Throughout the rape trial of Gisele Pelicot’s husband, Dominique Pelicot, and the handfuls of different males of sexually assaulting her whereas she was drugged unconscious, the world has seen the Frenchwoman undergo a sequence of phases—from “serene grandmother, to anguished and shame-haunted rape sufferer, to fearful courtroom witness, to international icon of braveness and defiance,” per Andrew Harding. In his newest op-ed for the BBC, Harding notes that this ultimate stage was reached when, “a number of weeks into the trial … Gisele Pelicot determined it was time to take away her sun shades.” Her lawyer, Stephane Babonneau, explains that the eyewear was “used to cover her eyes” and “to guard her intimacy”—however “there was some extent when she felt she not wanted to guard herself.”
“She did not want [the glasses]” anymore, Babonneau says, talking to Harding about how his 72-year-old consumer has “slowly and methodically sought to rebuild her life and, to a restricted extent, her peace of thoughts.” The lawyer says Gisele Pelicot’s energy was evident from the beginning, when he and his crew had been scouring by photograph and video proof of the alleged assaults, together with Pelicot. Babonneau notes she by no means cried. With the assistance of consultants, she had been in a position “to place a formidable distance between what she was seeing and her psychological well being,” Harding writes. As for her husband, the lawyer now says: “There had been two males in Dominique Pelicot, and she or he solely knew certainly one of them.” (More right here.)
