More than a hundred women formed a line and applauded as Gisèle Pelicot left the courtroom of the French mass rape trial this week. Pelicot, whose husband has admitted drugging her and inviting dozens of strangers into her bedroom to rape her for a decade, thanked supporters, putting a hand to her heart.

She would, she told the court, now go for walk. “I heal by hours and hours of walking – it’s a way to protect myself. That and my psychologist, music and chocolate … Everyone has their own therapy for suffering.”

A total of 51 men are on trial over more than 200 rapes of Gisèle Pelicot. Her then husband, Dominique Pelicot, crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into her food and drink, inviting men he met online to rape her while she was unconscious over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020 in the village of Mazan in Provence.

Dominique Pelicot has admitted the charges, telling the court: “I am a rapist.” Only 14 men on trial have admitted rape – “I was your torturer,” a former record shop worker from Avignon told Gisèle Pelicot in court, saying he had raped her “out of curiosity”. Most of the men, aged 26 to 74, have denied rape, saying they had not “intended” to do it, despite video evidence that shows them in her bedroom as she lies unconscious and snoring loudly.

Gisèle Pelicot, 72, a former logistics manager and grandmother of seven, has become a feminist hero after insisting that the trial be held in public to raise awareness of the drug-induced rape and abuse. “It’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them,” she has said.

She has been present in court for more than two and a half months of gruelling evidence in which many men said it was not rape because her husband “said it was OK”. She has only been briefly absent for her weekly psychologist appointment on Mondays. She has sat through the video evidence of alleged rape in her bedroom, with, in the background, her spotted pillowcases, a modern painting on the wall, purple wallpaper and family photos on the chest of drawers.

She told the court this week that she was a “positive” person and had always tried to see the good in life. Her father was in the military and her mother died of cancer when she was nine. She described growing up in a loving family where “we hid our tears and shared our laughter”. When she was 20 she met Dominique Pelicot, who was then 19, and fell “head over heels” for the “seductive young man with long hair” who drove a Citroën 2CV.

She knew he had had a tough childhood with a tyrannical father, and she took pride in the stability they had together. “I always tried to lift you higher,” she said to him in court. He had various jobs, including electrician and estate agent. She had considered hairdressing, but instead began her career in administration at the state electricity company, rising up the ranks. She told the court she loved art, books and opera, admitting that her husband found opera boring. But to everyone who knew them, the couple and their three children were the “perfect family”, she said. When in 2013, the couple retired from the Paris area to the south of France, Gisèle Pelicot joined a choir and her husband did a lot of sport and cycling. He was a “super guy”, she said.

The only difficulty was her mental decline over the past decade: her memory lapses, concentration difficulties and fatigue, which made her fear she had Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour. Her husband stuck by her through this, accompanying her to see specialists and undergo tests that never found a cause. She had been so grateful for his “kindness”, she said.

It was only in 2020, when he was detained for filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket, that police told her that searches revealed hundreds of pieces of video evidence showing rapes when she was drugged and unconscious. It was like a “tsunami”, she said.

Her three adult children, in a state of shock, travelled from Paris to empty the Mazan house in only two days, after her husband was taken into custody. Soon she was standing on a station platform to leave with only one suitcase and her dog, all that was left of 50 years of marriage.

Her son David said: “She stayed with us and she would go for very long walks … She said she’d walk while speaking to him [in her head], asking him why he did it … I realised that during those walks she’d shout and howl her anger, alone with her dog.”

She moved to a new home, in a place where she knew nobody. “She started from zero, never revealing what had happened except to a handful of very close friends,” her lawyer Stéphane Babonneau told the court. For her new neighbours, she was a “smiley woman” who preferred not to talk of her past and sometimes seemed “lost in an ocean of melancholy without them knowing why”.

In 2023, when the French media first reported allegations that a pensioner in the south of France had drugged his wife and invited men to rape her for a decade, she would often hear conversations about it among her new acquaintances. “She heard people doubting how a woman could have suffered such abuse for so long without realising,” Babonneau said.

Her decision to hold the trial in public was about letting go of shame and no longer hiding, she said.

Despite her support from the public who queue for hours each morning for a place in court, Gisèle Pelicot said she had felt “humiliated” by questioning from defence lawyers, who asked about her sexual past. Some asked whether she felt Dominique Pelicot had been seeking revenge because she once had an affair with a colleague. She said that had happened 30 years ago and the couple had moved on, because Dominique Pelicot also had affairs. This week, she was asked by a defence lawyer about not appearing to cry very much in court. One of her lawyers, Antoine Camus, said this constant discussion of whether someone who was raped is a “good victim” has “no place in court in France in the 21st century”.

Dominique Pelicot is likely to emerge from the historic trial with a record as one of France’s worst sex offenders. “Usually in big criminal cases, everyone remembers the bad guy’s name,” said the couple’s son Florian. “This time, it’s different, it’s Gisèle Pelicot’s name that will be remembered.”

She told the court she wanted her grandchildren “to remember their granny, and that there will be no more shame in having this name”.

She has received and read letters from women all over the world, sometimes forwarded to the court after they were addressed simply “Gisèle Pelicot, Mazan”, the village where she no longer lives.

As she prepares to attend the final weeks of defence lawyers’ comments before a 20 December verdict, Gisèle Pelicot said she was “determined to change society”. She appeared calm on the outside, she said, but inside she was “in ruins”.