🔗 Share this article The French survivor heads back to the judicial arena after groundbreaking trial transformed her into an icon - and tore her family unit The 72-year-old will return to the judicial process as an individual of her fifty-one rapists launches an appeal The first day the French woman climbed the entrance of the courthouse in the French city in September 2024, she was a little-known retired grandmother. Within weeks, this diminutive septuagenarian - the survivor at the core of the most extensive sexual assault case in the nation's legal annals, featuring fifty-one defendants including her husband - had transformed into a feminist icon. Her most recent public appearance in open view when the verdicts - each one convicted - were handed down in December. By that time, groups of well-wishers were calling out her name. This coming Monday the grandmother returns to court, this time in the French municipality, for the retrial of the only one of the fifty-one accused to contest his sentence: the married father, middle-aged, a family man of one. The Case That Shook French Society During the autumn months in 2024, the survivor's harrowing account circulated the world. During more than ten years, she had been drugged into unconsciousness by her husband Dominique and violated by dozens individuals he had solicited on online platforms. Dominique Pelicot filmed the attacks and systematically organized them on a hard disk, which permitted law enforcement to track down the majority of the individuals involved. Nearly two dozen failed to be traced and remain unapprehended. After a court case continuing for 16 weeks, 46 men were found guilty of sexual assault, two individuals of attempted rape and another two of sexual assault. Dominique Pelicot was given the most severe prison term of two decades. The Appeal Process The defendant's legal challenge in the coming days will, in effect, be a new trial. The videos of the victim's rape will be presented in the judicial setting anew, and Pelicot will be there – now, nevertheless, only as a testifier. While she is not obliged to, the grandmother too will be present at the proceedings. "Any reasonable person would have accepted if she chose not to attend since, frankly, she is trying to return to a ordinary routine," among her attorneys, Stéphane Babonneau, stated. "But she feels she has to be present and has a duty to be available until the completion of the judicial matters." The survivor was hailed internationally for her bravery in openly facing her rapists During the winter, the appellant was found guilty of grave violation and handed a prison term to a nine-year term in prison. Because of health reasons he was handed a deferred custody warrant and is not currently in prison. He is according to reports appealing both culpability finding and the length of his punishment. Courtroom Tactics As was the circumstance for several of the other 51 men, Dogan's legal argument hinged on the contention he could not be guilty of assaulting the survivor because he had not realised she would be incapacitated. The husband rejected this argument, stating he had made it abundantly clear to the individuals he enlisted online that his partner would be sedated. During his testimony the previous year the appellant acknowledged telling the husband that his partner "seemed unconscious". Still, he vehemently resisted regarding the allegations levelled at him. "I refuse to accept being labelled a sexual predator," he protested. "The burden is excessive a load for me to shoulder." While multiple other defendants as well at first filed legal challenges, the appellant was the only one who has pushed ahead with it. Relational Breakdown During the legal process commenced in last year, she was supported by her all three adult children – the eldest daughter, her son and the younger son. Currently, the tight-knit family unit that entered the Avignon tribunal previously is has dissolved. One son and the eldest child have called themselves the "forgotten victims" of the trial and in the coming days in the new location, Gisèle will only be supported by her youngest son, the youngest of her children. A separation emerged between the grandmother and adult daughter and son, Caroline Darian and the older child At the heart the familial division is a incident that shook the legal proceedings previously, when the survivor was questioned about photos discovered on the husband's computer depicting their in underwear daughter the eldest child, seemingly in a drugged state and clad in unfamiliar underwear. The daughter has consistently asserted the photographs prove her