Five unanswered questions from the trial

French rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot left a court in southern France for the last time on Thursday after her ex-husband was jailed for 20 years for drugging and raping her and inviting dozens of strangers to abuse her too for almost a decade .

Dominique Pelicot, 72, was found guilty on all charges by an Avignon judge. He was on trial along with 50 other men, all of whom were found guilty of at least one charge, although their prison terms were shorter than those prosecutors had demanded.

Although the trial has ended, questions still remain about the Pelicot case and what will happen next.

When she first walked up the steps of the Avignon courthouse in September, no one knew Gisèle Pelicot’s name. Over the course of the next 15 weeks, her fame as a rape victim who refused to be ashamed of what had been done to her grew precipitously.

When he left the court ThursdayHundreds of people chanted his name and his photograph appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world.

Now she is perhaps one of the best-known women in France. This means that, although she has changed her name, it will be impossible for her to return to the anonymity that served her so well while she was trying to rebuild her life after the revelation of her husband’s crimes.

Gisèle is not the first person whose unimaginable suffering has made her an icon. At great personal cost, he has become the symbol of a fight he never chose. It seems unlikely, then, that she wants to become an outspoken activist against gender violence or a prominent feminist figure. Rather, she can return to what she says has always brought her comfort: music, long walks and chocolate, plus her seven grandchildren.

“At the beginning of the trial, she said: ‘If I last two weeks, it will be too much.’ In the end she lasted three and a half months,” said her lawyer Stéphane Babonneau. “She is now at peace and relieved that it is all over.”

Days after Dominique Pelicot’s crimes came to light, his daughter Caroline Darian was summoned to the police station and shown photographs of an apparently unconscious woman dressed in unknown lingerie. She later said her life had “stopped” when she realized she was looking at photos of herself.

Her father has always denied touching her, but Caroline, whose anguish and devastation were evident in many court sessions, has said she would never believe him and accused him of looking at her “with incestuous eyes.”

But a lack of evidence of the abuse Caroline is convinced was inflicted on her has led her to say she is the “forgotten victim” of the trial. That notion has visibly seeped into his relationship with his mother. In her memoirs, published after her father’s arrest, she accused Gisèle of not showing her enough support, implicitly choosing to side with her rapist ex-husband over her daughter.

Although Gisèle and her children have always sat next to each other in court, often whispering together, there have been signs of the toll the trial has taken on their relationship.

On Friday, Caroline’s brother, David, stressed – as he had done before – that the trial had not focused only on Gisèle but on her entire “annihilated family.”

“We children feel forgotten,” he said. “Honestly, I think that while our attorneys did an extraordinary job defending our mother, we were a little less taken into account.”

In her memoirs, Caroline lamented Gisèle’s “denial as a defense mechanism.”

“Because of my father,” he wrote, “I am now losing my mother.”

Aside from Dominique, all of the prison sentences handed down to the defendants were less than what prosecutors had demanded.

Several defense lawyers were visibly complacent, meaning they are unlikely to encourage their clients to appeal their sentences. A man called Jean-Pierre Maréchal was sentenced to 12 years – five less than prosecutors had asked for – and his lawyer Patrick Gontard told the BBC it was “out of the question” for him to appeal.

The months or years the men spent in pretrial detention will count toward their total sentences, meaning some may be released soon if they have served their minimum sentence.

One man facing 17 years ended up being sentenced to eight years in prison, and his lawyer Roland Marmillot told the BBC that as he had already spent several years in prison, he was likely to be released relatively soon.

Still, by the morning after the trial concluded, two men sentenced to eight years each had already appealed. More are expected to occur in the next ten days – the period of time during which appeals can be filed.

Dominique Pelicot has admitted assaulting and attempting to rape a 23-year-old real estate agent, known by the pseudonym Marion, on the outskirts of Paris in 1999. Her mouth was covered with a cloth soaked in ether, but she managed to resist the attacker. he left and ran away. It was not until 2021, after being arrested for the crimes he inflicted on his wife Gisèle, that Pelicot’s DNA was matched to a speck of blood found on Marion’s shoe, and he admitted his guilt.

However, he has denied any responsibility in another unsolved case: the 1991 rape and murder of another young real estate agent, Sophie Narme, for which there is no DNA. Investigators have argued that the two cases have too many similarities to be a coincidence.

Other unsolved cases in which similar modus operandi were used are also being re-examined.

“There will be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ to the Pelicot trial,” a Parisian told the BBC in the early days of the trial.

For many, this feeling has only grown in recent months, during which intense media coverage of the Pelicot trial generated countless conversations about rape, consent, and gender-based violence.

“What we need to do is impose much, much tougher sentences,” Nicolas and Mehdi, two residents of Mazan, told the BBC. They said they were “disgusted” when they discovered that one of the accused was a man they had played football with.

“With longer sentences, they will at least think twice before doing things like this,” they said, adding that it was “very unfair” that some of the men could be released from prison in the coming months.

It is worth noting, however, that the risk of incurring a 20-year prison sentence for aggravated rape did not deter Dominique Pelicot from offering his unconscious wife to be raped by strangers he met online.

There have been calls to reform French rape law to include consent, but that has stalled in the past and would require considerable work in the current divided French parliament.

Some have argued that schools have a responsibility to better teach new generations about sex, love and consent. Béatrice Zavarro, Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer, has said that she believes that “the change will not come from the Ministry of Justice but from the Ministry of Education.”

Françoise, a resident of the area where Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot lived, told the BBC that she believes a way must be found to close the gap between what children are taught in schools and the type of material they have access to online .

“Young people are very exposed to sex on the Internet and, at the same time, schools are very prudish,” he said. “They should be much more open and frank in relating and explaining what children see.”

What these exchanges show is that, while it will take time before changes are tangible, a conversation has now begun. It will continue until there are no more unanswered questions.