The evidence heard in court has horrified the world. But as the trial comes to an end, the questions it has raised about ‘ordinary’ men, French society, and rape culture have still not been answered

In the four years after she discovered her husband had been drugging her and inviting strangers into their home to rape her, Gisèle Pelicot liked to walk to clear her head.

Striding through the countryside alone, she would throw the questions that tormented her to the wind: “Dominique, how could you have done it? Why did you do it? How did we get here?” Asked what she was doing when she was ­disappearing for hours, she would tell her three children: “I am talking to your father.”