendant is at large and faces up to 20 years in prison.She told the packed courtroom: “It’s time that the macho, patriarchal society that trivialises rape changes. It’s time we changed the way we look at rape.
However, she added: “I’ve lost 10 years of my life that I’ll never make up for. This scar will never heal. There’ll forever be 51 people who have defiled me and I will have to live with this for the rest of my life.”Investigators have counted around 200 alleged rapes, most of them by Dominique Pelicot, along with more than 90 that were carried out by strangers. Almost half of them have not been identified.
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