Gisèle Pelicot, a survivor of sexual abuse, is hailed as a nationwide icon in France for her bravery in court docket.
An on-line petition went viral after it proposed final Wednesday that Gisèle Pelicot be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pelicot grew to become globally recognized for standing as much as her ex-husband and dozens of different attackers in a mass rape trial that shocked France and made her right into a feminist icon.
Now, the petition has already garnered almost 90,000 signatures in lower than every week.
“No one deserves the Nobel Prize greater than Gisèle Pelicot,” Catherine Mayer, a British journalist who began the petition, wrote in her rationalization for the transfer.
For nearly a decade, 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot’s former husband, Dominique Pelicot, gave her sedatives and raped her whereas unconscious, inviting males recruited on-line to do the identical with out her data or approval.
In early January, the founding father of the web site utilized by Dominique Pelicot to seek out and have interaction with these males was arrested.
Gisèle Pelicot has caught the eye of French and worldwide information retailers and ladies’s rights teams worldwide with the openness and braveness she displayed within the three-month trial in opposition to her ex-husband and 50 different males, after she waived her proper to anonymity as a survivor of sexual abuse.
Pelicot efficiently pushed for the hearings and proof — together with her ex-husband’s selfmade movies — to be heard in open court docket, insisting that “disgrace ought to fall on her abusers”, not on her.
“Gisèle Pelicot managed to interrupt by the fog of disinformation by waving her anonymity with a purpose to attend the trial of her attackers and testify,” Mayer wrote.
‘We share the identical struggle’
The court docket within the southern metropolis of Avignon discovered Dominique Pelicot responsible of rape and all different fees introduced in opposition to him in December, sentencing him to twenty years in jail, the utmost potential in France.
A variety of sentences going from three to fifteen years’ imprisonment have been handed to the 50 different males discovered responsible of raping Gisèle Pelicot.
After the sentences have been handed down, Pelicot issued a message of hope.
“‘I need you to know that we share the identical struggle. After I opened the doorways to this trial… I wished society to witness the debates that passed off right here,” she stated.
“I now trust in our capacity to discover a higher future the place everybody, men and women alike, can reside in concord, respect and mutual understanding.”
Gisèle Pelicot was named France’s Character of the Yr in a 2024 French opinion ballot, beating world leaders together with French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In 2018, the Nobel Peace Prize committee handed out a joint award for the struggle in opposition to sexual violence to Congolese gynaecologist Dr Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad.
The Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo — a grassroots motion of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — acquired the award in 2024.
