Sawt Falasteen - Gisele Pelicot back in French court for appeal trial 'ordeal'

Fifty-one men, including her former husband Dominique Pelicot, were convicted at the initial trial that ended in December 2024, after nearly four months, and which turned Gisele Pelicot into an international icon.

Gisele Pelicot, 72, waived her right to anonymity and her dignified and quietly defiant conduct throughout the trial made her a feminist hero and a symbol of the fight of women against male sexual violence.

One of the 51 men convicted, Husamettin D., has filed an appeal and maintained it. This means the appeal trial will go ahead starting Monday in the southern city of Nimes, and it is expected to last a maximum of four days.

"She would have been happy to forgo this ordeal again," one of Gisele Pelicot's lawyers, Antoine Camus, told AFP.

"But she is taking part to make clear that rape is rape, that there is no such thing as a small rape," he added.

- 'Too much for me' -

Gisele Pelicot was heavily drugged by her husband over a 10-year period to be raped and sexually abused by strangers while unconscious, mostly at the family home in the rustic southern French town of Mazan.

Unlike in the initial trial in Avignon, where Gisele Pelicot faced around fifty accused men in court every day, this time she will find herself facing only Husamettin D., who is not currently in custody.

One of her three children, Florian, will be at her side to support her, according to Camus.

In December, Husamettin D. was sentenced to nine years in prison. But his incarceration was delayed for health reasons.

"I'm not a rapist," the 44-year-old construction worker said during the first trial.

"This is too much for me to bear. He's her husband. I never thought that guy could do this to his wife."

At first, 16 other men also appealed their verdicts, but they all abandoned their bids.

But Husamettin D. "intends to maintain his appeal in full, both on the question of his criminal responsibility and on the sentence", his lawyer Sylvie Menvielle said in June.

- Ex-husband to testify -

Dominique Pelicot, meanwhile, has not appealed his 20-year prison sentence and will only appear as witness for the new trial.

But he will be extracted from his prison, where he remains in solitary confinement, to be cross-examined on the second day of the appeal trial.

"Dominique Pelicot has no intention of changing his perspective or position," his lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, told AFP.

She stressed that her client's first words at the Avignon trial were: "I am a rapist and all the men in this room are rapists."

In the first trial, the defence strategy of many of the men was to shift the blame onto Dominique Pelicot and claim they were lured into believing they were taking part in a sex game with a libertine couple, an argument which did not convince the court.

Most of his 50 co-defendants, aged 27 to 74, were convicted of rape. They all received sentences ranging from three years in prison including two suspended -- the lightest term which went to a pensioner tried for sexual assault -- to 15 years in prison for a man who had raped Gisele Pelicot six times.

Husamettin D. said that in December 2019, he had met a man online who presented himself as a member of a "libertine couple" whose wife "pretended to be asleep".

That same evening, after abusing Gisele Pelicot's inert body for at least half an hour, he purportedly only realised that something was wrong when he heard her snoring.

He claimed to have left in a hurry but did not deem it necessary to alert the authorities.

Y.Zaher--SF-PST