A French woman whose husband allegedly drugged her and invited more than 80 men to rape her at her home for almost a decade has told a court her world collapsed when police told her of the alleged crimes.
Gisèle Pélicot, 72, said “police saved my life” when they investigated her husband Dominique Pélicot’s computer in November 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket near their home in a village in southern France.
Police are said to have found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.
When investigators first informed her of the years of alleged abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband, Giséle Pélicot, who had been drugged to the point of unconsciousness, told the court: “My world fell apart. For me, everything was falling apart. Everything I had built up over 50 years.”
She told a panel of five judges that she had only found the courage to watch the footage in May of this year. “Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me,” she said.
Referred to by her first name in court, Gisèle Pélicot has waived her right to anonymity in order for the trial to be held in public, with the support of her three adult children.
She said she was testifying “for all women” who had been assaulted while drugged and to ensure “no woman suffers this”.
Her husband this week answered “yes” in court when asked if he was guilty of the drugging and attacks. His lawyer said that after his arrest he “always declared himself guilty”, saying: “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.”
Police have said that between 2011 and 2020, Dominique Pélicot crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication and mixed them into his wife’s evening meal or in her wine at their home in Mazan, near Carpentras in Provence. He then allegedly enlisted men to rape and sexually abuse her, contacting them via an online chatroom, where members discussed preferences for non-consenting partners.
The accused men recruited by her husband were instructed to avoid smelling of any kind of fragrance or cigarette smoke to avoid alerting his wife and to leave if she moved so much as an arm, investigators said. Fifty men are on trial for allegedly taking part in the rape and abuse.
Speaking in a calm and clear voice, Gisèle Pélicot told the court how she and her husband had married when they were 21, had three children and seven grandchildren, and had been very close. “We weren’t rich but we were happy. Even our friends said we were the ideal couple,” she said, describing how they had stood by each other through financial, work and health problems. “I always supported my husband.”
She told the court that without knowing she was being regularly drugged at night, she had begun to have difficulties remembering things and concentrating and even feared taking the train to see her adult children in case she missed her stop. She said she had lost weight and at one point had difficulty controlling her arm.
Asked by the judge if she had experienced gynaecological issues, Gisèle Pélicot said yes. She said medical tests during the police investigation showed she had been infected with several sexually transmitted diseases.
She said she had barely recognised herself in the images uncovered by police, saying she was motionless. “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she said. “They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.
“When you see that woman drugged, mistreated, a dead person on a bed – of course the body is not cold, it’s warm, but it’s as if I’m dead.” She told the court rape was not a strong enough word, it was torture.
She said in the hours after discovering the allegations, she felt like dying. She described how she had to explain the allegations to her adult children, saying her daughter’s scream “was etched into my memory”.
She left the house with two suitcases, “all that was left for me of 50 years of life together”. Since then “I no longer have an identity … I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself”, she said.
Gisèle Pélicot, who has been supported in court by her children, has been praised by lawyers for her strength and calm at the trial. She said she appeared solid but was “in ruins” and did not know how her body had withstood the abuse and now the trial.
The 50 men on trial with her husband include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, soldier, firefighter and civil servant, many of whom lived around Mazan, a town of about 6,000 inhabitants. The men were aged between 26 and 73 at the time of their arrests.
Several of the accused have denied the charges, telling police they did not know Gisèle Pélicot was not a willing partner, accusing her husband of tricking them. Detectives were unable to identify and trace more than 30 other men who were recorded.
Gisèle Pélicot’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, said she did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”.
The trial in Avignon is expected to last four months. Dominique Pélicot, 71, and the 50 other defendants face 20 years in prison if convicted of aggravated rape.