WOMEN ON TRIAL © Marie-Camille Orlando / 2026 - QUAD - FAM - ADNP - GAUMONT - FRANCE 3 CINEMA
L’Affaire Marie-Claire (Women on Trial): a closer look at the Bobigny trial
“Shame has to change sides.” Fifty years before the Mazan rape trials, a different Gisèle uttered these now famous words, and dramatically transformed a human interest story into a Historic trial. Presented in a Special Screening, L’Affaire Marie-Claire (Women on Trial) by Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller delves into this 1972 Bobigny trial led by the lawyer Gisèle Halimi, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.
In the fall of 1971, Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 16-year-old high school student was raped by a classmate. A few months later, she realized that she was pregnant and asked her mother for help in getting an abortion. Her mother, together with a friend, turned to a “backstreet abortionist,” since terminating a pregnancy was still heavily criminalized at the time. However, the rapist reported Marie-Claire to the authorities.
When the two women began building a defense, Michèle Chevalier remembered Djamila Boupacha’s book about an FLN militant, who had been raped and tortured by the French army. The book had been co-written by Simone de Beauvoir and the victim’s lawyer, Gisèle Halimi. As a French-Tunisian anti-colonial activist, she was an early advocate for Algerian independence and the Palestinian cause, but above all, she supported women. Gisèle Halimi agreed to defend this public transportation worker and her daughter, but raised the stakes and focused the trial not on the two women, but on the law itself.
The lawyer’s strategy consisted in garnering as much media coverage as possible, backed by feminist associations such as Choisir, and inviting celebrities such as Delphine Seyrig, to attend the proceedings. On November 8, 1972, after Gisèle Halimi’s historic plea, the verdict came back a victory, the accused had all been either discharged or received a suspended sentence.
The Bobigny trial would have a considerable impact, since three years later, it led to the Veil Act of 1975, which officially decriminalized abortion in France.
