Gisèle Pelicot’s marital rape case shocked the world. It echoes a quieter revolution in the US.

A French man who admitted to drugging and raping his wife repeatedly over a period of 10 years, and inviting other men to join him in the assaults, was found guilty of aggravated rape and other crimes Thursday in a case that has sparked a furious reckoning over the culture of sexual violence in the European country and around the world.

The man, 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot, was given the maximum sentence of 20 years for his crimes, which included filming the sexual assaults, and distributing sexual images of both his wife and daughter without their consent.

Fifty other men were also found guilty of crimes in connection with the case.

The case has shocked and captivated the French public, in part because of the horrific details and because of the refusal on the part of the primary victim, Pelicot’s wife, Gisèle Pelicot, to keep the awful details of what happened to her in the shadows. 

The case is sparking a greater debate about marital rape and consent in France. But it’s also reflective of similar policy issues in the US, where activists have only just recently been able to reform laws that made it difficult to prosecute marital rape. Until recently, most US states had exemptions that made it hard to charge people accused of marital rape with a crime. An American woman with an eerily similar experience to Pelicot’s helped change all of that.

What happened to Gisèle Pelicot?

In 2020, Dominique Pelicot was arrested after being caught filming up a woman’s skirt at a grocery store. Police confiscated his phone and laptop and found an extensive collection of videos featuring Pelicot and several other men sexually assaulting his wife while she appeared unconscious. Gisèle Pelicot had health problems related to the druggings and assaults, but was unaware of what was happening to her until the police showed her videos of the assaults.

Gisèle waived the anonymity that is customarily granted to sexual violence victims in France, arguing from the start that she had nothing to be ashamed of. As she told the court during her trial: “I wanted all woman victims of rape — not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels — I want those women to say: Mrs. Pelicot did it, we can do it too. When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”

“By refusing the closed door, Gisèle Pelicot gave a historical dimension to the trial, showing the existence of marital rape, the banality of the rapists, and the extent of chemical submission,” Fondation des Femmes, a prominent women’s rights organization, said in a statement sent to Vox in French. At the same time, the group also criticized the court for giving shorter sentences to Dominique Pelicot’s co-defendants. “The fight against impunity is far from over.”

By refusing to stay hidden, Gisèle Pelicot held up a mirror to some of the darkest corners of society, and in particular rape culture: Here was an ordinary woman, a grandmother, who suffered unbearable sexual violence at the hands of the person she loved and trusted. Here were a number of seemingly ordinary men — a nurse, an IT guy, a journalist, and truck drivers — who participated in the crime. What did it say that so many of them had been willing to participate in such a horrific act? 

A Me Too moment in France

By allowing her story to be told, Gisèle has become an icon in Europe. A group of protesters began gathering at the court each day and cheering her as she entered the trial. She’s appeared on the digital cover of Vogue Germany and been depicted as a larger-than-life mural in several cities. 

Thousands of protesters have also taken to the streets to demand the government take sexual violence more seriously, with some protesters arguing that French law, which forbids rape “by violence, constraint, threats or surprise” but does not mention consent, needs to be updated to include that rape is also sexual conduct that isn’t necessarily violent but is done without permission. (Not all French feminists agree, with some arguing that the term puts the onus on the victim to prove she didn’t consent.)

In late November, just days after the protests across France, Equality Minister Salima Saa introduced a series of proposals meant to raise awareness and improve support services to victims of both sexual and domestic violence. They include expanding the number of hospitals where women could report incidents of sexual violence. She also announced a new hotline meant to help victims navigate the medical and legal processes when reporting an assault.

In an interview, Saa said there would be a “before and after” the Pelicot case, just as there was a “before and after” the Me Too movement. 

French survivors of sexual violence have argued that the Me Too movement never impacted French culture the way it did in the United States. As Vox’s Li Zhou wrote in September: “The Pelicot case is just the latest to raise awareness of sexual abuses in France this year, after multiple cases of sexual misconduct by prominent actors and directors came to light.”

Now, France seems to be in the midst of a revolution of its own. French director Christophe Ruggia is currently on trial for allegations that he groomed and sexually assaulted actor Adèle Haenel, a star of the 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, when she was a child. The trial started in December. Another sexual assault trial against Gérard Depardieu, one of the country’s most celebrated actors, is set to begin in March after being postponed over the fall. Depardieu has been accused of assault by more than a dozen women.

A reckoning on marital rape in the US

Though the Pelicot trial is sparking a cultural reckoning over sexual assault years after Me Too, the case in some ways echoes a reform movement that’s been quietly happening in the United States in recent years. French feminists have argued that the country’s proudly libertine culture made people less open to the Me Too movement than in the US, whose culture is comparatively more conservative. But in fact, the US has had to reckon with marital rape, too.  

In the United States, marital rape has been explicitly illegal in every state since 1993, the product of a feminist activist movement that successfully pressed each state legislature to update their laws. But until recently, a number of states had exemptions which made it difficult to prosecute marital rape. In some cases, people could not be charged if the person accusing them of rape was their spouse. In other cases, they were exempt if the person was incapacitated — if, for example, they’d been drugged.

In a case with haunting similarities to Pelicot’s, in 2017, a Minnesota woman named Jenny Teeson discovered videos during a divorce from her then-husband that portrayed him raping her while drugged and unconscious. When Teeson brought the evidence to the police, she was shocked to discover that they couldn’t arrest him because even though marital rape was illegal, a different state law included a “voluntary relationship defense” that forbid prosecution of someone for rape if the complainant was their spouse at the time. With the help of state lawmakers, Teeson began advocating for the Minnesota law to be reformed, and in 2019, Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill eliminating the voluntary relationship defense and explicitly making marital rape illegal. 

At the time, according to the New York Times, the majority of states had similar loopholes that effectively legalized some forms of marital rape. Since Teeson raised awareness about the issue, other states have moved to reform their laws: Ohio closed its marital rape loophole earlier this year. 

Today, most states have closed loopholes, but a few remain in states like Michigan, where spouses cannot be prosecuted if their partner is “mentally incapable” or under the age of 16. Lawyers who work with victims of sexual violence say that removing exemptions that allow people to get away with marital rape are critical. A “defense should never exist solely based on a relationship,” Jennifer Long, the CEO of AEquitas, a nonprofit organization that helps develop strategies for prosecuting crimes of gender-based violence, told Vox in an email. 

The questions raised by the Pelicot trial aren’t just relevant to France and the US, either — and that may be why the trial has become a major news story around the world. “It’s time that the macho, patriarchal society that trivializes rape changes,” Gisèle Pelicot said at the trial. Her words have reverberated far beyond her home country, implicating all a culture of violence that persists around the world.