She recalls the moment she decided to waive her legal right to anonymity, and how she has never regretted that decision. She also reveals she still has unanswered questions she wants to ask her now ex-husband – the man she refers to as “Mr Pelicot” – in jail, where he is serving a 20-year term.
Warning: This article contains accounts of rape and sexual abuse
The Hôtel de Ville in central Paris, with its ceiling frescoes and rich wood panelling, is a far cry from the drab courtrooms in which Ms Pelicot was last seen publicly, during the four-month trial that shook France.
She describes the moment that marked the beginning of what she calls her “descent into hell”.
She had accompanied her husband, Dominique Pelicot, to a police station near their home in Mazan, southern France. He had been summoned for secretly filming underneath women’s skirts in a supermarket.
Ms Pelicot was taken aside by a policeman, who started asking her a series of increasingly probing questions. What kind of man was her husband? A great guy, she answered. Had they had ever engaged in swinging? No, of course not, she protested.
“He told me: ‘I am about to show you something you won’t like.’ I didn’t understand right away.”
The officer showed her two photos of a lifeless woman lying on a bed. They were among thousands of pictures and videos her husband had taken of her while she was drugged.
“I didn’t recognise myself,” she says. “This woman was lying on the bed as if she were dead. There are men next to her. I didn’t understand who they were. I didn’t know them. I’d never met them.”
