Gisèle Pelicot tells rape trial ‘it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them'

Gisèle Pelicot told the court of her "will" and "determination" to change society, ITV News Reporter Chloe Keedy reports

This article contains distressing details.

Arriving at court in Avignon, Gisèle Pelicot appeared, as ever, calm and completely composed. Outside and inside the building people lined up and applauded as she passed. She smiled and nodded, just as she does every day, to thank them for their support.

In more than ten years as a journalist, I have never experienced anything quite like the atmosphere inside Avignon’s Palais de Justice as it grapples with hosting one of the biggest trials in French history.

There was a huge queue, not just for the main courtroom, but also for the overflow annexe where members of the press and public could sit and listen via a video link.

The Pelicot trial has riveted and repulsed not just France, but the world.

The horrific story of a husband - Dominique Pelicot - who repeatedly drugged and raped his wife over the course of a decade, and invited strangers into their bedroom to take part as she lay unconscious.

Today Gisèle Pelicot told a packed courtroom that she had loved and trusted her husband for 50 years.

The courtroom fell completely silent as Gisèle Pelicot said she wanted to address her husband directly. Refusing to look directly at him, she asked "how could you have betrayed me like this? How could you have brought these strangers into my bedroom?"

"I am a woman who is totally destroyed and I don't know how I can pick myself up from this."

She told the courtroom: "It's not for us to have shame - it's for them."

Inside court, she must face 50 more men on trial accused of rape, a charge which many of them deny. Amongst them, there is a nurse, a local councillor, an IT worker and a journalist. Many are husbands and fathers - ordinary-sounding men accused of the most extraordinary violence.

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Some choose to hide their faces as they walk in and out, unlike Gisèle Pelicot, who waived her right to anonymity so that this case could be heard by the world.

"She felt that she wasn’t the one who should be ashamed," her lawyer Stephane Babonneau told me. "Her aggressors should be ashamed. She is somehow fighting for every woman to ensure that this doesn’t happen again."

The incredible courage of Gisèle Pelicot has resonated with people across the globe.

From the walls outside the court and around Avignon, where supporters have scrawled messages in her name, to solidarity marches elsewhere in Provence and as far away as Paris.

To her many supporters, Gisèle Pelicot is both a survivor and a symbol of what needs to change. A hero who told the court that she lives in the hope that sharing her horror might make others think "I can do that too."

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