“The whole world is watching this trial which, I believe, carries a societal message,” says Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer

According to the lawyer, invited on Wednesday on France Inter, her client “considered that this absence of closed doors allowed openness to the international and the national and that people, that public opinion should have another look at this matter.”

“I had anticipated the fact that this trial could arouse the curiosity of the national press, I had not at all anticipated the international character that this trial now takes on,” Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, confessed on Wednesday October 2 on France Inter, one month after the opening of the trial. His client is accused of having drugged his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, with anxiolytics, for ten years, from July 2011 to October 2020, then raped her and had her raped by dozens of men he invited on the internet. Alongside the septuagenarian, 50 men, aged 26 to 74, are on trial in Avignon (Vaucluse).

“This international orientation is due to the fact that Madame Pelicot refused to go behind closed doors, the doors opened and the whole world is watching this trial which I believe carries a societal message”underlined the advice of Dominique Pelicot. According to the lawyer, her client “considered that this absence of closed doors allowed openness to the international and national world and that people, that public opinion should have another look at this matter”.

For Béatrice Zavarro, this trial “can change things”, particularly on the notion of consent, systematically absent in the minds of sexual attackers, and which could lead to a legislative evolution of the definition of rape. “I think that today we are pointing out the need for the absence of consent to be enshrined in law”she points out. “We go from Gisèle to Gisèle”, believes Me Béatrice Zavarro.

“We had Gisèle Halimi, in 1978, who through her strength of conviction and her fight succeeded in having rape included as a criminal offense in the penal code. And today, we have a Gisèle Pelicot who wears the message of the need for consent which, in fact, is already in the law”explains the lawyer. According to her, “the absence of consent is the definition of rape but it is true that literally speaking, the word consent is not included in the text of the penal code”.