The face of courage

Until Sept. 2, most of the world did not really know what Gisèle Pelicot looked like.

- VANESSA FRIEDMAN

There were almost no photographs of Pelicot, a 72-year-old grandmother, online. She wasn't on social media. No one except her friends and family knew she had an orange Louise Brooks bob and a penchant for round John Lennon sunglasses.

But by Thursday, as Pelicot stood with her head held high in a courtroom in Avignon, France, as the verdicts in the harrowing four-month rape trial of her ex-husband and 50 other men were read, she had become the image of bravery across the globe.

Her face has stared out from posters in protests across France and has been pasted on the sides of buildings. It graced the digital cover of Vogue Germany and was used on a mock cover of Time's person of the year issue. It has become the symbol of her own horrific experience, of course, but also that of every woman who was rendered helpless, lied to and abused. As one of her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau, said, Pelicot's face, with its seeming lack of artifice, has become the physical expression of the fact that "the shame has switched sides."

Rarely has someone who was so literally objectified - turned into a rag doll for men to violate as they saw fit - been able to so fully take back control of her own objectification and turn it into a picture of empowerment.

In this, Pelicot's image has become one in a long line of images that have transcended a unique story to become visual shorthand for a collective turning point. Think of the young man in the white shirt standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or the woman in the red dress being tear-gassed during anti-government demonstrations in Turkey in 2013, or the woman in the sundress standing before a line of police in riot gear during a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016.