WARNING: The details in this story may be distressing to some readers.
Speaking slowly and clearly, Gisele Pelicot told the courtroom how her life as she knew it fell apart one day in 2020.
Local French police had invited her to speak to them after her husband was arrested for filming up women's skirts in the town of Mazan, where they had lived since 2013.
The investigators showed her an image of herself, unconscious in her bedroom.
A man who was not her husband was raping her as she lay motionless on the bed — a still from one of dozens of videos involving dozens of men.
"For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years," Ms Pelicot said.
A decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband, Dominique Pelicot, is now the subject of a trial where Ms Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in order for the crimes to be made public.
Mr Pelicot has admitted to the charges against him.
"The police saved my life," Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband only by his last name, who is accused of repeatedly drugging her with a cocktail of medication before inviting men into their home to rape her while unconscious, and filming the assaults.
The trial, which began on Monday, will run for four months, with dozens of men including Mr Pelicot charged with a range of offences.
Ms Pelicot gave evidence for 90 minutes, recounting how she had begun to believe she had Alzheimer's after years of strange memory lapses and other health problems.
"For me, everything collapses," she testified. "These are scenes of barbarity, of rape."
'Scenes of horror'
At that initial meeting with police, Ms Pelicot was shown "barbaric" pictures of her being sexually assaulted by multiple men including her husband, taken at different times over a 10-year period.
Mr Pelicot, aged 71, listened to her evidence with his head bowed.
"Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me," she said, composed throughout her harrowing evidence.
"They treat me like a rag doll," she told five judges, adding she had only been able to watch the video footage in May this year.
She said that none of her abusers alerted the police.
"Even an anonymous phone call could have saved my life," Ms Pelicot said.
Lawyers for some of the defendants had questioned on Wednesday whether the couple had had an open relationship, or whether it was credible that Ms Pelicot had noticed nothing for the entire decade of the abuse.
"Don't talk to me about sex scenes. These are rape scenes," she said on Thursday.
After learning of her husband's crimes, she left their shared home with two suitcases, "all that was left for me of 50 years of life together."
Since then, she said, "I no longer have an identity. … I don't know if I'll ever rebuild myself."
'Speaking for every woman'
Ms Pelicot reiterated that she was "never complicit" and had never "pretended to be asleep" when asked by Judge Roger Arata, who is leading a panel of five judges.
During her testimony, she said she wanted to draw attention to the dangers of sexual crimes through drugging someone with malicious intent.
"I'm speaking for every woman who's been drugged without knowing it," she said.
"Many women don't have the proof. I have the proof of what I've been through," she said.
She also told the accused to "for once in your lives at least, take responsibility for your actions".
"I feel disgusted," she added.
"I've lost ten years of my life," she said, adding that inside she was a "field of ruins".
Ms Pelicot is in the process of divorcing her husband.
She was supported by her daughter and two sons, who accompanied her to court.
Speaking to reporters outside court, her lawyer said Ms Pelicot had received messages of support from around the world.
"A very important step has begun this morning," he said.
Folder labelled 'abuse'
Mr Pelicot documented his actions with meticulous precision on a hard drive in a folder labelled "abuse", lead investigator Jeremie Bosse Platiere said.
The investigators counted about 200 instances of rape, most of them by her husband and more than 90 by strangers, with 72 men taking part in total.
Fifty of those have been tracked down by police and are on trial alongside Mr Pelicot.
The other 21 men were not able to be identified from the footage taken during the crimes.
Ms Pelicot said she had recognised only one of her alleged rapists, a man who had come to discuss cycling with her husband at their home.
"I saw him now and then in the bakery, I would say hello, I never thought he'd come and rape me," she said.
The assaults took place between July 2011 and October 2020, mainly in the couple's home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in the southern region of Provence.
Most of the suspects face up to 20 years in jail for aggravated rape if convicted.
Eighteen of the 51 accused are in custody, including Mr Pelicot, with 32 others also charged.
A medical expert said that the alleged rapists were not made to wear condoms and that Ms Pelicot had contracted four sexually transmitted infections as a result of the sexual assaults.
Outside court, Ms Pelicot spoke briefly to detail the pressure of the trial on her.
"This is not easy and there is also the pressure from all of the individuals who are behind me. I can feel when there are questions that are trying to trap me so I am trying to answer as best I can and we will fight until the end, of course."
AFP/ABC/AP
