I am looking at a colour photo of a woman with auburn hair entering the courthouse in Avignon. Around her, the impassive faces of her lawyers.

This woman is about to hear a verdict. How much will he get? How much time in prison will be given to the man who drugged her senseless and remorselessly raped her?

As the answer comes and the news filters out around the world: 20 years, I wonder what it is worth to her. A woman to whom nothing will be given back. Not an inch of her body.

What’s a number like this when there’s nothing left?

This man is the father of her children. The judge reads out the prison sentences for his convicted acolytes, his mates, his accomplices in horror – his partners in the pleasure of destroying others.

This woman is not smiling.

Her eyes are wide open, unblinking. They never blink.

Her name is Gisèle Pelicot.

That name left the little village of Mazan and travelled the world. That name is now allowing us all to shout out loud: Gisèle Pelicot did it, so I can do it.

She is us.

This morning in Avignon, as she has done every other morning for months, Gisèle stared at the greedy camera. She made no effort to avoid its glare.

She hoped, she said, by her actions, to change our patriarchal society.

To do that, she looked us all in the face.

That face is also a body.

The body is also ours.

A body that a society made up of ordinary men chose to reduce to nothingness, to nonexistence.

But Gisèle decided to shine the spotlight on these men.

They wiped their shoes as they walked into her house, washed their hands in her washbasin, and hung their coats on the coat hook before setting to work.

Destroy everything? They “didn’t think” so, they had said.

Once upon a time, in a small village in the south of France – that part of France that people so love to visit – lived a woman named Gisèle Pelicot.

For as long as she could remember, Gisèle loved life.

Then one day, over a café au lait, a man – her husband, infinitely multiplied – decided to bring her down. Then to knock her out, to penetrate her, to insult her, to pry open her limbs and body parts. Like a serial killer turning a home into a morgue.

Like any other woman, Gisèle had countless things she liked to do in her daily life. It was a life of reasonable expectations. A life that, as the years passed, was shaped by childbirth, too.

In this small village in France at times lived her daughter Caroline and Caroline’s brothers. Children usually call their fathers Daddy.

Caroline doesn’t use that name now, and never will again. She too is waiting for justice to be done, as they say.

In a small village in France, our hearts lie shattered.

The denial of Gisèle’s humanity by her rapists is the denial of violence done to every woman, to all of us.

At her side, after this verdict, we can now look the world in the eye.

Deep in our entwined souls, we can only hope that society will rise to the challenge thrown down by the superhuman determination of Gisèle Pelicot.

I stayed silent for 30 years about sexual assault and rape. And now, the law in France considers that the statute of limitations has expired on the crimes committed against me. But I can still fight for those who do not have a voice. Like Gisèle’s, my own story speaks for all of them.

• Judith Godrèche is a French actor, writer and film director

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