Over a period of nine horrifying years, Gisèle Pelicot was routinely raped by her husband Dominique Pelicot and his sordid gang of accomplices. Devastatingly, her decade of torment could have been ended far sooner, had it not been for a police error.
From July, 2011, to October, 2020, perverted Pelicot recruited more than 50 rapists to assault his unsuspecting wife in their bedroom, with police uncovering evidence of around 200 rapes. Grandmother Gisèle had been unconscious at the time of the depraved attacks, having been drugged by her husband of 50 years.
Although the 72-year-old had begun experiencing unusual symptoms, including blackouts, she feared she was unwell. Never could she have suspected what her former teenage sweetheart, and father of her children, was really up to.
Now Pelicot has been jailed for 20 years after being found guilty of repeatedly drugging and raping Gisèle at their family home in the picturesque Medieval town of Mazan, in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France. A collective total of 400 years worth of jail time was handed out to 50 other defendants – some of whom had been known to Gisèle.
Throughout her trial, Gisèle, who waived her right to anonymity, was widely praised for her bravery in speaking out about her harrowing ordeal. And sadly, she might have been spared some of her agony had police taken action after a disturbing incident in 2010.
It was that year that Pelicot, 72, was first arrested for up-skirting in a Paris shopping centre, using a miniature camera hidden inside a pen. Officers who arrested Pelicot handed him a €100 (£83) fine for “capturing indecent images”, but failed to run the predator’s DNA sample through their national database.
Had they done so, they would have found a match connected to a man who, in 1999, lured a young estate agent to a Parisian apartment before knocking her out with chloroform. At the time, Pelicot was still in his 30s, and working in the field of property sales.
In 2011, one year after his arrest, Pelicot began coordinating his abuse by finding fellow rapists on an illegal and now-closed chat site which was not on the dark web. In the 10 years that followed, Pelicot spoke with dozens of men online, asking them to violate his unconscious wife by posting: “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my sleeping wife.” Several of the men returned to abuse Gisele, without her knowledge, on repeated occasions.
Finally, the devastating campaign of abuse came to light on Saturday, September 12, 2020, after a quick-thinking security guard spotted Pelicot taking up-skirting pictures of women in the LeClerc shopping centre, a short drive away from the Pelicot family home.
The security staffer, referred to only as M. Rey in court documents seen by the Mirror, refused to let the pensioner get away with it. M. Rey told the Mail Online: “We worked out that the phone was jutting out of this bag, and he was filming up their skirts. We saw him do this to three women, and he was obviously pretty good at it. It didn’t look like the first time he had done it.
“I went and found the first victim, but she didn’t want to make a complaint. She just said she hadn’t got time. But when my colleague in the surveillance room told me he was still at it, with a different woman, I decided to confront him directly – this time using the strong-arm method, to impress on the victim just how serious the offence was.”
CCTV footage shows the security guard confronting the rapist, grabbing his phone and holding his arm, all while encouraging one of his victims to wait for the arrival of officers. Pelicot, who is seen wearing red shorts and a grey T-shirt, is then told not to move and that police were on their way, the Daily Express reports. After being branded “disgusting”, Pelicot was then informed that women would be asked to give testimony against him, and ordered not to move nor to delete any of the footage he’d taken.
Remembering how he encouraged the victim to stay put, the employee, who will reportedly be awarded France’s highest commendation, the Legion d’Honneuer for his efforts, recalled: “I told her: ‘If you don’t press charges, he will just go home and do this again’. I was thinking of my mother and sister who shop here, so it got a bit personal. Pelicot didn’t resist. He froze with terror. I saw the fear in his eyes.”
The arrest led to a search of Pelicot’s family home, and it was here that the true depths of his depravity came to light. More than 20,000 videos and pictures of Gisèle being abused by Pelicot and others were found on his laptop, stored on a USB drive under files with names that included ‘abuses’, ‘her rapists’, and ‘night alone’. Another file named “around my daughter, naked”, contained indecent photographs of their daughter Caroline Darian.
In November 2020, Gisèle realised who her husband truly was when a lieutenant slid a photograph across the table and asked her: “Is this your room?” The photograph showed Gisele, in her own bedroom, with a man she did not know. Then a second photograph was produced. She remembered: “I’m being raped. The trauma is enormous, I want to go home.”
In May 2024, as the shocking trial approached, Gisèle’s lawyer convinced her to watch the videos Pelicot had recorded, archived and captioned. Addressing a packed courtroom in Avignon back in September, Gisèle said: “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice. It’s a dead woman on a bed. This isn’t a bedroom, it’s an operating theatre. They treat me like a garbage bag, a rag doll. These aren’t sex scenes, these are rape scenes, it’s unbearable, unbearable.”
Pelicot is now being investigated for the 1991 murder of an estate agent in Paris as well as a 1999 attempted rape, the Guardian reports. Police in the suburb of Nanterre, close to the French capital, have reportedly reopened two cold cases, placing the sex offender under formal investigation.
If you’ve been the victim of sexual assault, you can access help and resources via www.rapecrisis.org.uk or calling the national telephone helpline on 0808 802 9999
Do you have a story to share? Email me at julia.banim@reachplc.com
