One day in May 2024, Gisèle Pelicot changed her mind. For three and a half years she had lived with unthinkable facts: her husband had drugged and raped her, sometimes two or three times a week over almost a decade, and had invited at least 72 strangers to rape her too. At the time she had no knowledge of it, and when she was told the truth, she remembered nothing. Dominique Pelicot regularly added to his wife’s food or wine a cocktail of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication that rendered her comatose: the dosages were later revealed to be life-threatening.
Like all victims of sex crimes in France, she had a right to anonymity and had proceeded on the basis that when the trial began in September it would be held in a closed court. No public, no press, no real names. But that day in May, walking along the beach near her new home on the Île de Ré in western France, she pictured the closed hearing: on one side of the court, the 50 codefendants police had managed to identify; their army of 45 lawyers; her husband and his lawyer. On the other side: her two lawyers and her, a petite woman of 71.
She understood, as she later put it, that “the victim is always blamed” and that, outnumbered as she was, she “would be nothing but their prey all over again.” She had “the physical sensation that I needed the rest of the world.” She thought too that if she did not make this a public trial, and help other women feel less alone, “I would regret it all my life.” This was not the place for anonymity and silence. She looked out at the sea and remembered a phrase she’d heard used by women who’d survived domestic violence: “Shame must change sides.” She decided she would open the doors, unmask her rapists, and show her face.
Four months later Gisèle Pelicot changed history: the largest rape trial France had ever witnessed lasted three and a half months, led to a new law on consent, and—as societies everywhere asked themselves how men and women might learn to live better together—ricocheted across the world.
I ask what I should call her when we meet in Paris, one slate-gray day in mid-December. “Madame Pelicot? Madame Guillou?” We are in a location house in the center of the city, where she has spent the morning being photographed for Vogue. Before our conversation even begins I am anxious to know whether I should address her by her maiden name, and whether she’d prefer that her husband’s name not be attached to her in conversation at all. “Gisèle suits me just fine,” she replies with a smile.
The atmosphere in the room is respectful—everyone seems moved to be in her presence—but there is a brightness to Gisèle that none of us quite expects. It is three days after her 73rd birthday. Her dark eyes sparkle and her square-cut bob, the color of a new penny, swishes as she speaks. She has given herself, as she later tells me, “permission to be happy.” She is elegantly dressed in an olive-green suede jacket and a knitted skirt with a geometric pattern. (During the trial, the more people suggested that a woman subjected to such horrors would not care about her appearance, the more defiantly attentive she became to what she wore.) Her new partner, Jean-Loup, is with her, and they look across at each other with easy affection. She is beautiful. I say this not to comment further on her looks but to note her spirit: a palpable sense of freedom, and an almost unearthly transfer of optimism to those in her midst.
Over the past 11 months, Gisèle has written A Hymn to Life with the ghostwriter Judith Perrignon—a memoir she describes as “a family saga.” She has agreed to do some press in connection with it, and although all her interviews are due to be published worldwide simultaneously, an accident of timing means that this UK exclusive is the first she has ever given to a journalist. I know this and feel its weight; I tell her I’ll tread carefully, that we can pause at any point. As it turns out, there is only one moment that brings her to tears: when she recalls the bravery of her mother, who died from a brain tumor when Gisèle was a child. As she looks around for a tissue, embarrassed and apologetic, Gisèle explains that she comes from a long line of stoics. “In our family, we hid our tears,” she says.
Later I wonder whether my concern says less about her than it does about me—I’m far from being alone in identifying with her. For months outside the courtroom in Avignon there was a throng of hundreds of supporters, from whom she took strength. They carried banners, wrote graffiti: “Justice for Gisèle, justice for all women.” Some of them were crying. As for Gisèle, she’d made a pact with herself: “I have no choice but to be invincible.”
It was a hot September day in the South of France when a security guard in the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras saw a white-haired man secretly filming under women’s skirts as they leaned forward to pick up items in the aisles. He had a camera hidden in a black bag. The guard alerted the police and encouraged the women to file a complaint. One of them thought the guard might be making a bit of a fuss; when she saw the man who’d purportedly been upskirting them she thought he looked like a “poor innocent.”
While Dominique Pelicot was questioned by police in Carpentras that day in 2020, Gisèle was looking after their grandchildren in Paris. He was also interviewed by a psychiatrist, who found Pelicot to be so dismissive of the supermarket incident that he advised the police to look further. They began by confiscating the two mobile phones he had with him. Pelicot was sent home to the nearby village of Mazan while they investigated.
Upon inspection of Dominique Pelicot’s second phone, Sergeant Laurent Perret was surprised to discover that it contained no SIM card and only two apps: Skype and Photos. Opening Skype, he found messages exchanged with 72 men, all using pseudonyms, including one message describing the dosage of sleeping pills Pelicot used to drug his wife. When Perret tried to look at the photos, however, they began to disappear. Clearly, someone elsewhere was deleting them. He quickly switched the phone to airplane mode so that he could preserve the evidence the internet connection was erasing.
When Gisèle returned from Paris, Dominique sobbed as he told her about his voyeurism in the supermarket. “Mais qu’est-ce qui t’a pris?” she remembers saying, in response to his confession: “What’s got into you?” She insisted that he apologize to the women and see a therapist. At the same time, as she recalls, she thought, It could have been so much worse. He was in such a state of distress she thought he was going to tell her he’d been diagnosed with a fatal illness. Her thoughts turned to memories of her mother. “Only death really frightened me.”
A month later Gisèle was back in Paris, this time with other grandchildren, when she received a call from Sergeant Perret, a man she now describes as “remarkable.” He asked when she would be back in Mazan. On October 21, she said, and offered to come in as soon as she returned. No, no, he replied, they had a lot of work to do and needed more time. Though he didn’t reveal this then, Perret and his colleagues had discovered more than 20,000 images and videos on Dominique Pelicot’s devices—many of them in a folder titled “abuse”—and it was taking time to comb through them. Perret said it would be best if Gisèle came in with her husband a few days after that, on November 2. (Years later, Perret would tell Gisèle that he did not sleep in those 10 days, knowing the danger she was in—and with good reason. It would transpire that Pelicot had stepped up his attacks once he knew the police were onto him. Gisèle was raped on October 3, 10 and 21: all between his initial arrest in Carpentras and the couple’s appointment in November.)
On November 2, Gisèle and Dominique drove together to the police station, with Gisèle assuming it was a formality. Dominique was questioned first, and half an hour later she was interviewed separately. Sergeant Perret asked Gisèle about her relationship with her husband, and whether they went in for swinging (“échangisme”: wife-swapping). She was confused; absolutely not. Then Perret showed her three photographs of an unresponsive woman being raped by three different men. She was wearing a suspender belt that Gisèle had never seen.
“You don’t even realize what you’re being shown,” Gisèle tells me once we’ve settled into our armchairs, her grammar introducing some instinctive distance between now and that moment. “You tell yourself: ‘I don’t recognize myself.’ In fact, I think my therapist explained to me that my brain dissociated. It cut itself off from reality and I returned to my life before that moment. I wanted to go home, go back to my dog—and then I thought, obviously he’ll come home. This is all a bad joke, things will go back to the way they were. It took me some time to realize that it wouldn’t be like that.”
“How much time?” I ask.
“Sergeant Perret and one of his colleagues took me home. It was an indescribable mess—because they’d been looking for sedatives. They said: ‘You mustn’t stay here on your own.’ So I called my friend Sylvie and she came over shortly afterwards. She sat down. And I think that’s when I first said the word ‘rape.’”
Two further developments became crucial. (1) Among the images found on Pelicot’s computer were photos of both their sons’ wives, taken with a hidden camera as they came out of the shower, and two photos of their daughter, Caroline, asleep, wearing underwear she did not recognise. These were retrieved despite the deletion of a folder labeled “my daughter naked.” (2) It transpired that Pelicot had been caught filming up women’s skirts as early as 2010, when the couple still lived in the suburbs of Paris. He was given a €100 fine and Gisèle was never informed of his arrest. But a law passed a few years earlier had made DNA samples mandatory for a wide range of suspects, and the swab taken that day placed Pelicot at the scene of an attempted rape in 1999: it matched a drop of blood on the victim’s shoe. (The victim, who is using the pseudonym Marion, is the same age as the Pelicots’ daughter, Caroline.)
This evidence somehow never made it to the right file, and only came to light during the recent investigation, 23 years after the event. As a result, other cold cases from the 1990s have been reopened. These include the rape and murder of Sophie Narme in 1991, in which the perpetrator had a strikingly similar MO to Marion’s attacker: a man books a viewing under a false name for a flat in Paris; the estate agent is a young woman new to the job; he drugs her, maybe with ether, binds her hands, neatly arranges her shoes beside her body, which is face-down on the floor. Dominique Pelicot, who was himself working as an estate agent at the time, is under official investigation for both crimes, stretching the chain of suspicion back three decades. He has admitted to the attack in 1999 but denies committing the murder. The body of Sophie Narme is being exhumed.
Gisèle and Dominique met in the summer of 1971. She was 19, he a year younger. Gisèle’s mother had died a decade earlier and, she later felt, this gave her as much strength as sorrow. Nothing worse could ever happen to me now, she remembers thinking. That summer of 1971 she was back on childhood turf, visiting her beloved aunt among the châteaux of the Loire. Her aunt had recently employed a young electrician, and when Gisèle met him, she writes in her memoir, “I just knew that he was going to love me.” Both of them had been raised in the shadow of the war, both had left school as young teenagers and started work. “He was the first man in my life, and I was his first woman too,” she tells me. She and Dominique became lovers and “twins,” though by temperament, she says, she was positive and “he had a tendency to paint things in a negative light.” When they married two years later, “it felt as if we had escaped our misfortune.”
Dominique had grown up in a disused château in the forest, which had been turned into a shelter for veterans with disabilities and mental illnesses. His father was the warden there, and Dominique was teased for it mercilessly at school. His parents took in a foster child to make ends meet. Some years later, Gisèle and Dominique began to wonder whether his father was sexually abusing the child, and whether he was doing it in front of his unhappy mother. “Only tyranny held his family together,” Gisèle writes of Dominique.
During the trial, Gisèle learned things about her husband’s past that he had never told her. On a camping trip he had witnessed his mother fellating his father by force, with her hands tied behind her back. During a hospital stay when he was eight, Dominique woke up gagging on a male nurse’s penis. While working on a building site as a teenager, he witnessed a gang rape and was forced to participate. “When I discovered those things, I realised that it was a time bomb,” she says now.
At the time, she knew none of this. The couple moved to the suburbs of Paris, they had three children, and, eventually, seven grandchildren (one born since their grandfather has been in prison). Gisèle rose through the administrative ranks of the national electricity company and became the main breadwinner. Dominique struggled with his career—he was an electrician, started his own business, became an estate agent, fell into debt—but he did a lot at home.
In retrospect, their daughter, Caroline, would realize that Dominique took charge of domestic affairs in a way that sidelined his wife: he did the shopping, he made the meals, he opened the mail. Which meant he was able to hide their debts, as well as giving himself opportunities for solo outings and the foodborne administration of drugs.
In 2013 the couple retired to the South of France. They rented a yellow house with blue shutters in the village of Mazan, where the Marquis de Sade also once had his family home. Theirs had a pool and beautiful gardens. For his children, Dominique was the jovial father at the barbecue who went on early morning bike rides and painted in his spare time. They associated him with drinks on the terrace and late-night family games of Trivial Pursuit. Later, it became clear that Dominique had persuaded Gisèle to move there with the intention of isolating her. But she didn’t know that then. She would tell the magistrate that in recent years they “made love five or six times a month.” “We had a nice life, after all,” Gisèle says now, looking back at their marriage. “I think he was happy.”
“For 40 years, I was married to a good man,” she continues, subtracting the final 10 of her 50-year marriage. “Friends would ask me: ‘Doesn’t he have a brother?’ He cooked, he did DIY, he was athletic, he was tidy—he had many good qualities.” When the truth was unveiled people would say to her: “Madame Pelicot, you were under his influence.” But she tells me that was not the case. “Never. Chemically, yes, but psychologically no. That’s what’s so terrible. I’d prefer it if he’d been a bastard so I could say to myself: ‘You knew. You knew he was a horrible man.’”
During the trial, the psychiatrist who had first examined Dominique Pelicot argued that he had a split personality: that he was “cleaved in two.” Though not every expert agreed, this makes sense to Gisèle. “There was an A side and a B side,” she explains. “I never saw the B side. I only discovered it during the trial.”
In December 2024, Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum for rape in France. In her book, Gisèle lists the questions she would ask her husband if she were to visit him there—which many people have advised her against. The questions include: “Did you abuse our daughter?” “The night you came home crying, was that the night you tried to rape that young woman?” “Did you kill?.”
“I haven’t been to see him in prison,” she says now. “There was the trial, and… actually, I do need some time before meeting him again. But I am trying to understand. I tell myself: He had the key. He could have said: ‘I’m going to seek help, something’s not right, why am I like this?’”
“Do you think your ex-husband is capable of murder?” I ask.
“I really hope he’s not capable of that,” she says. “I don’t have the answer. Because yes, there is this business of suspicion—people think it’s him, but I hope he’s not guilty. First of all, my thoughts are with the family—I think only the mother is still alive, the young woman died 30 years ago. I know her body might be exhumed. There is one thing I hope: that they find the DNA of the guy who did it.”
If that turns out to be her ex-husband, it will be “another descent into the abyss.” But for now, Gisèle says, “My memories will remain. At a certain point you rise from the ashes, but you can’t erase the past. It’s part of us.”
The Mazan crimes might be seen as two cases intertwined: one domestic, the other societal. In the first, the perpetrator is a man who could be construed as a monster. In the second, the rapists are so numerous that any attempt to pathologize them becomes fruitless. The scale and range of Dominique Pelicot’s partners in crime showed the terrible banality of their acts, and how easily society had allowed them. “Every day people thank me for my courage,” Gisèle said in court. “I want to tell them that this is not courage, but a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.”
Among the 50 codefendants who appeared in court, common denominators were in short supply. (One of the 53 men identified was tried in absentia; one died of cancer and another by suicide before the trial began.) Their ages ranged from 26 to 74 (one was 22 at the time of the crime). Their defence lawyers portrayed some as childhood victims of abuse, others as addicts. Some had spent their early years in care, others had lived on the streets. But this was by no means true of them all. They varied in class, ethnicity, level of education. A few had a history of domestic violence, others possessed images of child abuse, and one had served time for raping his 17-year-old daughter. One drugged and raped his own wife according to Pelicot’s instructions and offered her to Pelicot; another proposed his mother as a prospective victim. One, who returned six times, was HIV positive. (Gisèle later tested negative.) If any unifying themes were particularly striking, they were the fact that so many of the men were professional guardians of public life—nurses, firefighters, a prison warden, a journalist, a soldier; that two thirds of them were fathers; that most lived within a 50-kilometer radius of Gisèle’s home; and that they claimed to have neither the intention nor the awareness of committing rape. Though a few of them said they noticed that something was not right, none blew the whistle. What was on trial, Gisèle said, was “cowardice.”
In December 2024 all of the co-accused were convicted and received sentences of between three and 15 years. Many followers of the trial felt this was far too short. Six of the men had served their time in pre-trial detention and walked free; 17 attempted to appeal and one of those, Husamettin Dogan, followed through, extending Gisèle’s torment by another year. “I think they still don’t understand,” Gisèle tells me. “Most of them don’t understand that they were rapists.”
The prosecutor for the appeal trial, which took place in Nîmes last October, recommended that Dogan’s sentence be increased, on the grounds that his refusal to acknowledge his crime endorsed not just an attack on an individual woman but “an entire sordid social system.” Unlike the first trial in Avignon, which was overseen by five professional magistrates, the appeal trial was judged by a jury, and this time citizens had their say. Five men and four women extended Dogan’s sentence from nine years to 10.
Despite this experience, Gisèle warns against tarring all men with the same brush. “The fact that this happened to me and that there were 51 degenerates in the courtroom—plus at least 20 more—doesn’t mean we have to put all men in the same basket,” she says. “Because a lot of men questioned themselves in relation to this trial. They asked themselves: ‘Are we worthless, as men, if these men were capable of doing that to this woman?’ I had a man come up to me outside the courthouse in Avignon. He said: ‘You know, I’m ashamed of being a man.’ I told him: ‘No, not all men are like that, and I’m sure you are not like that.’”
The history of misogyny in France stretches from the brutal treatment of Joan of Arc and prurient lies about Marie Antoinette to the novels of Michel Houellebecq and the late adoption of #MeToo. Dominique Pelicot stated during the trial that “One is not born a pervert but becomes one”—a twist on the famous feminist dictum by Simone de Beauvoir. His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, sought to show that his past had formed him, but there was a cruel irony in the reference. De Beauvoir’s point—“one is not born a woman but becomes one”—was that biology is not destiny, and that womanhood is constructed within parameters set by men. The Pelicot case proved that to be as relevant now as it was when she wrote it in 1949.
In France, 94% of rapes are never prosecuted, and before 2021 there was no age of consent—sex with a child under 15 was illegal but was not classified as rape. At the time of the Mazan trial, consent played no part in rape law at all. What had to be proven, instead, was “violence, constraint, or surprise.”
This meant that the accused—many of whom could not remember if they ever saw Gisèle’s face—could skirt around the issue, despite video evidence of their actions. Several of the defense lawyers were women (they attacked Gisèle with a force she still struggles to comprehend) and one of them has since been suspended after posting a video on social media in which she refers to Gisèle by miming to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”
Sexual practices such as swinging and BDSM fall under the banner of “libertinisme” in France, giving them a philosophical foundation. Several defendants described themselves as experienced on the swinging scene and claimed that it was usually the husband who made the arrangements. They didn’t think they needed the wife’s explicit consent as well.
The question of consent had long been debated by legislators, and finally, precipitated by Gisèle’s case and almost a year after her trial ended, the law was changed. As of October 2025, rape in France is understood to be any non-consensual sexual act. As one lawmaker put it, the new definition took the country “from a culture of rape to a culture of consent.”
Gisèle suggests, however, that just as she received international letters of support during the trial, the misogynistic attitudes it highlighted exist “all over the world”, not just in France. Weeks after we meet, Philip Young, a 49-year-old former Tory councilor in Wiltshire, UK, pleads guilty to drugging and raping his ex-wife over a 13-year period. Five other men have also been charged with sexual offenses against her. Possibly inspired by Gisèle, Joanne Young has waived her right to anonymity.
Gisèle has some sympathy for the women in the lives of her rapists—wives, partners, mothers—all of whom left the courtroom when the videos were shown. “Those women are like me, because they are in denial,” she reflects, looking back on her own initial response with self-awareness. She imagines their economic circumstances and the children they’re raising. She says it’s not easy for women who are reliant on men to divorce them. “I would say to them: be vigilant,” she tells me.
One significant element of the Mazan crimes was a website, Coco.fr, which later switched to a domain name in Guernsey. Dominique Pelicot recruited men in a chat room there called Without Her Knowledge. Founded in 2003 and shut down in 2024, Coco was a place where people convened anonymously and exercised their prejudices and desires with impunity. It had been linked to 23,000 criminal cases in France, among them drug trafficking, sexual assaults, homophobic attacks, paedophilia, prostitution of minors, and murder. (The magistrates in charge of the Pelicot trial mistakenly referred to Coco as a “dating site.”) Its founder, who had acquired Italian citizenship and moved to Bulgaria, was arrested in January 2025 on myriad charges ranging from complicity in drug trafficking and distribution of pornography to money laundering, all of which he denies.
Gisèle points out that many such sites still exist, and they stretch well beyond French borders. “Coco was closed, but how many more have reopened in the background?” she says. “There are a lot of them—all over the world. It’s a real curse. They need to be shut down.”
What else can be done? “We have to educate our children,” Gisèle says. “We must protect them, love them, and educate them, because that’s what will create tomorrow’s world. We know that our children—children of nine or 10—have access to pornographic images that are absolutely abject and appalling. What does that do to the mind of a child? Boys and girls need to learn to live together and to respect each other because we are equals. Women have always been thought of as inferior—it’s what society has wanted. A woman is not an object, she’s a human being.” Gisèle is hopeful. “I have faith in humanity,’ she says. “Society will change for the better.”
There is a question that is often asked of Gisèle: how could she not have known what was happening to her? It is asked not only by her antagonists but by women who project onto her their own sense of the records kept by their bodies.
“Today there are lots of people who go so far as to say: ‘But how can she not have known?’” Gisèle tells me. “They say: ‘That seems strange—if it had been me, I would have noticed.’”
The French word Gisèle uses to describe her blackouts is “absence.” For these purposes it’s a useful word in English too: Gisèle did not notice that her husband was inflicting ritual harm on her for a decade because she was absent.
Dominique Pelicot regularly gave her four to 10 tablets of the anti-anxiety drug Ativan and four times the recommended dose of Ambien, a sleeping pill. “It’s terrifying to think of the dosages,” Gisèle says now. “You wonder how the body can sustain it. I don’t think it could have gone on much longer.” Sometimes she was “a rag doll,” as she puts it—the rapes took place when she was in this state. At other times it was like sleepwalking: once, she went to get her hair cut and the hairdresser worried that she might be having a stroke. On another occasion, her youngest son, Florian, was heading home from a visit to Mazan with his family when he saw her gaze empty out and her elbow slip from the armrest of her chair, as if she’d been hypnotized. Dominique had brought her a glass of rosé not long before. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it,” he said. “She’s just tired.”
Dominique Pelicot said in court that his fantasy was “to make an unsubmissive woman submit.” In fact, his acts went beyond that, to willful degradation. He told the strangers he invited to rape her that he wanted revenge for an affair she’d had decades earlier. Night after night, he took from Gisèle all control of her own body. And then he set to work on her mind. When she realized that she’d experienced memory loss—she often couldn’t account for whole days—Gisèle went to see one neurologist after another. Was it Alzheimer’s? Was it a stroke? Was it a brain tumor, like the one that had killed her mother? The doctors all had different views. She had gynecological problems and went to specialists about those too. They didn’t check for sexually transmitted diseases until police discovered what had happened, and then Gisèle was found to be living with the lifelong consequences of four. This sanity-threatening quest went on for almost a decade, with Dominique driving her to every appointment and throwing the doctors off the scent. “My body was telling me what was happening but I couldn’t understand its message,” she writes in the book.
Which was worse, I ask her: crimes against the body or crimes against the mind? “I think the physical scars can heal more quickly, perhaps. The mind—it’s complicated. It’s not the same pain. I think pain in the soul is harder to manage.”
I ask Gisèle about her relationship to her body. She speaks about her stepmother and how ugly she made her feel; about hiding her breasts as a teenager at a time when everyone wanted to look like Twiggy; about growing up with “a bit of a complex” about her body; about meeting Dominique and feeling his gaze say: “Yes, you are pretty after all.”
There is one passage in the memoir that Gisèle tried to remove. It describes a three-year affair she had with a colleague named Didier, which began the year she turned 35. Her mother had died at 35 and she thought about this often. “I discovered new sensations,” she writes, “not least my first orgasm.”
After telling this story to her ghostwriter she was mortified. “I said to Judith: ‘No, I can’t say that! Take it out, it’s irrelevant.’” Perrignon argued that it would speak to many women. They went back and forth and eventually Gisèle asked Jean-Loup, who persuaded her to leave the line in.
One thing that’s striking about this is that it’s her new partner who persuades her to reinstate the story of her pleasure. Gisèle tells me several times that she is “a modest woman.” Videos of her violation have been shown in public but this intimate detail was a step too far.
Gisèle cannot count—she says she does not want to count—the thousands of letters of support she has received from people all over the world, including the queen. There were letters simply addressed to “Gisèle Pelicot, Avignon” and they reached her. She has been awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civic honor, and featured in lists of influential people worldwide. Gisèle, who does not believe in God, has become a kind of public martyr, akin to a medieval French saint. People come up to her and want to touch her. “As if I were the Virgin Mary!” she says with baffled laughter. “It’s as if they want some of my energy to rub off on them.”
She has shed the word “victim” and rejects the words “hero” and “icon.” “‘Survivor’—yes, because if he had continued I don’t think I’d be here speaking to you today,” she says of her ex-husband’s crimes. “But I prefer the word ‘symbol,’ because what I value now is having given a voice to women.”
Given the fact that more than 20 of her rapists are still roaming free, this fame may be double-edged. Once, at the start of the trial, she had lunch with her lawyers in a restaurant in Avignon and when she asked for the bill the waiter told her it had been paid. He indicated the man who was responsible and Gisèle went over and told him she was very touched but could not accept. The man insisted, he said, because he lived not far from her. Suddenly, a thought crossed her mind. “What if he’s one of my rapists who was never arrested?” Then she said to herself: “Stop. You’re going completely mad.”
Sergeant Laurent Perret came to think that when he discovered Dominique Pelicot’s crimes, he “saved a victim but destroyed a family.” Gisèle and her children have each absorbed the horrifying facts at their own pace. Though she could divorce her husband, the children cannot divorce their father. In addition to being forced to rewrite their pasts they now carry the burden of negotiating their genetic inheritance.
Caroline, who looks more like her father than her mother, has written two books about her experience under the pseudonym Caroline Darian. She has also set up an organization called #MendorsPas (“Don’t put me to sleep”) that campaigns against “chemical submission”—a phrase that has become dismayingly familiar in France. Certain that her father drugged her and possibly raped her too, Caroline has been left in the limbo of the unproven. Though she stood by her mother in court, she cut ties with Gisèle afterwards, describing herself as the “forgotten victim of the trial.”
Most rape trials pit the word of the victim against that of the accused, since that is largely the evidence that exists. Gisèle, by contrast, had a huge amount of documentation but no memory of events. Her trial arguably set a high new bar for proof, and put those who lack it at a disadvantage.
Among those is one of their grandchildren, whose case against Dominique Pelicot has been discontinued, and Caroline, who has brought new charges of drugging and rape against him. The lawyer she has chosen for this round of proceedings is Florence Rault, who is prosecuting the attempted rape and murder cases from the 1990s. Dominique has denied Caroline’s claims and any wrongdoing with his grandchildren. Having confronted her father in the dock in Avignon to no avail, Caroline believed that Gisèle, more circumspect by nature, had “abandoned” her by not supporting her. In her first book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, Caroline describes her mother’s response when she returned from the police station after seeing the two photos of herself asleep: “Are you sure it’s you?” Gisèle asked “with detachment.” Caroline concludes: “I understood then that my mother had chosen denial.”
Caroline’s elder brother, David, has described the events of the past few years as having “annihilated” the family. “They are full of hatred and anger and I am not,” Gisèle reasons when I ask her about this. In A Hymn to Life she describes her relationship with her daughter as “wretchedly complicated” and tells me she thinks Caroline must be “scarred for life” by the photos and videos she saw of her mother being raped.
Gisèle’s capacity to survive this experience, admired by millions, may be related to patterns of thought that have come to alienate or frustrate her children. Perhaps Gisèle can only process one layer or compartment at a time, beginning with what was done to her. In January this year Caroline reported that relations between them had “eased,” adding that although it had been very difficult for her mother to contemplate the idea that her father could have gone as far as incest, “she was never the guilty one.”
“My wish is that Caroline’s suffering diminishes with time,” Gisèle tells me eventually. “For her sake and for her family’s, especially her son. Being positive, for me, means fighting against suffering and anger. It doesn’t mean forgetting or forgiving, nor minimizing or denying harm and violence. It means fighting so they don’t win, so they don’t destroy all generations.”
Gisèle remains close to Florian. Years ago, when Florian managed his father’s business, he would come to the rescue when Dominique had IT issues. On one of those occasions he discovered a folder called “Martine’s knickers.” It was empty. The identity of Martine remains a mystery.
In June 2023, a year and three months before the start of the trial, Gisèle met Jean-Loup, a retired Air France steward, through mutual friends on the Ile de Ré. They had the same type of dog, a French bulldog, and liked the same music. Jean-Loup knew what had happened to her, and had been through a harrowing few years: his wife had died a few months earlier, after a long illness during which he’d been her carer. He and Gisèle took things gently and became very close. Later, he would observe that it was a good thing they’d met before the trial because she went on to become so famous that he would never have dared to ask her out for coffee.
“If anyone had told me that I’d find love at this age, I’d never have believed it,” Gisèle tells me. “The love of my grandchildren, yes, but the love of another man—I hadn’t even considered it.” She had set aside what she calls “my life as a woman.” But the universe, as she puts it, had other plans. Now Gisèle wants to give hope to women her age who think their lives are behind them. “I’m saying: ‘No, ladies, we still have a right to happiness. I am proof that anything is possible.’”
I ask how she found it in herself to trust another man. “I have total faith in him,” she says. “I never think: Maybe I should be careful because I put all my trust in Monsieur Pelicot and… Never.” Then she raises an eyebrow and says bluntly: “I mean, that can’t happen to me every five minutes! Not everyone is twisted.”
Can you ever really know another person? I ask. “I don’t see how Jean-Loup could hide anything from me,” she says. “I feel like we’re twins.” I’m reminded that she says this in her book, of Dominique. Gisèle goes on: “But I think you never really know another person, because Monsieur Pelicot was split in two. We must all have a part of us that’s in shadow. We might have some melancholy that we don’t necessarily want to show. There may be many things like that. I don’t have secrets but maybe some people need secrets.”
In her book, Gisèle calls her ex-husband Dominique (their divorce came through on the first day of the trial). But when we speak she refers to him as “Monsieur Pelicot.” Is that out of respect, I ask her, or distance? “Respect, no,” she says. “It’s more to mark a distance. But it’s also my way of saying he’s still a human being. Because you can say that he’s a monster, but for me he’s not a monster, he’s a human being, despite what he has done.” I ask if she believes in evil. “I don’t want to think about evil,” she says. “I believe there are people with bad intentions.”
Do you forgive him? “Forgiveness is very difficult for me,” Gisèle reflects. “Impossible even. But I don’t want to live in hatred. I want to move on. Where he is now, he’s paying his debt to society.”
Several times during our interview, Gisèle uses the word “unthinkable.” She is referring to the fact that no one could have imagined these outlandish crimes to be the cause of her symptoms. But afterwards I wonder if “unthinkable” could be taken to mean that it’s impossible to get one’s head around what has happened to her, or even that dwelling on it doesn’t help. Unthinkable: it doesn’t bear thinking about.
I’m struck by the fact that Gisèle says Jean-Loup is only the third man she’s ever slept with, despite knowing she’s been raped by dozens of others; that when the rape videos were shown in court she was embarrassed because people could see her snoring; that when I ask if she thinks her ex-husband is capable of murder she refers to the body of Sophie Narme and not to her own, which was put at risk on a regular basis.
You could call this denial—she has used that word herself. But Gisèle has also faced so much. It’s possible that something more purposeful is going on: a will to overturn her own disempowerment. In relating her story this way, Gisèle is restoring to the record her waking life. She will not be known solely for what was done to her while unconscious. She will regain her agency and detail her conscious experience with defiance.
She has reverted to her maiden name in her private life but retained the name Pelicot for public purposes because, she explains, she wants to rescue it for her grandchildren—her granddaughters in particular. “I want them to be proud to bear the name Pelicot. Now people will remember Gisèle Pelicot much more easily than they will Dominique Pelicot.”
The day is still light and the air mild when we emerge onto the street. “Aren’t I lucky to be able to experience this?” Gisèle says, smiling as she looks back over the day. “The little everyday joys that make a day like today: c’est magnifique.”
“Do you, in fact, think of yourself as lucky?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I believe in the forces of the universe. I’m convinced something must have protected me because I could have died 100 times.” Then she reflects on what she has told me over the past few hours. “If I hadn’t lost my mother, I would surely not have met Monsieur Pelicot. Life decided it would be otherwise, so I accept the trajectory. I have no regrets. When I look at myself in the mirror, I say: ‘We’re OK, you and me. It’s not that bad, after all.’”
In this story: hair, Diego Da Silva; makeup, Sandrine Cano Bock. Set design: Natalie Turnbull. Production: 360PM.
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