A little more than a year ago, Stéphane Babonneau and Antoine Camus packed their bags for Avignon, where they would be representing Gisèle Pelicot in court.
Stepping foot into the apartment 400 miles south of Paris that would serve as their home for the next four months, Babonneau and Camus felt more like college students than lawyers in their 40s preparing for one of the world’s most significant rape trials in decades.
Tucked under the Avignon train station, their barely 300-square-foot one-bedroom trembled each night as freight trains passed above. Babonneau and Camus would switch off weeks sleeping in the bedroom, the other resigning himself to the hard foldout couch in the kitchen. The bathroom reeked of mold, its windowless walls preventing damp towels from ever fully drying.
“It was like an American TV show, where we see a lawyer put up in a motel,” Babonneau tells me.
For the trial, he and Camus left behind their respective firms, and their salaries, relying instead on France’s notoriously meager legal-aid system. “It doesn’t cover travel or living expenses,” says Babonneau, “so those were on us.” Each morning, they headed for court, where the two of them faced the 42 lawyers defending the 51 men accused of raping Gisèle.
Over the course of nearly a decade, Dominique Pélicot brought men to the bedroom he shared with his wife of 50 years, where they sexually assaulted her while she lay unconscious, drugged with pills he had slipped into her food and drink. They were truck drivers, carpenters, nightclub managers, bakers, and firefighters, husbands and fathers, men in their 20s and some in their 70s. He recruited them on Coco.fr, a French chat Web site shuttered in June of last year after being linked to tens of thousands of crimes.
Dominique filmed the rapes, sometimes participating, sometimes watching and commenting, as the men penetrated his wife or forced themselves into her mouth while she remained so deeply sedated that she sometimes snored. (He also photographed one of his three children, Caroline, more than once while she was incapacitated and wearing only underwear—incidents she’s since pressed charges for. She has also accused Dominique of rape.)
Gisèle suffered from frequent, unexplained blackouts, and feared they might be signs of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor. She didn’t know that her husband had been fined in 2010 for filming women under their skirts in a shopping mall, using a miniature camera concealed in a pen. A decade later, in September 2020, he was arrested again after using his smartphone to film up women’s skirts in a supermarket. This time, Gisèle found out. The police seized two of her husband’s phones, a camera, and a video recorder, as well as a laptop, a USB key, and an SD card. What investigators found on those devices was far worse than anyone could have imagined.
Babonneau and Camus represented Gisèle in the ensuing trial, which took place throughout the fall of last year. On December 19, 2024, after three months and 17 days, the criminal court found all 51 defendants guilty. Dominique was sentenced to 20 years in jail, France’s maximum sentence.
The attorneys have since been recognized by the Victim Rights Law Center—the first U.S. law center dedicated to responding to the civil needs of sexual-assault survivors—with an award that was previously given to Anita Hill and Gloria Steinem. Babonneau and Camus had planned to travel to Boston next week to accept it, but they recently learned that one defendant’s appeal in the Pelicot case would be going to court. Now, instead of Boston, they will head to Nîmes next week, and Gisèle will be taking the stand once more.
The Case of a Lifetime
In November of 2022, Camus was at his Paris office when the phone rang. On the line was a fellow lawyer, asking for a referral. A woman she vaguely knew, Gisèle Pelicot, was in search of new representation. In the midst of a divorce and preparing for a criminal case against her husband, she had just fired her attorney, feeling betrayed after hearing that the lawyer had spoken to the press about her case without her permission.
It wasn’t the first time Camus, a corporate lawyer who had never worked on a rape case, had heard of Gisèle—in fact, he’d learned about her story the night before on a true-crime show he’d been watching, the content of which had been shared by Gisèle’s first lawyer.
Hours after the first phone call, he says, he received another, this time from Gisèle herself. What began as a courtesy turned into an offer: he would represent her himself. She accepted.
It was an audacious commitment. Knowing he couldn’t do it alone, Camus called Babonneau, a criminal-defense attorney and longtime friend. “My first thought was, How is this even possible?” says Babonneau, who hadn’t yet heard of the case. “I thought I’d misunderstood him.” But he didn’t hesitate, either, and agreed to take on the case with Camus.
What they found was overwhelming. The files stretched across more than 40 volumes of documents. “With a single rape case, we try to find out who did it and what happened,” says Babonneau. “Here, we had to make Excel spreadsheets—every defendant, every incident, every date. It wasn’t easy keeping these 50 crimes straight.”
Their first mission was to find an explanation. “We didn’t understand how it was possible for a woman not to know what had happened to her for 10 years,” says Camus. The answer emerged through transcripts and screenshots of conversations, which revealed that Gisèle had been systematically drugged by her husband, and that the assaults were carried out methodically to ensure that she never woke up: the men moved slowly, “without violence,” says Camus, whispering and stopping at any sign of movement. When it was over, Dominique later told police, he would clean Gisèle’s body meticulously, for hours, with wet wipes, then re-dress her in her pajamas and put her back in her bed, as though nothing had happened.
“We felt from the start that we’d have to be the bearer of bad news,” says Camus. Though Gisèle grasped the outlines of what had happened to her, Camus and Babonneau knew that she’d never faced the entire mountain of evidence, never dug through the thousands of files herself. The attorneys’ dread only deepened once the videos recorded by Dominique became central to the case.
“We’d hoped to never have to watch them,” says Babonneau, who for months relied on secondary materials. But Dominique had carefully organized and filed hundreds of videos and thousands of photographs, all of which had been seized by investigators, and they were ultimately grateful to the case’s investigative judge, who insisted Babonneau and Camus take a look. In crimes that are often reduced to “he said, she said,” the videos stripped away ambiguity. Each rape was clear, each act undeniable.
For Gisèle, the decision to watch the videos was much harder. Even knowing how important the footage would be during the trial, she told the court that she’d leave the room whenever it was played. “She feared that it would feel like going through another rape,” says Camus. But as the court date drew nearer, Gisèle made a decision that changed the case forever. Not only would she watch the videos, she would waive her right to privacy, making the case open to the public—and, in doing so, forcing her country to confront its widespread, rarely acknowledged culture of sexual assault, victim-blaming, and toxic masculinity.
Inside the Courtroom
The trial began on September 2, 2024, after almost two years of preparation. At first, Babonneau and Camus were confident they’d win, having built a case that, presented to a panel of five judges, seemed foolproof.
Then came the defense. One after another, the accused men didn’t just pull apart the circumstances of their assaults but in many cases denied that what had taken place constituted assault in the first place. To prove it, some claimed they didn’t know Gisèle hadn’t consented. Others said Dominique had tricked them into believing it was a sexual game. “That really surprised us,” says Babonneau.
From the first day in court, Babonneau and Camus realized they’d be dealing with three distinct challenges: first, the overwhelming nature of being two attorneys arguing their case against 42 defense lawyers; second, to prove that the events surrounding Gisèle were entirely non-consensual; and, lastly, to challenge the defense’s damaging efforts to minimize her trauma.
Each day of testimony felt long, often stretching into arduous, emotional, and volatile hours. “The line between lawyer, friend, and psychological support becomes very fine,” says Camus about the bond that developed between him, Babonneau, and Gisèle. Sometimes, the three would just sit in silence over lunch. “It felt like a way of diluting the violence, of sharing it three ways,” Camus recalls.
In the end, 48 men—including Dominique, who was found guilty of all the charges against him—were convicted of rape; two of attempted rape; and one of sexual assault.
The time spent in that courtroom in Avignon was disturbing and disorienting for Babonneau and Camus. “My children still talk about the four months I wasn’t around,” says Babonneau, a father of two, aged four and six. But the lawyers say they never questioned their commitment. “Rape destroys everything,” says Camus.
After a year spent back in their regular lives, Babonneau and Camus will wade back into the Pelicot case next week. It doesn’t come as a surprise. In fact, they see this single appeal that was allowed to move forward—out of 17 attempts—as a victory of sorts. Even so, they say, “we would’ve preferred for it to end last year.”
Jeanne Malle is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
