Pelicot recounts harrowing discovery of rape crimes
Gisele Pelicot’s brain froze when a French police officer revealed the unthinkable.
“Fifty-three men had come to our house to rape,” she remembers the police officer telling her.
Sharing details of the horrors that have until now been largely reserved for the French courts, Pelicot tells her story of survival and courage in a book in her own words, speaking publicly in her first series of interviews since a landmark trial in 2024 made her a global icon against sexual violence and jailed her husband, who drugged her unconscious so other men could attack her motionless body.
Excerpts from his book Hymn to Life: Shame Must Switch Sides, published by French newspaper Le Monde on Tuesday, flash back to November 2, 2020, the day his world collapsed.
Her then-husband, Dominique Pelicot, had been summoned for questioning by police after a supermarket security guard caught him secretly filming under women’s skirts.
Gisele accompanied him and was completely unprepared for officer Laurent Perret’s bombshell.
Slowly and carefully, she described how the man she considered a loving husband and whom she described as a “superman” had unwittingly made her the victim of his perversions.
“I will show you photos and videos that will not please you,” the officer said in the book.
In the first, a man was seen raping a woman lying on her side and wearing a suspender belt.
“That’s you in this photo,” the officer said.
He then showed her another photo, and then another, taken from a collection of photos Dominique Pelicot had taken over the years in which he regularly drugged his wife’s food and drink to knock her out so that strangers he invited into their home could rape and attack her while he was filming.
Gisele Pelicot couldn’t believe that the still woman in the photos was her.
“I couldn’t recognize these people. I couldn’t recognize this woman either. Her cheek was very slack. Her mouth was very slack. She was a rag doll,” he writes in his book.
“My brain stopped working in Deputy Sergeant Perret’s office.”
The shocking case sparked a national reckoning about the plight of rape culture in France.
A harrowing trial ended in December 2024 with guilty verdicts for all 51 defendants.
Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men were convicted of rape and sexual assault over almost a decade.
Another man was convicted of drugging and raping his own wife with the help of Dominique Pelicot.
The court found Dominique Pelicot guilty of all charges and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, the maximum possible sentence.
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