PARIS — 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 the officer 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 rape and 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 spurred a national reckoning about the blight 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 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.
The court found Dominique Pelicot guilty on all charges and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, which was the maximum possible.
