Original Verdict

Nearly a year had passed since the original verdict stunned the country. In Avignon, fifty-one men were convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot over almost a decade. Her husband, Dominique, had drugged and filmed her as she lay comatose in their marital bed. He posted ads in an online chatroom called “Without her knowledge” that invited other men — seventy-two in total — to come and take turns. The evidence was overwhelming: hundreds of videos, methodically catalogued and stored, showed Gisèle Pelicot unconscious, snoring heavily, her body positioned by her husband for strangers’ use. All fifty-one identified men were convicted.

For all her efforts to make the trial a public reckoning with France’s entrenched rape culture, civil society was kept outside the courtroom. The use of a streamlined, jury-free court turned what could have been a collective confrontation into a bureaucratic exercise. The reform’s rhetoric of “efficiency” had translated, in effect, into the removal of the people from 88 percent of rape trials — and that included what many called the “rape trial of the century.”

Outside the courtroom, the people gathered anyway. Feminist collectives put up collages on the walls of Avignon that read “20 years [in prison] for all” and “Justice for Gisèle, justice for all.” Each morning, long before the gendarmes opened the doors, a line of women wound down the street, hoping to get a seat in the courtroom, though journalists from around the world already took up most of the spots.

From the outset, defense lawyers made clear what they thought of this public scrutiny.

One of the accused’s lawyers, Maître Caroline Beveraggi, complained that the “chaos of the courtroom lobby” would hinder a serene judgment, dismissing the rows of journalists and citizens who had come to watch. Another, Maître Philippe Kaboré, mocked “judicial tourists.” Others went further: “After the Star Academy [a French singing competition judged through a public vote], here comes the Criminal Court Academy,” joked Maître Carine Monzat, while Maître Virgil Monzies sneered that spectators rushed in “as if to a spectacle, as if to the zoo.”

Three weeks into the trial, and against Gisèle Pelicot’s wishes, the president of the court used his powers to lock journalists and the public out of the room when the videos were shown. When the press pushed back and got let back in a week later, they were described as “hyenas,” with lawyers decrying their “morbid and unhealthy curiosity.” Maître Monzies continually described “the media, feminists and the well-thinking elites” as “violent,” and his colleague, Maître Patrick Gontard, told women’s rights activists to “go take a trip to Iran.” The courtroom reeked of contempt for anyone who dared to look in.

That contempt spilled over onto their own clients. One lawyer described his defendant as having “the IQ of a vibrator.” Another dismissed the fifty accused as representatives of “social misery — labourers, a disabled man, a truck driver.”

One has to wonder how such a legal strategy might have played in front of a peer jury.

It never had the chance to be tested. When the verdict finally came that December, it was not delivered by citizens weighing the “intimate conviction” in their hearts but by five career magistrates. All fifty-one men were found guilty by the criminal court, including Gisèle Pelicot’s husband, most receiving sentences much lower than those demanded by the prosecution.

So when Husamettin Dogan, one of the convicted men, appealed his nine-year sentence for aggravated rape, the retrial in Nîmes was not just a procedural follow-up. It was the first time one of Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers would be heard before a jury — and a test of what difference the presence of ordinary citizens might make.

Unfiltered Reaction

In the Nîmes court of appeal, the men and women of the popular jury sat on five benches to the right of the accredited press. They had been drawn, as French law requires, by random lot from the electoral rolls of the Gard department. They had to be over twenty-one, without a criminal record, and able to read French. Most looked anxious. Many looked determined. They stared at the press, at Gisèle Pelicot, at Dogan, who walked in free.

In the United States, juries are theatrical — scrutinized, dissected, endlessly debated. Lawyers select them strategically; voir dire sessions expose bias and psychology. Sat next to me in court, Margaux d’Adhémar from French daily Le Figaro told me that when she covered the Harvey Weinstein trial in New York, the jury selection took two weeks. In Nîmes, it took all of ten minutes.

In French appeal trials, the defense can recuse five jurors, and the general attorney can recuse four. The court knows almost nothing about the assembled jurors before making its selection: not their political beliefs, not their class, not their religion — just their name, age, and profession. They could not ask them whether they, themselves, had experienced sexual abuse.

And so, unsurprisingly, and with barely a glance their way, Dogan’s defense exercised its right to recuse all of the women among the first eight whose names were called, alongside a young man in his mid-twenties. Though this strategy had been expected, outraged whispers erupted across the room. The general attorney also recused two young men, including one who, like Dogan, bore an Arabic first name. No explanations were given as to the thought process behind their selection.

All of the recused jurors sat back down, but most chose to stay and watched as the selected peer jury — five men and four women — joined the court as the trial began.

Their presence altered the atmosphere.

Though the peer jurors had been asked to leave behind what they knew about the original case, they didn’t come in blind, as one might in an appeal regarding a local traffic accident. The Avignon trial had been sensational, inescapable. All of them had undoubtedly heard of Gisèle Pelicot before they entered the courtroom and had necessarily been privy to her ten-year ordeal.

During testimony, one juror’s pen froze above his notes as Dogan claimed that he had not raped Gisèle Pelicot, but that he, himself, had been “raped,” because the videos projected in court violated his privacy. Another wiped her eyes as she watched footage of Dominique Pelicot prying open his wife’s mouth so Dogan could insert his erect penis into it. When Dogan, asked what he thought rape meant, said, “Someone who is tied up, and forced,” the room audibly tensed, and one of the younger jurors rolled her eyes.

Unlike in Avignon, the absurdity of the defense’s strategy of denial met the unfiltered reaction of ordinary people.

Popular Jury

The Nîmes appeal reversed the procedural logic of the Avignon courtroom. It was imperfect (most of the jurors stopped taking notes after the first day), sometimes problematic (one of the jurors anonymously asked to know the accused’s religion), but recognizably democratic.

Trials before popular juries are slower, more demanding — and more pedagogical. Lawyers must speak plainly, experts must be extensive in their explanations (the speed at which hair grows, the rate at which sleeping pills might lead to death, the psychiatric meaning of “perversion”), and prosecutors must narrate rather than recite.

As magistrates often admit, the presence of citizens forces the courtroom to teach as it judges: to translate legal abstraction into moral meaning. In criminal courts, proceedings are technical and written; during appeals, they are oral, collective, alive.

Since the Revolution, the popular jury has been a key instrument of citizenship. Yet every generation of rulers — from Napoleon’s censored juries to Emmanuel Macron’s professionalized ones — has tried to tidy away citizens’ participation in the conduct of justice.

In Nîmes, for a brief moment, that distance closed. The presence of nine ordinary people reminded the court that justice, at its core, is a social contract.

In his concluding remarks, public prosecutor Dominique Sié urged the mixed panel to move “from a culture of rape to a culture of consent.” A few jurors nodded.

When the verdict came — ten years in prison, one more than before — it felt like acknowledgement. The people had spoken, and they had not believed Dogan’s denials. They recognized that Gisèle Pelicot was a victim of rape — which, as her lawyers told the court, was all she had wanted.

In his concluding plea, Antoine Camus, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, told the court: “The verdict you deliver will matter more than the one in Avignon, because this time, it will be the expression of the French people, designated by lot, for the entire world to see.”