‘Gisèle Pelicot did something. Now we have to prove that we can do it too’

Four hundred and twenty years in prison… and now what? The world’s press unanimously hailed Gisèle Pelicot’s courage and the conviction of the 51 defendants on trial for the rapes under sedation that she endured for almost a decade. But beyond the judgment and the facts, what most foreign commentators underlined is that it marks the start of a new era in which everything remains to be done, because “we could all be the monster,” as The Country put it.

Many highlight how this “historic” trial involved seemingly ordinary people. “This case revealed that monsters often had the features of an ordinary neighbor. But also that the majority of assaults took place in a family setting, and that the murder weapon was within everyone’s reach, in the bathroom medicine cabinet,” observes Spanish journalist Daniel Verdu, for The Country. The scale of the “monsters trial,” as the Austrian daily The standard calls it, has “shown that sexual predators are neither rare nor abnormal,” writes The Guardian in its editorial.

“The trial is a story of what ordinary men did to one ordinary woman,” writes Megan Clement in an opinion piece for The New York Timesexplaining that the defendants, nurses, factory workers, technicians or shopkeepers aged between 20 and 70, “represent a broad cross-section of French society,” which many commentators around the world still consider to be steeped in “rape culture.”

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