Mr Babonneau knew that without those videos, “most likely there would have been no trial, no case”.
Mrs Pelicot understood that too, but could easily and understandably have decided, for her own sanity, to avoid watching any of the footage herself.
Instead, Mr Babonneau remembers, she simply announced one day: “I’m ready now.”
So, she sat down beside the two men, in their office, as they introduced a carefully selected portion of each video, explaining who the men were, and what she would be seeing them do to her. Then Mr Babonneau pressed play and images of the Pelicots’ bedroom, in their bungalow in the village Mazan, flashed up on the screen.
Gisèle remained still, watching intently.
“How could he?” she eventually asked, in her quiet voice. It was a phrase she would keep repeating over the coming days.
Then a little later, she noted the date on one of the videos.
“That was my birthday evening.”
“That happened in [my] daughter’s bed. In her beach house.”
Mr Babonneau remembers Mrs Pelicot’s sustained indignation, but noted too that she never cried, and that with the help of experts, she’d managed “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 equilibrium” in the four years since 4 November 2020, when she’d been informed about her husband’s actions and “her world was destroyed.”
She was now ready to face the rigours of a public trial.
