Giselle Bellicot raises her sunglasses and chooses to respond

Warning: This story contains descriptions of alleged sexual crimes.

There was a moment, a few weeks into the trial, when Giselle Bellicot decided it was time to remove her sunglasses.

This was not just an acknowledgment of the fading autumn sunshine in the medieval city of Avignon in southern France. It was also a sign that she had crossed a milestone — one of many that marked her slow, painful journey from quiet grandmother, to anguished rape victim haunted by shame, to frightened witness in the courtroom, to global icon of courage and defiance.

“She had these sunglasses that she used to hide her eyes…to protect her intimate relationship,” said Stephane Babonneau, a young criminal lawyer who guided Ms. Bellicot for two years during the case against her ex-husband, Dominique, and 50 other men. On trial for rape.

“But there was a moment when she felt like she no longer needed to protect herself. She didn't need (the glasses),” Babono explained, using that moment as a way to illustrate the slow transformation of “honest… very honest.” “A humble person,” she began the trial “very anxious,” shocked by the flames of publicity, and still feeling “deeply ashamed of what happened to her.”

Over the course of the trial, Giselle Bellico, 72, said almost nothing about her ordeal, other than occasional, brief comments to her supporters gathered at the Palace of Justice in Avignon.

But Mr Babono, now speaking with his client's blessing, is beginning to offer us insight into the way she handled herself in court, the way she slowly and methodically sought to rebuild her life and, to a limited extent, her peace of mind.

Another moment – ​​and landmark – stands out.

That was earlier this year, in May. Mr. Babonneau and his colleague Antoine Camus were going through some of the 20,000 strangely explicit videos and photographs discovered by police in 2020 on the hard drive of Dominique Bellicot's computer.

Grim mission. Babono said the videos were “absolutely disgusting”. But the sound was almost more shocking.

“It is possible to hear Mrs. Bellicot snoring…and to hear her breathing. And most disturbingly, to hear her choking when some men abused her. The sound was very important (evidence).”

Babonneau knew that without those clips, “there probably would have been no trial or case.”

Mrs Bellicott realized this too, but she could have easily and understandably decided, for the sake of her own sanity, to avoid watching any of the footage herself.

Instead, Babono recalls, one day she simply declared: “I'm ready now.”

So, I sat next to the two men, in their office, as they presented a carefully selected portion of each video, explaining who the men were, and what they saw them doing with them. Then Babono started playing, and images of the Bellicot family's bedroom, in their small house in the village of Mazan, appeared on the screen.

Giselle remained still, watching intently.

“How could he?” She finally asked in her calm voice. This is a phrase that you will continue to repeat over the coming days.

Shortly after that, I noticed the date on one of the videos.

“That was the evening of my birthday.”

“It happened in my daughter's bed. At her beach house.”

Babonneau recalls Ms Bellicott's constant exasperation, but also noted that she never cried and, with the help of experts, was able to “put an impressive distance between what she was seeing and her mental health.”

The lawyers saw this moment as a “final test” that showed their client had regained “some kind of balance” in the four years since November 4, 2020, when she was informed of her husband’s actions and her “world was destroyed.”

She is now prepared to face the rigors of a public trial.

Mrs Bellicott wanted to watch the footage to find out who all these men were, and to help fill in the gaps in her memory, caused by years of being drugged by her husband.

“She has whole parts of her existence that don't exist in her mind,” Mr. Babono explained.

The same practical concerns initially shaped her decision to choose a public trial, and to push for the videos to be shown in open court.

She was very angry, for sure. But at that point she wasn't looking to change the world. She was simply nervous about the idea of ​​spending months inside a closed courtroom filled with dozens of her attackers. I thought a public trial would be less terrifying.

The first day of the trial was still painful. Ms. Bellicott was wearing sunglasses and revealing herself to the public for the first time. And it got worse. While walking beside her on the stairs leading to the courtroom, Mr. Babono noticed and recognized some of the masked accused men.

But Ms. Bellicott slowly realized that she was now surrounded by them, bumping elbows as they scrambled to cross the same security barriers.

“It was stressful for her,” Babono recalls. “I was surprised at how normal everything seemed.”

Then came the moment — the first in four years — when Giselle and Dominique Bellicot met eyes across the crowded courtroom. Their chairs were arranged as if this contact was inevitable.

“I could sometimes see them exchanging glances,” Babono noted. Gisele repeatedly spoke to her team about her anxiety about how she would react in that first encounter.

We now know, of course, that while giving evidence in court, Dominique Bellicot confessed everything, and that he begged his family for forgiveness. We also know that Giselle Bellicot has not forgiven him.

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Babono said. “She cannot forgive him.”

However, the couple was once deeply in love. They were married for fifty years. In the courtroom, Babono was able to say, the former spouses were not able to completely ignore their shared past. What did the lawyer think of those exchanged glances?

“It was as if they were saying, ‘Look at us,’” Babono said.

He felt that they were communicating with each other with a shared sense of disbelief. As if they were, briefly, spectators watching the suffering of two strangers.

“How did we end up here?”

During the trial, defense attorneys for several defendants tried to suggest that Giselle's composure, and her lack of tears, somehow suggested that she was complicit in her abuse. Or that she felt sympathy for Dominique Bellicot.

“When the victim does not cry, or cries a lot, there is always something worth criticizing,” Babono said with a tinge of disdain.

But while Ms Bellicott was clearly shaken by the attacks, she told her legal team not to worry.

There was a simple reason for this. Nothing lawyers could throw at her in court could compare to the worst moment of her life, that day in November 2020, when an officer at Carpentras police station sat her down and showed her the first grim images investigators had unearthed. From her husband's hard drive.

“You know I survived November 2, 2020, so I’m ready for everything now,” Babono recalled her saying.

As the trial continued, Gisèle Bellicot was surprised to find that public and media attention had not turned away, as she and her team had imagined. Instead, she began receiving letters, gifts and applause from cheering crowds.

“When she started receiving these messages, I felt a kind of responsibility towards the victims who had suffered similar things,” Babono said.

She recognized the uniqueness of her case—that the video evidence meant it was not just “the victim's word against the suspect's,” and that she now had a rare opportunity to “change society.”

She told Mr Babono: “I'm lucky to have the proof. I have the proof, which is very rare. So, I have to go through (all of this) to defend all the victims.”

Her lawyer once again noted the “simple” practical nature of his client. She is not interested in being an “activist”, but is simply thinking about how her experience with anesthesia without realizing it, can now help make other women aware of this issue, and look for potential signs of similar abuse.

If she had known then what all of France knows now, perhaps she could have put an end to her ordeal.

Perhaps other women can now do the same.

As for the future, Ms. Bellicott may break her silence by giving some interviews in the coming months. But she explained that she wants to “remain an individual… She wants to live a very simple life.”

And while she may never forgive her “perfect” ex-husband, she has found a way to manage her memories of him and hold on to the “happy moments” they once shared.

Some psychiatrists claim that Dominic Bellico is a relatively typical psychopath – a high-functioning narcissist who lacks the capacity for empathy, and who juggles his sordid secret life with the enjoyable role he plays as a family man. Giselle Bellico sees things more simply, as she adopts the idea that was raised during the trial, which is the idea of ​​a split personality.

As Mr. Babonneau says: “There were two men in Dominique Bellicot and she only knew one of them.”

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