Gisèle Pelicot has rewritten her story – and electrified women all over the world. But what about men?
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Women who are raped are in many countries – perhaps in most – violated and abused again by the legal system. And yet during her reckoning with the crimes of her husband and 50 other men, all now found guilty in a historic set of verdicts, Gisèle Pelicot seized control of the narrative, becoming a hero in France and around the world.
After she discovered her husband had been drugging her and offering her up online to strangers to come and rape while she was unconscious, Gisèle left her home, her marriage and the story she had told herself about her life, and spent some time in seclusion. When she emerged, she made two key decisions that transformed her into a feminist hero.
The conviction of her rapists and the husband who orchestrated them is justice of a sort (despite some of their sentences seeming shockingly short), but it could all have taken place in the context of the same old story: the shaming, blaming and bullying of a woman in court. She broke that story, and wrote her own instead.
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