Gisèle Pelicot in 2024 – Publik / Private does not own this photo.
There are moments in public life that do more than interrupt the news cycle; they rupture the very architecture of shame itself. Gisèle Pelicot’s emergence into collective consciousness is one such rupture. What she has invited the world to witness, to feel, and to reconsider is not simply her own story—harrowing as it is—but the deeper social lie that murder, theft, and assault leave stains on the victim’s soul, and that humiliation is a cost to be absorbed quietly, in private.
This lie is ancient, pernicious, and coded deeply into the way society talks about sexual violence. It insists that the violated should cover their wounds, carry their pain behind closed doors, and perform discreet silence as if harm is a private blemish. Gisèle Pelicot refused this inheritance. In the mass rape trial that unfolded in Avignon, she did something extraordinary: she waived her right to anonymity and demanded the trial be public. She said she wanted “all women victims of rape … to say: Madame Pelicot did it, we can do it too.” And she declared with quiet gravity that “when you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them.”
To say “never have shame” in a world that reflexively trains victims to internalize blame is to challenge the very grammar of violence. Shame doesn’t spring from the wound itself; it is a social product, a mechanism that protects power by making the vulnerable feel small, isolated, and unworthy of witness. Pelicot stood against that mechanism, insisting that the weight of disgrace belongs not with the one attacked, but with those who inflicted the harm.
This shift—simple in phrase but seismic in effect—is a reallocation of moral responsibility. Pelicot’s experience was nearly unimaginable in its scope: over many years, while drugged unconscious by her husband, she was raped repeatedly by dozens of men he invited into their home. The revelations emerged only after police investigating unrelated voyeurism found disturbing footage on her husband’s computer, revealing the systematic nature of the abuse.
The instinct of the criminal justice system in many societies is to protect the privacy of victims, to sequester their experiences in sealed rooms and sealed pages. But Pelicot refused this protection precisely because that privacy historically serves perpetrators far more than survivors. By opening the courtroom to the public gaze, she made the crime visible on her terms. She turned the spotlight from hidden shame to exposed accountability. The shame was no longer something lodged in her voice or bowed shoulders; it was something placed squarely on the acts of her husband and the men who participated with him.
Her words—it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them—are not a palliative or a slogan. They are a methodological shift in how we think about collective responsibility. When Pelicot articulated this during her testimony, she was not issuing a comforting platitude; she was proposing a restructuring of who bears the emotional and moral cost of violence. Victims are too often taught to apologize for surviving. Her stance interrupts that conditioning.
And yet, there is humility in her refusal of the language of heroism. When observers called her brave, she deflected—not because she was unheroic, but because courage abstracted from consequence is a story we tell to feel comfortable again. Pelicot described her persistence as “will and determination to change society,” not simply personal endurance. Courage for her was not a static trait but a sustained commitment to truth-telling in the face of denial, minimization, and cultural avoidance.
In insisting that victims should “never have shame,” Pelicot forces us to examine the structures that scaffold shame in the first place. What does it mean that we accept a culture where consent is poorly understood, where “I didn’t think it was rape” is offered as a defense? What does it mean that survivors must navigate not only the trauma of assault but the expectation of self-silencing? These questions are not rhetorical. They point toward the very conditions that allow violence to become normative rather than aberrant.
There is no quick fix here, no singular legislative moment that will instantly dissolve centuries of conditioning. But there is a shift that begins in language and extends into empathy. When we stop locating shame in the body of the victim and start locating it in the conduct of the perpetrator, we begin the work of dismantling stigmas that function as social glue, holding in place systems that protect the powerful and isolate the vulnerable.
Pelicot’s call is, at once, an invitation and a demand. She invites survivors to reject the internalization of shame. She demands that society change the terms of its moral imagination. To reject shame is to reclaim narrative authority over one’s own life. It is to declare that harm is not a mark of dishonor but a testament to an injustice that must be addressed, not hidden.
In a cultural moment saturated with testimonies—some celebratory, others mournful—Pelicot’s voice resonates because it refuses to locate dignity in silence. Her message matters because it disassembles a foundational assumption: that victims should be quiet. Instead, she insists that silence belongs to the perpetrators who hide their acts behind euphemism and denial.
This is not merely about visibility. It’s about truth. To say “never have shame” is to assert that survivors deserve a world where their stories are not obstacles to justice but bridges to change.
And if we are listening—truly listening—we might begin to understand that the redistribution of shame is not an act of forgiveness, but an act of radical accountability.
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