Gisèle Pelicot left women around the world in awe of her bravery as she faced the 51 men who secretly abused her for years in court.
In 2010, the French mum was looking forward to retiring with her husband of 38 years, their grown up children having flown the nest. She was 57 when she was making her plans to move to a pretty Provencal village, dreaming of walking her French bulldog Lancôme while her other half Dominique Pelicot enjoyed bike rides in the beautiful countryside.
But a decade on and Gisèle’s idyllic life started to crumble. She had shed weight, was losing clumps of her hair and experiencing frequent blackouts. The grandmother could barely stay awake and had become extremely anxious, imagining she must be dying.
Gisèle’s then-husband sat by her side as she frequented her local doctor’s surgery begging for answers, with none forthcoming. It had been ‘love at first sight’ when she spotted Pelicot in the Seventies and although they faced tough times in their relationship of four decades, friends described the pair as the ‘perfect couple’.
No-one knew that Pelicot was the perverted mastermind behind a vile campaign of abuse inflicted on his wife, by him and at least 50 other strangers he lured into their family home.
Today, rapist Pelicot was jailed for 20 years for orchestrating a nine year campaign of sexual violence against his wife. A total of 51 men were sentenced alongside him, for charges including aggravated rape, attempted rape and sexual assault. One of the worst offenders in French history, Pelicot has been dubbed the ‘Monster of Avignon’.
Gisèle’s need to sleep all the time from the start of the 2010s had occurred because her husband was drugging her to the point of unconsciousness. Pelicot, who had been taking to the internet to share his sexual perversions, had been given the idea by a man who claimed to be a nurse, sending him pictures of his own unconscious wife.
The predator was prescribed medication for anxiety by his doctor and carefully worked out the right dosage of pills that would plunge his wife into a sleep from which she would not wake. Putting the powerful anxiolytic drug in her evening dinner enabled him to carry out sexual depravities she did not consent to, dress her in lingerie and film the despicable crimes with other men.
With Gisèle unaware she was being regularly raped in her sleep by her husband, the couple retired to the village of Mazan in 2014. Pelicot, 72, began inviting strangers on the internet to abuse his wife too, with more than 70 men visiting over a decade. He told one of them: “You’re just like me, you like rape mode.”
In 2018, one of the couple’s sons recalled having a later summer supper with his parents. “Only a few minutes after sitting down Maman was swaying in her chair as though she was drunk,” he said, according to the couple’s daughter Caroline Darian in her memoir And I Stopped Calling You Daddy. “Suddenly her whole body was drained of energy, like a rag doll.” Pelicot simply told his child: “It happens. It’s better if I take her to bed.”
Gisèle, 72, started to experience gynecological problems to add to her blackouts and increasing tiredness, undergoing tests to determine if she could have a brain tumour or might be suffering from Alzheimer’s. For reasons she devastatingly was yet to discover, the grandmother only felt better when she was away from home.
When the answers finally came, they were beyond her worst nightmares. For when Pelicot was caught filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in 2020, police found more than 20,000 videos and pictures of his wife being raped by himself and others on his laptop, stored on a USB drive dubbed ‘Abuses’.
Shown evidence in the police station, Gisèle said “everything caved in, everything I built for 50 years”. Cross-checking the faces and names of the men carefully logged by Pelicot enabled police to identify 54 of the men who had abused her. But 21 remained nameless.
Photos of their daughter Caroline were found on the laptop too. Pelicot vehemently denied abusing his daughter but was charged with violating her privacy by sharing images he secretly recorded of her online, which police found in a file named “Around my daughter, naked”. In court today, Pelicot was found guilty of taking indecent images of his daughter and his daughters-in-law, Aurore and Celine. Earlier in the mass rape trial trial, Caroline shouted at Pelicot from the courtroom that he would “die alone like a dog”.
“He did not have to go far to find willing participants. Most of those who responded lived close by,” Caroline writes in her book, which comes out in English next month. “Finally, he would draw a map of how to get to the house, photograph it, and send it to those he had selected, guiding them on their final approach by text message. So as not to alert the neighbours, cars had to be parked at a nearby gym.”
With every detail considered, Pelicot demanded his fellow abusers didn’t smoke or wear perfume, so no trace was left of their presences. They had to wash their hands in warm water so their cold fingers didn’t wake his wife and mobile phones had to be left in cars, so they didn’t ring. The men who took up his sick invitation included a fireman, a municipal councillor and a nurse.
Fast forward to today, with her ex-husband and the strangers who abused her now behind bars – bar two who have yet to be caged on medical grounds – Gisèle has reverted to her maiden name. According to the BBC, she went by ‘Pelicot’ during the trial so her grandchildren could be ‘proud’ of being related to her.
In a statement given following the sentencing at the Avignon court, the brave survivor said she had “confidence in our capacity collectively to find a better future where women and men alike can live together with mutual respect”. Helped by a psychiatrist, the mum now shuns medication and turns to long walks for her mental and physical wellbeing.
According to her eldest child David, family photos have been discarded, because they “got rid of everything linked to my father there and then”.
If you are affected by the issues raised in this article, contact SARSAS on info@sarsas.org.uk or reach out for NHS advice on help after rape or sexual assault.
