PARIS (AP) — Gisèle Pelicot’s brain froze as the French police officer revealed the unthinkable.
“Fifty-three men had come to our house to rape me,” she recalls him telling her.
Sharing details of the horror that until now had largely been reserved for French courts, Pelicot is publicly telling her story of survival and courage in her own words, in a book and her first series of interviews since a landmark trial in 2024 turned her into a global icon against sexual violence and imprisoned her husband who knocked her out with drugs so other men could assault her inert body.
Extracts of “A Hymn to Life, Shame Has to Change Sides,” published Tuesday by French newspaper Le Monde, rewound to Nov. 2, 2020 — the day when her world fell apart.
Her then-husband, Dominique Pelicot, had been summoned by police for questioning after a supermarket security guard caught him secretly taking video up women’s skirts.
Gisèle accompanied him and was completely unprepared for the bombshell delivered by the officer, Laurent Perret. Gradually, and with care, he explained how the man she regarded as a loving husband and whom she described as “a super guy” had, in fact, made her the unwitting victim of his perversions.
“I am going to show you photos and videos that are not going to please you,” the officer said, words she recounts in the book.
The first showed a man raping a woman who had been laid out on her side and dressed up in a suspender belt.
“That’s you in this photo,” the officer said.
He then showed her another photo, and another after that — drawn from a collection of images that Dominique Pelicot took of his wife over the years when he regularly knocked her unconscious by lacing her food and drink with drugs, so strangers he invited to their home could assault her while he filmed.
Gisèle Pelicot couldn’t believe that the inert woman in the photos was her.
“I didn’t recognize the individuals. Nor this woman. Her cheek was so flabby. Her mouth so limp. She was a rag doll,” she writes in her book.
“My brain stopped working in the office of Deputy Police Sergeant Perret.”
The shocking case and her courage in demanding that it be tried in open court spurred a national reckoning about the blight of rape culture. The harrowing trial ended in December 2024 with guilty verdicts for all 51 defendants.
Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men were convicted of rapes and sexual assaults over a period of nearly a decade. Another man was convicted of drugging and raping his own wife with Dominique Pelicot’s help.
Dominique Pelicot, found guilty on all charges, was given the maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison. The sentences ranged from three to 15 years imprisonment for the other convicted men. Only one of them subsequently appealed and saw his sentence for rape increased from nine to 10 years imprisonment.
In the book extracts published by Le Monde, Pelicot says that accepting the possibility of a closed-door trial would have protected her abusers and left her alone with them in court, “hostage to their looks, their lies, their cowardice and their scorn.”
“No one would know what they had done to me. Not a single journalist would be there to write their names next to their crimes,” she explains. “Above all, not a single woman could walk in and sit in the courtroom to feel less alone.”
The 73-year-old adds that had she been twenty years younger, “I might not have dared to refuse a closed-door hearing.”
“I would have feared the stares,” she writes. “Those damned stares a woman of my generation has always had to contend with, those damned stares that make you hesitate in the morning between trousers and a dress, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you and embarrass you. Those damned stares that are supposed to tell you who you are, what you’re worth, and then abandon you as you grow older.”
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