Every adjective to describe Gisèle Pelicot falls short: strong, powerful, unique. Aptly, the same set of words fails to describe the atmosphere when she enters a room.
When Pelicot walked on to the stage at the sold-out event at the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre on Friday, February 20, more than 2,000 people, mostly women, got to their feet in unison. Women wiped away tears, several embraced the friends they had come with and the two women in front of me held hands.
Today’s world hosts a multitude of divisive opinions but in that room and at that moment, there was only space for one. I have very few memories that compare. It is hard, then, to envision that the world nearly did not know Gisèle Pelicot.
In 2020, when Gisèle first pressed charges against her then-husband, Dominique, and 50 other men for repeatedly drugging and raping her over the course of a decade, she had wanted a closed hearing. As she writes in her memoir, A Hymn to Life, co-authored with the journalist Judith Perrington and translated into English by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, it was so clear to her that she hadn’t even discussed it with her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau and Antoine Camus, whom she affectionately called “the boys”.
Her previous lawyer had already suggested the same thing, telling her that an open hearing would be a public trial of violence against women, yet at the time, Gisèle wanted no part in that scenario. She did not want to be the victim, splashed around in headlines as “that poor woman”. “She wasn’t me, and she wasn’t the person I wanted to be”, she writes. Then one day in May 2024, a few months before the trial was to commence, she changed her mind.
It is one of the memoir’s most moving passages. She documents how, while walking, words she’d first heard over a decade ago, a slogan supporting women who had experienced sexual violence and domestic violence, entered her mind in almost melodic fashion: shame has to change sides. It was for her 51 rapists to hang their heads in shame, not her.
When she shared her decision with her lawyers, they told her that this “changed everything”. They were, of course, referring to their preparations for facing the courtroom inside Avignon’s Palace of Justice, yet their words would soon take on another reality. The course of a global storm had been set in motion.
A Hymn to Life documents this and is a poignant account of all Gisèle has endured, told on her own terms. It does not shy away from self-reflection; it is unrelenting and both beautifully and painfully honest. Its conclusion is one of defiance; she has met a man, Jean-Loup, fallen in love and moved in with him. Love, she decides, is not dead.
The memoir begins on November 2, 2020, the day Gisèle accompanied her husband to the police station after he was caught upskirting in a supermarket in Carpentras, near the village of Marzan, where they lived. When the deputy sergeant asked about her husband’s character, she talked about his kindness and his attentiveness.
The questions became stranger; what time did she go to bed, did she take a nap in the afternoon and, finally, was she into swinging? Gisèle no longer understood what was happening.
Her bond with Dominique had been love at first sight, a Prince Charming rescuing her from her unhappy childhood after her mother passed away from a brain tumour when Gisèle was just nine years old. In fact, it is these parts of the memoir that are the most self-questioning; if her mother had not died from cancer, would she have married so young? If it weren’t for her mother’s medical history, would she have been more suspicious of her blackouts, caused by the Lorazepam that Dominique had been drugging her with, and not feared they were early signs of cancer or a neurological condition?
In the station, the deputy sergeant’s tone changed to what Gisèle describes as a hybrid of fear, mortification and protectiveness. He told her he was about to show her some photographs she wasn’t going to like.
In them, Gisèle lay limp and unconscious, while men assaulted her. They were taken in her bedroom. She was told her husband had been taken into custody for aggravated rape and administering toxic substances. “My brain shut down in deputy sergeant Perret’s office,” she writes.
Gisèle’s three children, David, Caroline, and Florian, reacted in very different ways. Her eldest, David, ended their phone call to vomit, while Florian needed to know if his mother was on her own. Then there was Caroline.
On hearing the news, she let out a cry of anguish, “one of a wounded animal”. It later came to light that her father also took explicit photos of her while she was sleeping, but he has always denied abusing his daughter. In I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, she now writes of her family’s history as a “chronicle of horror and survival.” (It has been reported that Dominique is also writing his own memoir from prison.)
Suggested Reading
Dear catcallers, we could’ve grown up without you
The trial began in September 2024, in what Gisèle describes as an autopsy of her life and marriage. Inside the courtroom, the accused men stared at Gisèle, refusing to break eye contact. All 51, including her husband, pleaded not guilty and, by the trial’s conclusion, would be found guilty of rape, attempted rape or aggravated sexual assault. None would escape a prison sentence. The men’s partners, girlfriends or wives were also asked if they’d like drug tests to check for evidence of Lorazepam. None of these women accepted the offer.
Gisèle had never planned to stay for the duration of the trial. As agreed with her family and her legal team, she would be there for the first two weeks and return for the closing statements, but something was happening. The buzz from the trial was becoming a beast. Women from all over France lined the streets of Avignon, waving banners of rally cries and thrusting out letters of support. Each evening, as an act of self-protection, she opted to read this correspondence rather than updates in the media.
As we listened to her speak on the Southbank, she laughingly admitted that, even today, she has yet to make her way through all of the ones she received. It was these women who gave her the strength to stay in Avignon.
When Gisèle was called to give evidence again on October 23, she was no longer afraid. She corrected the judge who referred to the videos of her being raped as “sex scenes” (“they’re rape scenes”) and challenged one of the defence lawyers who set out to diminish her attacks, daring to claim that “there’s rape and then there’s rape”. When, mid-trial, she gave a statement to the court, stating a desire to change the “sexist, patriarchal society” we live in, she thought of a young woman she had met outside the courtroom one afternoon who told Gisèle, crying, that she could never have been as brave as her.
In the auditorium, when we heard Gisèle recount this moment, it was met with rapturous applause. My mind wandered to a comment from the woman sitting next to me while we were waiting for the event to start. Her eyes caught a glimpse of the royal box and nudged her partner. “Not a good look to be in there today,” she said, eyes wide.
The day before, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested and charged with misconduct in public office in relation to the emails that appeared in the Epstein files. He was the first senior royal to be arrested since 1647. It was his 66th birthday. In the room with Gisèle that night, were we seeing the early signs of a pendulum swing?
It was hard not to read A Hymn to Life and think about the stories of sexual assault I know of the women I love. I thought about the friend I’ve known since childhood, who only shared what had happened to her with me in a nightclub bathroom, the influence of alcohol freeing her from keeping the most debilitating secret. I thought of the women I know who swore me to secrecy after telling me that they had been assaulted and about the women I know who still struggle to find the words to articulate it. And then I thought of Gisèle Pelicot.
Perhaps this is why most adjectives fail. She is an ordinary woman who experienced the unimaginable and with it, did the extraordinary. A woman who yearned for a conventional, quiet life and who acknowledges that while she understood feminism’s modern battles for access to contraception and abortion, they never felt like hers to fight. Instead, her revolution was building the stable, family unit she never had.
“Here I am,” she writes, “in my seventies, a martyr, the symbol of a new feminist wave that I hardly know a thing about.”
For Gisèle, the story is no longer about her but the wound too many women feel forced to conceal and leave unhealed. This is true, but it is also about Gisèle’s strength to tell it. There is very little left to say other than: Merci, Madame Pelicot, Merci.
A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, is published by Bodley Head
