Gisèle Pelicot lifts her sunglasses – an indication of a milestonepublished at 10:35 Greenwich Mean Time
Andrew Harding
Reporting from Avignon
Image source, Reuters
There was a moment, a few weeks into the trial, when Gisèle Pelicot decided it was time to remove her sunglasses.
It wasn’t just an acknowledgment of the fading autumn sunshine in the medieval southern French city of Avignon. It was also an indication that she’d passed a milestone – one of many that have marked her slow, painful journey from serene grandmother, to anguished and shame-haunted rape victim, to fearful courtroom witness, to global icon of courage and defiance.
“She had these sunglasses she used to hide her eyes… to protect her intimacy,” said Stéphane Babonneau, the youthful criminal lawyer who for two years has guided Gisèle through the case against her ex-husband, Dominique and the 50 co-accused.
“But there was a point when she felt she no longer needed to protect herself. She didn’t need [the glasses],” Babonneau explained, seizing on that moment as a way to illustrate the slow transformation of a “sincere… very humble person”, who had begun the trial “extremely worried”, shocked by the blaze of publicity, and still feeling “very ashamed of what had happened to her”.