‘Monster of Avignon’ Rape Scandal: Is It France’s #MeToo Moment? [Video]

Women’s rights activist Blandine Deverlanges wants to be in court to support Gisèle Pélicot as much as she can, but often the testimony in the rape trial implicating dozens of men is too much.

“Sometimes it is really unbearable, so I cannot go every day,” said Deverlanges, founder of Les Amazones d’Avignon, a group whose members have protested outside Vaucluse criminal court since the case against Pélicot’s husband Dominique and 50 other men started on September 2.

“I felt sick,” Deverlanges told Newsweek in describing the first time she heard details of how the retired electrician allegedly drugged his wife and recruited accomplices in an online chatroom to sexually violate her while it was being filmed.

“During the hearing I cry and the women around me, you see tears on their faces—it is so inhuman. This woman has been a victim of such monstrosity that we feel compassion and anger and everything is mixed,” she said. …