Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot lived in an idyllic pink housein Mazan, a village of about 6,000 in South-East France. The house is the kind of quaint, sun-drenched Provencal villa you might coo over, if it were listed on VRBO for vacation rental — except that this villa housed a monster.
Dominique Pelicot stands accused of inviting dozens of other monsters inside that house to rape his unknowing wife, whom he drugged into a stupor, over a nine-year period between 2011 and 2020. The mass rape trial, which began in September and is expected to wrap in December, has shocked France.
From the ashes of this unthinkable situation, a heroine has risen.
Gisèle Pelicot, 72, made the brave decision to have the proceedings carried out in public, waiving the shield of privacy under which rape cases are usually tried in court. “It’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them,” she said. She has been hailed as a feminist icon around the world, sparking protests in her name across France, and greeted by applause when she enters and leaves the Avignon courthouse where 51 of her accused rapists are being tried. “We are all Gisèle,” read the handmade signs. And: “Rapist we see you, victim we believe you.”
When Gisèle appeared on the witness stand this week for the first time, she refused to look at her (now) ex-husband as she addressed him. “How could you have betrayed me to this point? How could you have brought these strangers into my bedroom?”
She also said, simply, “I am totally destroyed.”
The “normalness” of the Pelicots, and indeed of many of the other accused rapists, is part of what makes this case so shocking. The Pelicots are parents of three, and grandparents of seven who were married for 50 years. Before retirement, Gisèle was a logistics manager and Dominique was an estate agent. Among the 50 accused assailants, aged 26 to 74, are truck drivers, a soldier, a plumber, a town councillor, farm workers and a journalist. Graffiti scrawled on a wall near the courthouse reads, in translation: “Ordinary men, horrible crimes.”
Dominique was caught after he was arrested filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket. Police found a terrifyingly meticulous set of records of the assaults on his wife. In a file folder marked, impossibly, “Abuse,” he kept some 20,000 photos and videos of men raping his wife while she was knocked out. Why did keep these records? “Part pleasure,” he told the court. “but also, part insurance.”
How Dominique acted while Gisèle was awake was somehow even worse.
“He made a lot of meals. I saw that as him being attentive,” Gisèle testified, describing the mashed potatoes, dressed in olive oil, that he served her. She spoke of the raspberry ice cream her husband brought her in bed. These details, she said, now haunt her: Dominique has admitted that this was how he administered the sedatives. Over the nine-year period, Gisèle lost weight, lost hair and lost time — she reported severe memory gaps that she worried were related to neurological issues. She also suffered from gynecological problems. (One of the alleged assailants, who is accused of raping her six times, is HIV positive and refused to wear a condom lest it hinder his performance.) Dominique drove Gisèle to doctors to pursue the answers that he alone held.
The complicity, the dual personality — it’s difficult to fathom.
The case grows creepier, if possible. Dominique had an elaborate scheme in place to avoid detection. He told the men he invited to rape his wife that they had to leave no trace, so they could not smell of cologne or cigarette smoke, and they were required to warm their hands on a radiator before they touched his unconscious wife, to guard against waking her. If she did stir, they were ordered to leave.
Dominique has pled guilty to rape. “I am a rapist, like the others in this room,” he told the court. Fourteen men who were identified (there were 72 in Dominque’s “Abuse” file) also pleaded guilty to rape. The rest have pleaded not guilty. Their argument is that they were Dominique’s victims, too, ensnared in what they thought were kinky consensual sex games. Dominique connected with his wife’s future rapists via a now-defunct internet sex site called Coco.fr.
Dominique didn’t just recruit men to film with his wife at their house, he did so at his daughter’s holiday home as well. One of the accused rapists had his partner drive him to the rendezvous, and wait outside.
The Guardian has done an impressive job of compiling information on the men who stand accused. The details are haunting.
There is Redouane A., 40, who asked if it was normal that Gisèle was snoring. “Yes, we like it like that,” he said Dominique told him. Mohamed R., 70, a former employee of a discotheque, said that he “couldn’t imagine for a fraction of a second that Dominique Pelicot did that without his wife knowing.” Turns out Mohamed R. had been to prison previously for raping his own daughter. Then there is Ahmed T., 54, a plumber who says he thought “Why not?” when Dominique invited him in 2019 to join him and (sleeping) Gisèle. He testified that he thought she must have been shy. He told the court, “I’m not a rapist, but if I had wanted to rape I would not have chosen a 67-year-old woman, I would have chosen a pretty one.”
These statements, the 50 different takes on this story that the court will hear, are all individually revealing, and collectively mind-boggling. What is the state of the world that would make it possible for anyone to think it is OK to have sex with anyone who is unconscious? How would a husband’s word ever be good enough as consent for his unconscious wife?
And finally: Did the shoe not drop when the guy who invited you to his home to have sex with his wife while he films it asks you to warm your hands on a radiator else you might her up? Come on.
The outpouring of support for Gisèle, who has appeared in court head held high is the only balm to this God-awful saga. It should not matter that she chose a sharp pair of boots paired with her short, flowy dress to testify, but it was touching that she did: she had the pride and heart to appear as fully herself: to stand up and to stand out, a signal of defiance and heart. It showed that those men on trial couldn’t take her verve away from her.
They also have not taken her purpose away. Her voice, and her intent, was clear: “I want victims of rape to tell themselves, ‘If Mrs. Pelicot did it, so can we,” she said, a rallying call in a world where sexual assault victims often feel further abused, and let down, by justice systems everywhere.
“I am expressing a desire to change society,” she said. Far beyond the French penal code and its definition of rape, Gisèle Pelicot has already done that.
