The first day Gisèle Pelicot walked up the steps of the courthouse in Avignon in September 2024, she was an anonymous retired grandmother.
Within weeks, this diminutive 72-year-old - the victim at the centre of the largest rape trial in French history, involving 51 men including her husband - had become a feminist icon.
She was last seen in public when the verdicts - all guilty - were handed down in December. By then, crowds of supporters were chanting her name.
On Monday Gisèle Pelicot returns to court, this time in Nîmes, for the appeal of the only one of the 51 defendants to challenge his sentence: Husamettin Dogan, 44, a married father of one.
Between September and December last year, Gisèle's bleak story travelled the world. For over a decade, she had been drugged unconscious by her husband Dominique and raped by dozens of men he had recruited on internet chat rooms.
Dominique Pelicot filmed the assaults and neatly catalogued them on a hard disk, which allowed investigators to track down the majority of those involved. Around 20 could not be identified and remain at large.
After a trial lasting 16 weeks, 46 men were found guilty of rape, two of attempted rape and two of sexual assault. Dominique Pelicot was handed the maximum jail sentence of 20 years.
Husamettin Dogan's appeal next week will, in effect, be a retrial. The videos of Gisèle's rape will be shown in court again, and Pelicot will be present – this time, though, only as a witness.
While she is not obliged to, Gisèle too will attend the proceedings.
Everyone would have understood if she hadn't come because, well, she is trying to resume a normal life, one of her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau, told the BBC. But she feels she needs to be there and has a responsibility to be there until the end of the proceedings.
In December, Dogan was found guilty of aggravated rape and sentenced to nine years in prison. Due to health reasons he was handed a deferred custody warrant and is not currently in jail. He is reportedly appealing both the guilty verdict and the length of his sentence.
As was the case for many of the other 51 men, Dogan's defence hinged on the argument that he could not be guilty of raping Gisèle because he had not realised she would be unconscious. Pelicot rejected this argument, asserting that the men were made aware she would be drugged.
His appeal, unlike the original trial, will be judged by a jury of nine public members who will decide on both his conviction and sentence length.
The outcome could be influenced by the media coverage and societal shift regarding rape and consent that the Pelicot case has sparked across France.
While Gisèle's public battle has turned her into a symbol of resilience, it has come with immense personal costs, straining her familial relationships. The emotional toll of the trial has left her family fractured, with two of her children now estranged.
As Gisèle Pelicot looks forward to the next chapter in her fight for justice, she holds a dual identity: a public figure advocating for victims and a mother navigating the complexities of a broken family.
