Is This France's #MeToo Moment?

The trial of Dominique Pélicot, who has admitted drugging his wife and allowing her alleged rape, has highlighted a culture of sexual violence in the country

- BRENDAN COLE

WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST BLANdine Deverlanges wants to be in court to support Gisèle Pélicot as much as she can, but often the testimony in the rape trial implicating dozens of men is too much.

"Sometimes it is really unbearable, so I cannot go every day," said Deverlanges, founder of Les Amazones d'Avignon, a group whose members have protested outside Vaucluse criminal court since the case against Pélicot's husband Dominique and 50 other men started on September 2.

"I felt sick," Deverlanges told Newsweek in describing the first time she heard details of how the retired electrician allegedly drugged his wife and recruited accomplices in an online chatroom to sexually violate her while it was being filmed.

"During the hearing I cry and the women around me, you see tears on their faces—it is so inhuman. This woman has been a victim of such monstrosity that we feel compassion and anger and everything is mixed," she said. "You feel so disgusted."

Gisèle Pélicot, 72, has won praise for waiving her anonymity and walking defiantly into the Avignon courtroom every day, sometimes behind the men accused of raping her.

On September 17, she heard her husband of five decades admit: "I am a rapist like the others in this room."

The range of professions and ages of the accused reflects a snapshot of different generations and a cross-section of working and middle-class rural France. The youngest is 26, the oldest 74, and they include truck drivers, members of the military, a nurse and a journalist. The modus operandi of the accused combined with the everyday nature of their occupations have tested public comprehension.

Gisèle Pélicot's courtroom response of "it is difficult for me to listen to this" was understated and echoed sentiment in France where the #MeToo movement has so far only implicated the famous and powerful, with few consequences.