'Gisèle is waiting for explanations'

The Pelicot rape trial has horrified the world. But as it comes to an end, the questions it has raised about French society and rape culture have still not been answered.

- Kim Willsher

IN THE FOUR YEARS after she discovered her husband had been drugging her and inviting strangers into their home to rape her, Gisèle Pelicot liked to walk to clear her head.

Striding through the countryside alone, she would throw the questions that tormented her to the wind: "Dominique, how could you have done it? Why did you do it? How did we get here?"

Asked what she was doing when she disappeared for hours, she would tell her three children: "I am talking to your father."

From his prison cell, Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted orchestrating the rapes at the couple's home in the Provençal town of Mazan, could not answer. Nor would he when facing his former wife across the crowded courtroom, except to say: "I am a rapist ... like the others in this room."

The 50 men who appeared alongside him charged with aggravated rape and sexual abuse have also failed to explain their actions.

Why, when confronted with the inert body of a drugged and unconscious woman, did these "ordinary men", as they were described in court, with ordinary names - Laurent, Nicolas, Philippe, Christian, Hassan not leave? Why did not one of them go to the police and put an end to Dominique Pelicot's decade-long abuse of his wife that could have killed her?

"The question is not why you went there, but why you stayed," Gisèle Pelicot's lawyer, Antoine Camus, told the court.

And yet they stayed. Camus cannot imagine why the men, whom he describes as a representative "kaleidoscope of French society", did so except for a lack of empathy towards their victim, who he says they treated as "less than nothing".