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 identified for standing as much as her ex-husband and dozens of different attackers in a mass rape trial that surprised France and made her right into a feminist icon.
Now, the petition has already garnered practically 90,000 signatures in lower than every week.
“No person 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 interact with these males was arrested.
Gisèle Pelicot has caught the eye of French and worldwide information shops and girls’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 do-it-yourself 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 way of the fog of disinformation by waving her anonymity to be able to attend the trial of her attackers and testify,” Mayer wrote.
‘We share the identical battle’
The court docket within the southern metropolis of Avignon discovered Dominique Pelicot responsible of rape and all different expenses introduced in opposition to him in December, sentencing him to twenty years in jail, the utmost doable in France.
A variety of sentences going from three to fifteen years’ imprisonment had been handed to the 50 different males discovered responsible of raping Gisèle Pelicot.
After the sentences had been handed down, Pelicot issued a message of hope.
“‘I would like you to know that we share the identical battle. Once I opened the doorways to this trial… I needed society to witness the debates that happened right here,” she stated.
“I now believe in our capability to discover a higher future the place everybody, ladies and men alike, can dwell in concord, respect and mutual understanding.”
Gisèle Pelicot was named France’s Character of the 12 months 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 battle 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 — obtained the award in 2024.
