“When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them.” With these words, Gisèle Pelicot stood up for all women who have been raped or sexually assaulted by men. “I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those woman to say: Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too.”
At 11.30am on Wednesday 23 October Gisèle Pelicot took to the stand at the criminal court in Avignon. The rape trial against her former husband, Dominique Pelicot, and 50 other men is now in its eighth week. She arrived at the building to applause from those who admire her courage. It is impossible to adequately put Pelicot’s bravery into words, even though she herself rejects the idea: “I hear lots of women, and men, who say you’re very brave. I say it’s not bravery, it’s will and determination to change society,” she told the court.
The cold facts of this care are now well known. In a series of assaults between 2011 and 2020, Gisèle Pelicot, now 72, was unknowingly drugged and raped by her former husband and dozens more men, whom he invited to rape her in her own home. The majority of the 50 men on trial alongside Dominique Pelicot lived less than 40 miles from the village where the couple lived. They are aged between 26 and 74 and include a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a local councillor, a carpenter, a soldier, a plumber, lorry drivers and farm workers. Dominique Pelicot has admitted to the charges against him. Others have denied rape, saying they thought they were taking part in a game. Some have said that they returned more than once because they thought Gisèle Pelicot “enjoyed it”.
In court on Wednesday, Gisèle Pelicot addressed her husband directly, but did not want to look at him. Details of his deceit were shared, including how he appeared to have acquired a separate supply of underwear that would be used in the alleged rapes. “The underwear in the videos [of rape] is not my underwear,” she told the court. “What I saw on the videos, it doesn’t belong to me, he must have kept it somewhere but I didn’t know.”
I have never known a case like this; each detail that emerges is more appalling and grotesque than the last. It has shocked not just Pelicot’s native France, but the entire world. That so many men living in a small area are capable of such heinous crimes is beyond comprehension; the level of betrayal from her husband unfathomable. Pelicot described how her husband used to bring her favourite ice cream – raspberry – to her in bed. “I thought, ‘How lucky I am, he’s a love,’” she said. The ice cream, though, was laced with drugs to sedate her, so that she could be raped without her knowledge. “How can the perfect man have got to this?” she asked. “How could you have betrayed me to this point? How could you have brought these strangers into my bedroom?”
One of the most devastating revelations from Pelicot’s evidence was the fact that this unimaginable hell could have been avoided – had she been told by police that her husband had been caught filming up women’s skirts in 2010. It was his repetition of this offence in 2020 that led to the alleged rapes becoming known. Had she known back in 2010, she said, she may have left him. “I lost ten years of my life,” Gisèle Pelicot says. “If I had been alerted in 2010, I would have been a lot more vigilant about my mental lapses.”
There appeared to be some attempt to speculate on what might have been the motive. Could it have been revenge for a previous affair by Gisèle Pelicot? Maybe, but the couple had talked about this, she said, and Dominique had had affairs too. Did he have an inferiority complex in relation to his wife, whom he referred to as “la bourgeoise” to some of the men he is alleged to have recruited to rape her? “I never felt an inferiority complex from him,” she stated. The fact that Dominique Pelicot had been raped as a child has also been mentioned during the trial.
A British newspaper dared to accuse this woman of taking “public revenge” on the men who “raped her every night on [her] husband’s orders”. It still makes me fizz with rage.
Whatever went through Dominique Pelicot’s mind during nine years of depravity, there is no excuse for it. Asked by her lawyer whether she should ask herself if she was responsible for what happened, Gisèle Pelicot replied: “Of course, today I feel responsible for nothing. Today, above all, I’m a victim.”
Gisèle Pelicot’s heroism has exploded the myth of the stranger, or “monster” rapist. “The profile of a rapist is not someone met in a car-park late at night,” she told the court. “A rapist can also be in the family, among our friends. I am a woman who is totally destroyed, and don’t know how I can pick myself up from this?”
It is impossible for anyone to answer that question. I only hope that she finds strength in the hope she has given to others. Gisèle Pelicot is a hero.
[See also: The unspeakable horror of the Pelicot rape case]