Daily Times

Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose ex-husband was jailed for 20 years for orchestrating and committing mass rapes against her with dozens of strangers, has no fear of a new trial if there is an appeal, her lawyer said on Friday.

The 72-year-old has been hailed as a hero and feminist icon for her courage and dignity in the over three-month trial that ended on Thursday with all 51 defendants, including her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, being convicted.

Gisele Pelicot said afterwards that she respected the verdicts of the court, although her elder son on Friday said that while satisfied with his father’s sentence, he was “disappointed” by the leniency of the other verdicts. But after Gisele Pelicot described the process as a “difficult ordeal”, she risks having to go through another trial, with two defendants already lodging an appeal and the lawyer of her ex-husband not ruling out doing the same.

“If it were to happen, she has already indicated to us that she would face it – if she is healthy, obviously, since she is a lady who is now 72,” Stephane Babonneau, one of her lawyers, told France Inter radio. “In any case, she has no fear of it, that is what she told us.”

Asked about his client’s state of mind, Babonneau replied that “she was very happy to go home. She is very relieved”.

But he warned against seeing Gisele Pelicot as an “icon” even as she is applauded by world leaders for her courage in ordering the trial to be open to the public to raise awareness of sexual violence against women and drug-induced rape.

“What she doesn’t want is for other victims to think ‘this lady has extraordinary strength, I couldn’t do that’,” he said. “She doesn’t want to be seen as an icon. She doesn’t want to be seen as someone extraordinary. And in reality, she is someone who remains very simple and who has decided to try to live her life in the most normal way,” he added.