Viral petition calls for Gisèle Pelicot to receive Nobel Peace Prize

An online petition went viral after it proposed last Wednesday that Gisèle Pelicot be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Pelicot became globally known for standing up to her ex-husband and dozens of other attackers in a mass rape trial that stunned France and made her into a feminist icon.

Now, the petition has already garnered nearly 90,000 signatures in less than a week.

“Nobody deserves the Nobel Prize more than Gisèle Pelicot,” Catherine Mayer, a British journalist who started the petition, wrote in her explanation for the move.

For almost a decade, 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot’s former husband, Dominique Pelicot, gave her sedatives and raped her while unconscious, inviting men recruited online to do the same without her knowledge or approval.

In early January, the founder of the website used by Dominique Pelicot to find and engage with these men was arrested.

Gisèle Pelicot has caught the attention of French and international news outlets and women’s rights groups worldwide with the openness and courage she displayed in the three-month trial against her ex-husband and 50 other men, after she waived her right to anonymity as a survivor of sexual abuse.

Pelicot successfully pushed for the hearings and evidence — including her ex-husband’s homemade videos — to be heard in open court, insisting that “shame should fall on her abusers”, not on her.

“Gisèle Pelicot managed to break through the fog of disinformation by waving her anonymity in order to attend the trial of her attackers and testify,” Mayer wrote.

‘We share the same fight’

The court in the southern city of Avignon found Dominique Pelicot guilty of rape and all other charges brought against him in December, sentencing him to 20 years in prison, the maximum possible in France.

A range of sentences going from three to 15 years’ imprisonment were handed to the 50 other men found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot.

After the sentences were handed down, Pelicot issued a message of hope.

“‘I want you to know that we share the same fight. When I opened the doors to this trial… I wanted society to witness the debates that took place here,” she said.

“I now have confidence in our ability to find a better future where everyone, women and men alike, can live in harmony, respect and mutual understanding.”

Gisèle Pelicot was named France’s Personality of the Year in a 2024 French opinion poll, beating world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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In 2018, the Nobel Peace Prize committee handed out a joint award for the fight against sexual violence to Congolese gynaecologist Dr Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad.

The Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo — a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — received the award in 2024.