Determined to shame the men who raped her with the force of her steely presence, Gisele Pelicot has missed barely a moment of their trial, insisting on remaining in court even when graphic videos of the attacks were replayed.
Midway through the 15-week hearing, however, she quietly slipped away from the judicial tribunal in Avignon and asked to be driven to a huge hypermarket in the town of Carpentras, 25 miles away.
She went there to thank a dutiful security guard without whose diligence her grotesque husband, Dominique, might never have been caught and would doubtless still be drugging her and inviting men to defile her to this day.
While the Pelicot case has cast ordinary French men in an unfavourable light, causing us to wonder whether there is something in their culture that made so many of them capable of the cruellest form of misogyny, the heroics of Thibaut Rey – astute, sharp-eyed, with a zealous sense of justice – go some way towards restoring their honour.
Though the world’s media have sought him out at the LeClerc shopping centre where he works, these past four months, M. Rey, 38, has hitherto shied away from describing how he brought Pelicot to justice.
As the trial ended, however, he told me his exclusive story, the banality of which juxtaposes with the shocking court evidence, and somehow makes it more compelling.
We rewind to Saturday, September 12, 2020. The first wave of the Covid pandemic was almost over, but shoppers were still subject to strict safety precautions.
At LeClerc, numbers were limited, and they were required to wear masks and produce vaccination certificates.
Gisele Pelicot with security guard Thibaut Rey, 38, who has hitherto shied away from describing how he brought Gisele’s grotesque husband, Dominique Pelicot, to justice
Since all the security guards were busy enforcing these rules, Pelicot must have seen an opportunity to indulge in one of his favourite little pastimes – positioning the camera on his mobile phone in such a way that it could film the underwear of unsuspecting women.
As it was a sultry day, and many of the female customers wore short dresses and skirts, his sordid trick would be that much easier. So, with Gisele looking after their grandchildren in Paris and his urge for thrills running rampant, he made the short drive from their home in Mazan to the hypermarket.
However, his furtive behaviour was picked up by a woman monitoring the CCTV cameras, and she radioed M. Rey.
For 15 minutes, they watched as the grey-haired, surgically masked man, wearing a sweatshirt and red shorts, sidled up to women browsing around the cosmetics department and placed a cooler-bag beside their feet.
‘We worked out that the phone was jutting out of this bag, and he was filming up their skirts,’ the guard told me. ‘We saw him do this to three women, and he was obviously pretty good at it.
‘It didn’t look like the first time he had done it.
‘I went and found the first victim, but she didn’t want to make a complaint. She just said she hadn’t got time. But when my colleague in the surveillance room told me he was still at it, with a different woman, I decided to confront him directly – this time using the strong-arm method, to impress on the victim just how serious the offence was.’
CCTV footage shows M. Rey grabbing Pelicot’s phone, holding him by the arm, and telling him of his disgust – in forthright language – as he implores the shocked middle-aged victim to wait for the police to arrive.
‘I told her: ‘If you don’t press charges, he will just go home and do this again.’ I was thinking of my mother and sister, who shop here, so it got a bit personal,’ he says. ‘Pelicot didn’t resist. He froze with terror. I saw the fear in his eyes.’
Though the guard could not know it, Pelicot wasn’t panicking over the punishment he faced for ‘voyeurism’. As he well knew, having been convicted of the same offence in a Paris supermarket, ten years earlier, the worst he could expect was a caution or a small fine.
Yet he was also aware that, when he was arrested for up-skirting for the first time in 2010, bungling French police had given him a fortuitous let-off. Had they run the DNA sample he had been obliged to provide through the national database, they would have found that it matched that of a man who had lured a young estate agent to a Paris apartment, in 1999, then knocked her out with chloroform and attempted to rape her. This was the young Pelicot, then in his 30s and working in property sales.
Inexplicably, on that occasion investigators failed to check his DNA – leaving him free to put his wife through a decade of hell.
But he must have realised that they were unlikely to make the same mistake twice.
And, of course, they didn’t. His arrest at the hypermarket, brought about solely by M. Rey’s instinct and professionalism, was the crucial moment in this astonishing story.
It prompted the exhaustive house search that uncovered the vilest family archive ever assembled: more than 20,000 videos and photos of strange men abusing Gisele, often in ways that defy description, plus indecent images of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline, his pregnant daughter-in-law, and even his supposedly much-loved grandchildren. When a friendly police officer told the security guard, a few weeks later, that he had unwittingly ended the reign of a monster, he was horrified beyond words.
Graffiti posted by feminist groups on the walls near the court in Avignon that says ’20 years for each’ (the maximum sentence that could be handed down to the rapists)
Gisele arrives in front of the courthouse before a verdict in the Pelicot case is delivered on December 19 in Avignon, France
Dominique pictured arriving at the courthouse to face the verdict
‘My mother tells me every morning that I’m a hero, but for me the only satisfaction is that Madame Pelicot’s Calvary has come to an end, and that I may have helped to stop it,’ he reflects.
With the momentous trial over, he has been informed that he will be awarded France’s highest commendation, the Legion d’Honneur, yet he is equally proud that the nation’s new heroine came to show her appreciation and has since returned several times – always greeting him with a hug.
The rape trial of the century may have ended, yet the Pelicot saga is far from over. Not only because he will be back in the dock in a couple of years, this time in Versailles, for the above-mentioned attempted rape of the estate agent, who is now in her 50s and still traumatised.
Though investigators probed his evil doings for three years, sifting through hundreds of thousands of phone messages and computer files, and delving deeply into the backgrounds of the 51 defendants, when the inquiry was called to a halt (partly for fear that Pelicot’s death might deprive his wife of justice) many secrets remained.
Gisele is known to have been raped by a further 21 men, at the very least; attackers whose faces, either by stealth or luck, were not captured by Pelicot’s video camera, and who are identifiable only by the code-names he gave them, plus random comments he added to their computer files.
Among them are ‘Richard’, a local water company employee, who was the first to creep upon the comatose Gisele, according to Pelicot’s records; ‘Black Villiers’, an IT worker who ogled her at a shopping centre before his rape; ‘Guillame’, a greengrocer and volunteer fireman, who returned to attack her several times; and ‘Luc Pizza’, who fantasised about raping her and her daughter together.
Then there was ‘Michel’, who arrived at the house wearing open-toed sandals and had a retiring manner, leaving Pelicot to surmise that he may have been a monk from a nearby monastery.
While all these men, and doubtless more besides, have evaded detection, having investigated this perplexing affair since it first came to light last year, I have little doubt that some people know who they are.
Their secrets probably lie hidden in the many scenic villages dotted around Mont Ventoux – the forbidding 6,000ft mountain that locals called ‘The Beast of Provence’ before Dominique Pelicot stole that soubriquet.
Though these folk may welcome the British tourists who flock here in the summer to sample the region’s wines and watch the arduous Tour de France cycle-climb, behind their cheery façade they are deeply insular and guard one another’s privacy fiercely.
Among the procession of so-called ‘Monsieur Ordinaires’ who so casually took the opportunity to defile a sleeping grandmother, the majority lived within a small radius of the mountain.
Investigators concluded that none of the defendants had operated as a ring that met in person, deciding they had contacted Pelicot individually via private messages after initial exchanges on the now-closed website Coco.fr.
Given the close proximity of their homes, however, I think this stretches credulity. For example, I discovered that three of the men convicted yesterday not only lived in Bedoin, a village of 4,000 people, six miles from Mazan, but that their houses were only 200 yards apart. They even socialised in the same tabac.
The Pelicots’ home in Mazan. Gisele is known to have been raped by a further 21 men, at the very least
One of them was the youngest man to rape Gisele, lorry driver Florian Rocca, now 32, whose former partner still lives in the smart detached house they shared, with their three children plus two by her new partner.
Her mother described Rocca as a ‘good father’ and a fundamentally ‘decent’ person who had gone astray.
Just around the corner, in a gated compound, is the handsome family home of Cyrille Delville, 54, who raped Gisele for almost an hour, without a condom, one night in September 2019: attacks documented by Pelicot in 48 separate files labelled ‘Cyril de Bedoin’.
Of all the attackers, few were as unlikely as this redoubtable member of the village community, the father of two grown-up children by his partner of 33 years, and until the trial a respected civil engineer.
But the sorriest story I heard in Bedoin was related by Michele, an 86-year-old woman with whom I struck up a conversation as she pushed her shopping in a pink trolley.
Like everyone in these parts, she had been following news reports of the trial from the outset. But it was only a few days ago, when some of the accused were named, that she sank into despair.
For among those identified was wine company rep Joseph Cocco, 69, who lived with one of her three daughters for 15 years, and whom she once regarded as her son-in-law.
‘I haven’t even been able to discuss this with my daughter yet,’ the rheumy-eyed woman told me. ‘To know that he was involved in this will destroy her.
‘It is killing me. I thought I knew this man.
‘Yes, he could be bad-tempered sometimes, but this is something else. These men are worse than animals. At least animals do this to procreate.
‘Maybe there is something bad in every man – it shows that we just don’t know the people who live with us.’
It was a remark I heard in other villages surrounding the mountain, such as Loriol-du-Comtat, where three more of the rapists lived; and in a nearby village where I met the man described to me by Pelicot’s lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, as ‘the smartest in this entire case’.
A local councillor and town planning chief who pleaded with me not to identify him, he was among dozens of suspects arrested in the dawn raids staged after Pelicot’s cache of videos was uncovered.
However, though he admitted to contacting Pelicot on Coco.fr, with a view to a sexual encounter, and exchanging a flurry of messages with him, when investigators opened the computer file under his name it was blank.
The councillor, a 48-year-old bachelor, claims he realised he was being tricked into an illicit encounter and did not go to the house.
Yet he was under suspicion for two years before police told him he would have to appear as a trial witness but wouldn’t be charged.
During that purgatorial waiting period, he confided in just one person – his boss, the mayor.
But as he told me: ‘Everybody here knows somebody who is involved.
‘Even if it’s not a friend, it will be the friend of a friend, or someone at the grocery store.’
Gisele Pelicot leaves the courthouse after hearing the verdict of the court that sentenced her ex-husband to the maximum term of 20 years jail
In a selfie snapped by her cruel and abusive spouse, Gisele is seen beaming at the camera held by her then-spouse at a sun-soaked marina
This astonishing story first came to my attention in June 2023 when, following brief reports in the regional French press, I headed for Mazan. There I met with blank faces and closed doors, but surprisingly Madame Zavarro invited me into her cluttered office in the back-streets of Marseille and opened her files.
As this feisty little lawyer told me about the man she had agreed to represent – an outwardly proud family patriarch who professed to ‘adore’ his wife, despite subjecting her to a fate arguably worse than death – I could barely believe what I was hearing.
His crimes were so ghastly, so bestial, that I doubted that anyone would want to read about them, even in a form sanitised for public consumption.
It was a view that grew stronger when, soon afterwards, a source close to the investigation showed me a video image that still haunts me. In a dimly lit bedroom with peach-coloured wallpaper, a middle-aged woman lay on a rumpled bedspread with her eyes tightly closed and her knitted pink nightgown riding up.
Spooning behind her was an overweight young man – who hadn’t troubled to remove his grubby white socks.
I later learned that this was Charlie Abdo, a then-29-year-old agency worker, who returned to rape her on six occasions, even though – by his own admission – he came to realise after the first couple of visits that she had been rendered unconscious with sleeping pills.
Of course, I was wrong in thinking that all this would be too much for readers to stomach.
The trial has been covered by hundreds of journalists from every continent, prompting the millions who have followed it to ponder the unfathomable depths of human depravity.
And by virtue of her beatific decision to sacrifice her anonymity and face down her tormentors, Gisele Pelicot has become a totem of female indomitability. A modern-day Joan of Arc, no less.
In France, the expectation is that her courage will be rewarded with lasting societal and legal changes – changes that ensure French women are no longer vulnerable to such protracted and appalling abuse.
Like everyone who has sat through this stomach-turning trial, I pray these expectations are realised. Yet after some of the vignettes I have witnessed behind the scenes these past four months, I have grave doubts that they will materialise.
In the rapists’ home villages, the talk among the men is no less crudely sexist, and even among some of the older women I met attitudes remain primitively patriarchal. Reeling off an oft-repeated mantra, a woman who has lived in Malemort for all her 80 years said she refused to believe any wife could be raped for a decade without knowing.
She topped off this iniquitous slander by quoting the turn-of-the century French writer Pierre-Jules Renard: ‘L’homme propose, la femme dispose.’
That this jaw-droppingly outdated saying – which translates as ‘men make propositions and women avail themselves’ – still pertains in parts of France speaks volumes.
Yet these retrenched attitudes weren’t only to be found in the rural backwaters. Perhaps the most revealing thing I have seen happened when, by chance, I walked behind two defence lawyers – both young and female – as they went to lunch at a restaurant near the Avignon court.
Along the way they passed one of the slogans that feminist groups have posted on walls around the city – a huge sign demanding ’20 Years for Every One of Them’ (the maximum sentence that could be handed down to the rapists).
In Britain, as in any other modern democracy, members of the legal profession would surely have ignored this graffiti, no matter whom they represented.
Extraordinarily, however, these learned young pillars of French femininity clawed off the number ‘2’ on the sign with their fingernails, so that it read ‘0 Years’ for the rapists. Then they strolled away, giggling at their handiwork.It left me to wonder what planet they were on.
But this is planet France, and they have another famous saying here: ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.’ The more things change, the more they stay the same. This time, in the name of Gisele, we must hope they will turn out differently.
Additional reporting: Rory Mulholland in Avignon.
