The Gisèle Pelicot Case in the French Press: Intimate Partner Violence, Social Representations and Institutional Revictimization

Media coverage extends high-profile intimate partner violence (IPV) trials beyond the courtroom, establishing them as public sites where credibility, consent, accountability, legal legitimacy, and policy responses are negotiated. This study examined how mainstream French newspapers constructed the Gisèle Pelicot case, represented institutional revictimization and accountability, and reproduced or contested revictimizing media logics. Guided by Social Representations Theory (SRT), we analyzed 359 articles published between March 2024 and July 2025 in five high-circulation national newspapers. IRaMuTeQ analyses combined Descending Hierarchical Classification (DHC) and Lexical Similarity Analysis. Four lexical classes were interpreted through three higher-order representational logics. Penal adjudication and punitive closure privileged conviction and sentencing as markers of institutional response. Intimate and biographical narration organized harm through scene-based reconstruction, family ties, and personal histories. Contested accountability foregrounded consent, public hearings, feminist mobilization, and legal reform. Institutional revictimization remained unevenly articulated across the corpus. It gained visibility in debates over courtroom transparency, survivor protection, the handling of evidence, and reform, but receded within penal and intimate registers. These findings frame institutional revictimization as both a procedural and representational problem, shaped by institutional practices and the public vocabularies through which harm and accountability acquire meaning.