SARAH VINE: Gisele Pelicot is my Woman of the Year. For courageously taking down her scumbag husband, she deserves everybody’s respect

It’s that time of year when newspapers and magazines publish their ‘persons’ of the year: Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, President Zelensky, the usual suspects.

But for me there can only be one person deserving of the title, and that’s Gisele Pelicot, whose scumbag of a husband was yesterday/today sentenced to the maximum term of 20 years in jail for drugging her and inviting strangers to rape her, while filming it all.

This unassuming grandmother from a small town in south west France, with her stylish auburn bob and elegant dress sense, may have been an unwilling participant in the horrific crimes against her – but she was instrumental to bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Were it not for her dignity and courage in waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her husband Dominique and his 50 co-defendants, it’s perfectly possible that many of them would have wriggled off the hook.

Were it also not for her steely determination to face her abusers in court and endure hours of harrowing, humiliating footage, filmed and meticulously catalogued by her husband for his own enjoyment, the world might never have realised the sheer extent of their depravity.

They will now pay for their crimes, even though 20 years (the maximum available to the judge) seems a derisory sentence for what Mr Pelicot did to her. Still: at least the principle of justice has been served.

But then this case was never just about the crimes of one nasty, perverted coward and his accomplices (many of whom may never be known).

It was about society, and how even in a country like France, after years of so-called equality and progress, women are still fundamentally seen as the property of men, to be treated as they please.

Gisele Pelicot gives her verdict on the trial after her ex-husband Dominique was sentenced to 20 years in prison

It was about technology and online pornography, and the way the internet has opened up, even normalised, new avenues of abuse. It was about a dark, seething underbelly of perversion, hidden beneath a façade of respectability; it was about how evil can hide in the most unexpected of places, living among us in plain sight.

All channelled through one unlikely woman, a septuagenarian with a core of steel, who over the course of her husband’s trial become a lightning rod for every downtrodden wife or girlfriend, every victim of toxic masculinity in all its forms.

A woman who has shown other women that they do not need to be cowed, to hide away in shame. That when men carry out acts of violence against us, when they take advantage of our naivety or kindness, when they abuse our trust, when they lie to us and deceive us, when they gaslight us or coerce us, it is not we who should feel the humiliation – but they.

Her ability to hold her head up high is especially inspiring. So many female victims of male abuse blame themselves. We feel ashamed, inadequate, guilty, somehow responsible. Not Madame Pelicot.

Time and again during the trial, it was implied that one of the reasons her husband had taken to drugging her and inviting strangers to rape her was because she was unwilling to participate in his sexual fantasies. ‘She didn’t give me what I needed, so she drove me to it’: that old trope. But she was having none of it.

It didn’t matter what they threw at her, at no point was Gisele Pelicot diminished by her ordeal. If anything, it seemed to make her stronger, more defiant, more determined at every turn.

She showed the accused that she would not just quietly and conveniently disappear into a corner and die, broken and defeated. She was prepared not only to face the demons that did this to her, but turn the entire world’s attention on them, to shine a light on their depravity, even if it meant subjecting herself to the trauma of her abuse.

These men, including the husband she loved and who she thought loved her, treated her body like ‘a rag doll’; but they couldn’t break her spirit. And that’s what makes her such an inspiration. She may be just an ordinary 72-year-old mother and housewife from nowheresville; but she has the heart of a warrior.

She’s a modern-day Boudicca, defiant in the face of her tormentors, unafraid to take on this army of men who dared defile her. She also reminds us that heroes can emerge from the most unlikely scenarios; that it’s not money or status that count, but strength of character and a clear moral compass.

If you saw her in the street, you would never believe she had it in her. But not only has she exposed those who committed these crimes against her own person; she has also exposed a deep vein of misogyny that runs not just throughout French society, but so-called ‘civilised’ society everywhere.

Because, yes, Madame Pelicot is an ‘ordinary’ women. But her rapists are ‘ordinary’ men, too.

There was veteran chief fireman Christian Lescole, hospital nurse Redouane El Farihi, local builder Thierry Parisis, marine firefighter Jacques Cubeau, IT worker Lionel Rodriguez, painter and decorator Husamettin Dogan and odd-job man Mathieu Dartus.

The list goes on and on, most of them middle-ranking, middle-aged family men, the kind you see drinking coffee or enjoying a beer in the local bar.

Worse still, many of them thought they weren’t doing anything wrong. One told police, ‘rape is not possible if a woman’s husband is present’, another claimed a man ‘can do what he likes with his wife’. Lescole, the firefighter, seemed to think he was entitled to do whatever he wanted to her in return for ‘saving lives’.

That such a mundane cross-section of men, from all walks of life, could delude themselves into thinking that raping a drugged, unconscious woman was even remotely OK betrays a level of unconscious misogyny that is utterly chilling. Talk about the banality of evil.

Crowds gather outside the courtroom in Avignon with one sign reading ‘thank you for your courage Gisele Pelicot’

As girls and women, it’s drilled into us from a young age that we need to be vigilant. We understand this. We know not to put ourselves in danger, to be careful late at night, to avoid certain situations, to make sure we watch out for each other. But what Madame Pelicot’s case shows it that it’s not the obvious creep, the peeping Tom, the flasher you need to be aware of; it’s everyone. Literally, anyone could be that guy. It’s terrifying.

And it makes you wonder, as a woman in the world: how many of the men you know and love as friends and colleagues secretly despise you?

How many, given the opportunity, would do what Dominique Pelicot and those 50 others have done? How many would think it an acceptable night out, just a bit of harmless fun? How many think so little of you they would do something that despicable, given half a chance?

It doesn’t bear thinking about. Better instead to focus on the incredible achievement of Madame Pelicot in almost singlehandedly bringing down a vile rapist ring and who, for her incredible courage and fortitude, deserves every woman’s respect and gratitude.