He said he grew addicted to abusing her,which is why he failed to respond to his wife’s concerns about random gynaecological issues as well as hair and weight loss,and lapses of memory,which we now know were due to the heavy drugs he was plying her with. She began to worry she had Alzheimer’s or brain tumours but he dismissed her concerns.

She must have felt she was going mad. Imagine how deeply you would need to be drugged to reach a coma-like state where for hours at a stretch you could be violently assaulted,unaware. According to police counts,as she slept in her bed,Pelicot was raped about 200 times.

There are so many questions. Dominique Pelicot says he “became perverted” when a male nurse he met online told him how to heavily sedate women. “That’s when it all clicked,” he said. “Everything started then.”

What is “it all”,though? What was pre-existing? Why did they meet? What else has this man done?

This case has demonstrated both the prevalence of rape and the apparent ordinariness of those who commit this crime. Fifty-one men,aged between 26 and 74,have been charged,including Dominique. Forty-eight have been charged with aggravated rape,one with sexual assault and another with attempted rape. (One man has been charged with drugging his own wife,who Dominique then raped.) There were 83 men seen assaulting Gisele in the thousands of videos her husband captured with a camera stuck on a tripod in their bedroom – but about 30 could not be identified,and are currently walking free,much to the unease of locals.

This is the world women live in.

All those charged were local men,living in or near their little medieval village in Provence in southern France,responding to an ad Dominique posted online inviting people to come and have sex with his wife. The web forum he found was called “without her knowledge”. Which seems pretty plain,even though some have argued they assumed she must have been aware of this ploy. Gisele even recognised one of the men;he had come to her home to discuss cycling with her husband;she had seen him around town,in the bakery,exchanged pleasantries. “I would say hello,” she said. “I never thought he’d come and rape me.”

Eighty-three men. They came from a range of backgrounds and professions – a fireman,a nurse,a journalist,a prison warden,a supermarket worker. Fathers,sons,husbands,neighbours. Not one of them called the police. Not even an anonymous tip-off.

Meanwhile,Gisele walked streets and crossed paths with her rapists without having any knowledge of their crimes,or the unfettered access her husband had allowed them to her body. (The only way she discovered what her husband was doing was when he was busted filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket – and police went on to find a cache of other videos he filmed of strangers assaulting Gisele.)

Ordinary men.

The idea that rapists present as monsters is,of course,a myth.

Céline Piques,from the feminist group Osez le Féminisme,told the BBC this case “demolishes the myth of the rapist who is a psychopath … they raped because they were sure of their impunity”. Audrey Darsonville,a professor of criminal law at the University of Nanterre,toldThe New York Times:“Sexual offenders are often imagined as being dysfunctional misfits,when,in reality,they are Mr Everyman. That’s what this trial reminds us.”

It’s also an alarming reminder of the use of “chemical submission”,or drugging of women,and the spiking of drinks that appears to be far more prevalent than we realise. (As Gisele has pointed out,unlike her,most women this happens to don’t have proof.) And it is a reminder of the continual diminishing of rape as a non-serious crime. Take the words of Louis Bonnet,the mayor of the medieval village of Mazan,where the Pelicots lived:“People here say ‘no one was killed’. It would have been much worse if[Pelicot] had killed his wife … the family will have to rebuild itself. It will be hard. But they’re not dead,so they can still do it.”

It’s hard to see this ignorance as anything but defensive or calculated. Or as part of a culture of impunity that women are now demanding be burnt down.

Painted on a wall in Avignon,where the case is being heard,are these words:“On la disait brisée,c’est une combattante Gisele” – “They said she was broken,she’s actually a fighter,Gisele”.

Julia Baird is a journalist,author and regular columnist. Her latest book isBright Shining:how grace changes everything.