The first day Gisèle Pelicot walked up the steps of the courthouse in Avignon in September 2024, she was an anonymous retired grandmother.
Within weeks, this diminutive 72-year-old - the victim at the centre of the largest rape trial in French history, involving 51 men including her husband - had become a feminist icon.
She was last seen in public when the verdicts - all guilty - were handed down in December. By then, crowds of supporters were chanting her name.
On Monday Gisèle Pelicot returns to court, this time in Nîmes, for the appeal of the only one of the 51 defendants to challenge his sentence: Husamettin Dogan, 44, a married father of one.
Between September and December last year, Gisèle's bleak story travelled the world. For over a decade, she had been drugged unconscious by her husband Dominique and raped by dozens of men he had recruited on internet chat rooms.
Dominique Pelicot filmed the assaults and neatly catalogued them on a hard disk, which allowed investigators to track down the majority of the individuals involved. Around 20 could not be identified and remain at large.
After a trial lasting 16 weeks, 46 men were found guilty of rape, two of attempted rape and two of sexual assault. Dominique Pelicot was handed the maximum jail sentence of 20 years.
Husamettin Dogan's appeal next week will, in effect, be a retrial. The videos of Gisèle's rape will be shown in court again, and Pelicot will be present – this time, though, only as a witness.
While she is not obliged to, Gisèle too will attend the proceedings.
Everyone would have understood if she hadn't come because, well, she is trying to resume a normal life, one of her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau, told the BBC. But she feels she needs to be there and has a responsibility to be there until the end of the proceedings.
In December, Dogan was found guilty of aggravated rape and sentenced to nine years in prison. Due to health reasons he was handed a deferred custody warrant and is not currently in jail. He is reportedly appealing both the guilty verdict and the length of his sentence.
As was the case for many of the other 51 men, Dogan's defence hinged on the argument he could not be guilty of raping Gisèle because he had not realised she would be unconscious. Pelicot rejected this argument, saying he had made it abundantly clear to the men he recruited online that his wife would be drugged.
In his statement to the court last year Dogan did admit telling Pelicot that his wife looked dead. Still, he vehemently pushed back against the accusations levelled at him. I don't accept being labelled a rapist, he protested. It's too heavy a burden for me to carry.
Although 16 other defendants also initially lodged appeals, Dogan was the only one who has pushed ahead with it. Unlike the first trial, Dogan's appeal will be judged by a jury made up of nine members of the public who will decide on both his conviction and the length of his jail term.
If he loses his appeal, the trial's huge resonance and media coverage may mean the jury ends up being less lenient than the judges were last December.
French magistrate Magali Lafourcade believes the Pelicot case has had a significant effect on French society and that jurors are bound to have a new understanding of societal issues around rape and consent.
The proceedings, which this time will only last four days, are set to be combative. Last year, Dogan's lawyer Sylvie Menvielle suggested the rape videos showed a three-way sex game and hinted Gisèle may have been complicit. The comments prompted an outraged Gisèle to exit the courtroom mid-session for only the second time in the trial.
Although last year she only addressed the court on a handful of occasions, whenever she did so Gisèle said she was speaking out to help other victims of rape: I want them to say: if Madame Pelicot did it, I can too. Shame must change sides from the victim to the perpetrator, she insisted. This reasoning was at the heart of her decision to waive her anonymity, open the trial to the media and the public, and push for the videos of her rapes to be shown in court.
It was a momentous decision, and the reason the trial garnered worldwide resonance. Since the verdicts were handed down, Gisèle Pelicot has been named one of Time's 100 most influential people. She was also awarded numerous prizes including the French Legion d'Honneur and has been sent a personal letter by Queen Camilla.
However, after months in the public eye, Gisèle retreated to Île de Ré, a small island off France's Atlantic coast. Unfortunately, the need for privacy did not last, as her image was captured by paparazzi reports, causing renewed legal troubles.
Her public visibility reflects not just her iconic status but also the familial unraveling resulting from the case. The family unit that presented a united front during the trial has now fractured, with two of her adult children distancing themselves due to emotional turmoil surrounding the case.
As the new court date draws near, looking back at the significant transformation that has taken place within Gisèle’s life and the lives of her family members raises questions about societal views on rape, justice, and healing.
