One day in May 2024, Gisèle Pelicot changed her mind. For three and a half years she had lived with unthinkable facts: her husband had drugged and raped her, sometimes two or three times a week over almost a decade, and had invited at least 72 strangers to rape her too. At the time she had no knowledge of it, and when she was told the truth, she remembered nothing. Dominique Pelicot regularly added to his wife’s food or wine a cocktail of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication that rendered her comatose: the dosages were later revealed to be life-threatening.
Like all victims of sex crimes in France, she had a right to anonymity and had proceeded on the basis that when the trial began in September it would be held in a closed court. No public, no press, no real names. But that day in May, walking along the beach near her new home on the Île de Ré in western France, she pictured the closed hearing: on one side of the court, the 50 codefendants police had managed to identify; their army of 45 lawyers; her husband and his lawyer. On the other side: her two lawyers and her, a petite woman of 71.
She understood, as she later put it, that “the victim is always blamed” and that, outnumbered as she was, she “would be nothing but their prey all over again”. She had “the physical sensation that I needed the rest of the world”. She thought too that if she did not make this a public trial, and help other women feel less alone, “I would regret it all my life.” This was not the place for anonymity and silence. She looked out at the sea and remembered a phrase she’d heard used by women who’d survived domestic violence: “Shame must change sides.” She decided she would open the doors, unmask her rapists and show her face.
Four months later Gisèle Pelicot changed history: the largest rape trial France had ever witnessed lasted three and a half months, led to a new law on consent, and – as societies everywhere asked themselves how men and women might learn to live better together – ricocheted across the world.
I ask what I should call her when we meet in Paris, one slate-grey day in mid-December. “Madame Pelicot? Madame Guillou?” We are in a location house in the centre of the city, where she has spent the morning being photographed for Vogue. Before our conversation even begins I am anxious to know whether I should address her by her maiden name, and whether she’d prefer that her husband’s name not be attached to her in conversation at all. “Gisèle suits me just fine,” she replies with a smile.
The atmosphere in the room is respectful – everyone seems moved to be in her presence – but there is a brightness to Gisèle that none of us quite expects. It is three days after her 73rd birthday. Her dark eyes sparkle and her square-cut bob, the colour of a new penny, swishes as she speaks. She has given herself, as she later tells me, “permission to be happy”. She is elegantly dressed in an olive-green suede jacket and a knitted skirt with a geometric pattern. (During the trial, the more people suggested that a woman subjected to such horrors would not care about her appearance, the more defiantly attentive she became to what she wore.) Her new partner, Jean-Loup, is with her, and they look across at each other with easy affection. She is beautiful. I say this not to comment further on her looks but to note her spirit: a palpable sense of freedom, and an almost unearthly transfer of optimism to those in her midst.
