Topic: Courts. Gisele Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in order to make the trial of her husband public. AP: Lewis Joly. Speaking slowly and clearly, Gisele Pelicot told the courtroom how her life as she knew it fell apart one day in Local French police had invited her to speak to them after her husband was arrested for filming up women's skirts in the town of Mazan, where they had lived since The investigators showed her an image of herself, unconscious in her bedroom.
A man who was not her husband was raping her as she lay motionless on the bed β a still from one of dozens of videos involving dozens of men. Everything I have built up over 50 years," Ms Pelicot said. A decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband, Dominique Pelicot, is now the subject of a trial where Ms Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in order for the crimes to be made public.
The trial, which began on Monday, will run for four months, with dozens of men including Mr Pelicot charged with a range of offences. Ms Pelicot gave evidence for 90 minutes, recounting how she had begun to believe she had Alzheimer's after years of strange memory lapses and other health problems.
At that initial meeting with police, Ms Pelicot was shown "barbaric" pictures of her being sexually assaulted by multiple men including her husband, taken at different times over a year period. Mr Pelicot, aged 71, listened to her evidence with his head bowed. Ms Pelicot was supported by her children throughout the first week of her husband's trial. Lawyers for some of the defendants had questioned on Wednesday whether the couple had had an open relationship, or whether it was credible that Ms Pelicot had noticed nothing for the entire decade of the abuse.
These are rape scenes," she said on Thursday. After learning of her husband's crimes, she left their shared home with two suitcases, "all that was left for me of 50 years of life together.
