By JOHN LEICESTER
PARIS (AP) — Gisèle Pelicot’s brain shut down when a French police officer revealed the unthinkable to her.
“Fifty-three men had come to our house to rape me,” he remembers the agent telling him.
Pelicot shares details of the horror she experienced, which until now had largely been reserved for French courts, and publicly tells her story of survival and bravery in her own words, in a book and her first series of interviews since a historic trial in 2024 made her a global icon against sexual violence and put her husband in prison, who drugged her so other men could assault her limp body.
Excerpts from “A hymn to life. Shame has to change sides” published on Tuesday by the French newspaper Le Monde, date back to November 2, 2020, the day his world fell apart.
Her then-husband, Dominique Pelicot, had been summoned by police for questioning after a supermarket security guard caught him secretly recording upskirt videos of women.
Gisèle accompanied him and was completely unprepared for the bombshell dropped by the agent, Laurent Perret. Slowly and carefully, she explained how the man she considered a loving husband and whom she described as “a great guy” had, in fact, made her the unwilling victim of his perversions.
“I’m going to show you photos and videos that you’re not going to like,” the officer said, according to her story in the book.
The first showed a man raping a woman who was lying on her side and wearing a garter belt.
“That’s you in the photo,” said the police officer.
He then showed her another photo, and another after that, taken from a collection of images Dominique Pelicot took of his wife over the years, when he regularly knocked her unconscious by adulterating her food and drink with drugs, so that the strangers he invited into his home could rape and assault her while he recorded.
Gisèle Pelicot couldn’t believe that the inert woman in the photos was her.
“I didn’t recognize the individuals. Not even that woman. Her cheek was very flabby. Her mouth was very loose. She was a rag doll,” he writes in the book.
“My brain stopped working in Deputy Police Sergeant Perret’s office,” he adds.
The shocking case sparked a national debate about the scourge of rape culture in France. The 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 a period of 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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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
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