By Catherine Porter
Warning: Graphic content
Avignon, France: If the sight of dozens of men accused of raping her, including her husband of many decades, upset Gisele Pelicot, she did not let it show. She swept into a packed courtroom on Thursday with steely poise, her face composed, her eyes dry beneath sunglasses. Her adult children trailed behind her.
Then, she took the stand and told the court how the life she had built over 50 years had quickly unravelled one morning in late 2020 when the police summoned her to a station in southern France. There, they told her that the man she considered the love of her life had been drugging her for almost a decade and inviting strangers to come into their home and join him in raping her while she was comatose.
Gisele Pelicot speaks to the media as she leaves the Avignon courthouse. Her ex-husband is expected to testify before a panel of French judges. Credit: AP
Under French rules, Pelicot, 71, could have avoided letting the trial play out in the public eye and chosen to keep it behind closed doors. Instead, she decided it was important for all of France to hear her story and to place the shame on the accused men rather than on her.
“So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms Pelicot,” she said in a calm, controlled voice. “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimised.
“We must address this scourge.”
The trial in Avignon, which started this week and is scheduled to take four months, has shaken France. Everything about it seems almost too shocking to absorb: how long Dominique Pelicot is accused of drugging his wife, how ordinary and loving the couple seemed in their retirement, and how many men are accused of raping her.
There are so many men on trial that the court had to build a second glass box in the courtroom for those in custody. They include firemen, soldiers, truck drivers, an IT expert. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many are in stable relationships and have children.
Dominique Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, including aggravated rape and drugging. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, his daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at times distributing, intimate photos of them. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
He hopes to use the trial to explain himself to his now ex-wife and estranged children, according to his lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro.
Standing at a lectern before the row of judges in court, Gisele Pelicot never showed much emotion. She referred to her former husband formally as “Monsieur Pelicot”.
As she told it, they fell madly in love at just 19 and were soon married. They’d had three children and now seven grandchildren. They’d been together through some illness, financial problems and even at least one fleeting affair but they made it through.
Pelicot told the court she had trusted her husband implicitly, and she said they had what she considered a normal sex life.
“I thought we were a strong couple,” Pelicot said. “We had everything to be happy.”
After she retired in 2013, they moved from the Paris region to Mazan, a small town in the south.
There, she said, her husband supported her through a strange, undiagnosed illness. She was losing her hair, losing weight and, most worryingly, losing her memory of some nights and days, she told the court. She would sometimes awake in the morning with no recall of saying goodbye to her children, watching a movie or getting into bed, she said.
These gaps, which she described as “total blackouts”, frightened her so much that she stopped driving.
“I was persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour,” she said. She had also suffered gynaecological problems.
Her husband drove her to appointments with specialists, one of whom did a CT scan of her brain. She was never given a satisfactory explanation.
“I could not have imagined for a single second that I had been drugged,” she said, though later she recalled he once gave her a beer that glowed mint green before he threw it in the sink. She said she now believes he was doing “trials” of ways to drug her.
The reality of what prosecutors say was happening was discovered by chance after Dominique Pelicot was caught trying to film under women’s skirts in a grocery store. Gisele Pelicot said she forgave him, thinking it was a rare slip in a 50-year marriage.
Only later would she learn that he had been caught doing the same thing earlier, in 2010, and was let off with a fine, prosecutors said. It was a warning sign she said she never got to see. She said she would have been more vigilant had she known.
“I lost 10 years of my life,” she said. “Those are years I will never get back.”
Dominique Pelicot sat apart from the other accused men in a separate glass box and cast his eyes down throughout his wife’s testimony. He had met most of those men on a notorious, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France. It was shut down in June.
He has argued to the police and through his lawyer that all the men knew his wife had been drugged into submission and followed the rules he had established to ensure she didn’t wake up. He filmed the scenes, storing more than 20,000 digital videos and photographs that the police used to track down the accused.
Most of the men on trial have been accused of rape with “many aggravating circumstances”, one being the use of drugs to put her to sleep. Many have pleaded not guilty. Some say they were tricked into having sex with a drugged woman, lured by her husband for a playful three-way encounter and that they had been told she was pretending to sleep because she was shy.
In the days after meeting the police and seeing some of the shocking photos that her husband had kept, Gisele Pelicot said she contemplated suicide. But with the help of her children and friends, she began to slowly gather the shards of her broken life and identity. She sold most things in the home in Mazan and moved elsewhere.
She has divorced her husband, and while she is keeping her married name for the trial, she intends to take up her maiden name as soon as it is over, she said.
Notably, since the day she stepped into the police station, she said she has not had a single blackout.
While she seemed strong and described herself as like a boxer who repeatedly stood back up after being knocked down, she also told the court, “inside, there is a field of ruins”.
“I will try to rebuild my life,” she said. “I don’t know how.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636, or call Kidshelpline 1800 55 1800.
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