Gisele Pelicot, the woman at the centre of France’s largest rape trial, was left “crushed” after her husband’s sickening abuse tore their family apart as she attempts to rebuild her life
A year on from watching 51 of her vile abusers face justice in court, Gisele Pelicot is bravely rebuilding her life – but her family has been torn apart.
In a gruelling trial that shocked the world, her ex husband Dominique Pelicot admitted to drugging and raping his wife over a decade, all while inviting 50 men to their home to abuse her whilst she was unconscious. One rapist was her neighbour; others were from her local community. Sedated for years, she had no idea of the violence she was subject to until police discovered harrowing footage of the abuse.
Now, the 73-year-old has become a powerful beacon of hope for survivors globally after speaking out and demanding accountability – bravely forgoing her own anonyminity to expose the depraved attackers who destroyed her life. Her story, told movingly in her new memoir A Hymn to Life, delves into betrayal, brutality, family fractures and the long, uncertain path toward healing.
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In 2020, Gisele – then living in Provence, France, with her husband – was horrified to learn the truth about a decade of abuse she had no conscious memory of. Police intercepted her husband for unrelated voyeurism offences and during the search of his devices they uncovered thousands of pictures and videos revealing that, over nearly a decade, he had systematically drugged Gisele and invited dozens of men to sexually assault her without her knowledge.
Gisele, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped at least 92 times by 72 different men. In 2024, Dominique – alongside more than 50 men he recruited – was convicted of rape or sexual assault in a public trial in Avignon. Dominique received a 20-year prison sentence, while the co-accused received terms ranging from a few years to around 15.
Family shattered by abuse
Though Gisele has been widely praised for facing her abusers in court, her family have been deeply strained by the revelations and the trial’s emotional toll. “The unanswered questions continued to drive a wedge between us,” she admits.
Her daughter, Caroline Darian, 47, has publicly expressed anger and distress about how the abuse and the trial unfolded, pointing to sentences she and other family members felt were too lenient and voicing anguish at how the ordeal has affected their lives.
The agony didn’t stop with the abuse of their mother either. Images of Caroline, unconscious and in lingerie she does not recognise, were found on her father’s devices. He was convicted for taking the photographs but denied abusing his daughter in court. She still has no idea if he ever assaulted her, and accused her mother of “abadoning” her after her four-month trial was complete.
“I had no idea how to respond or how to reassure her, since reassuring her now meant betraying her. I wanted the truth, the whole truth,” Gisele writes of their fractured bond. “I wasn’t trying to save appearances, nor spare the wife and mother I had been, that woman who had seen nothing, who either had not been able to protect her family or hadn’t known how to.”
Gisele admits in her book that Caroline was so traumatised from watching videos of her mother’s rape – and by the prospect that her father may have abused her too – that she once spent the night in psychiatric care. “She was terrified. I was too. Did she let out the screams that I held in, allowing herself to collapse as I did not? I could have asked these questions, without hope of finding any answers.”
The mother and daughter are now on speaking terms again and working on their relationship, but tragically, Gisele is not currently speaking with her eldest child David, 51. Explaining that he took Caroline’s side in the fall-out, Gisele said: “You have to understand that such a tragedy doesn’t necessarily bring a family together. It’s a cataclysm that sweeps everything away. Everyone needs to be able to rebuild themselves in their own way.”
Gisele decided not to share her memoir with her adult children ahead of its publication, though she has remained close to her son Florian and still sees many of her grandchildren. “They probably felt betrayed and at the same time guilty for all the laughter and fun they had shared with their father, and tainted by being the children of a man guilty of such crimes. They wanted to erase it all. And that erasure included me as well.”
Visiting her rapist ex-husband
Much to the dismay of others in her life, Gisele has announced her intention to visit her ex-husband in prison. It is not a gesture of forgiveness, but one of confrontation as she attempts to rebuild her life. She writes in her book: “I’ll have to go and see him in prison, even though so many people have warned me not to. I need to.”
Explaining the burning questions she wants to ask, she says: “When you looked at me in the morning, was there not a single moment when you felt pity for me? Did you never think, ‘I must stop’? Did you abuse our daughter? Did you commit the most abject crime of all? Do you have any idea of the hell we ’re living in? I will never forgive you for dragging our children and grandchildren into this suffering.”
“I need answers; he owes me that much. I will talk to the man I used to think I was married to. If he is still there, he will answer me. What does he have to lose, given that he is going to spend the rest of his life in prison? And if, in fact, that man vanished a long time ago, if all that remains of him is his pathological need for power and manipulation, I will sense that too. Either way, it will help me move on. This visit will not be an act of kindness nor a show of weakness, it will be a farewell and an essential stage in my recovery.”
Asked in a recent interview if she hopes Dominique might show remorse, Pelicot said: “Maybe he’ll have some remorse. I’m still holding on to that hope. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I won’t get an answer.” He received the maximum sentence of 20 years for his crimes.
New relationship
Despite the immense trauma she has endured, Gisele has also found space for discovering love again. In the four years between her ex-husband’s arrest and the trial’s end, she met Jean-Loup, a retired Air France steward, on the French Atlantic coast.
Widower Jean-Loup and Gisele met in June 2023, after she had moved to Île de Ré in Western France – but falling in love with him was something of an “accident,” she told the Daily Mail. “It happened almost by accident, because I never thought I’d fall in love again or would even want to. Neither of us expected it at all. And we thought, ‘Why not? Why not allow ourselves to be happy?'”
The pair met through mutual friends and bonded over both owning French bulldogs. Jean-Loup had also been through a tragic few years before meeting Gisele – his late wife died a few years earlier after enduring a long illness, during which time he had taken care of her. “If anyone had told me that I’d find love at this age, I’d never have believed it,” she recently told Vogue magazine. “The love of my grandchildren, yes, but the love of another man – I hadn’t even considered it.”
Of the begining of her relationship, Gisele writes in her book: “There was some-thing hesitant about it, something gloriously tentative, as there often is when you meet someone new, but there was more to it than that. I was afraid of how Jean- Loup would feel about having a new woman in his life. He was worried about what being with a new man might mean for me. We went out to dinner, to the cinema, held hands, kissed, but we didn’t take the plunge. We were too damaged. And then one day I said to him, ‘Do you know what I want? To spend the night in your arms'”.
“My body yearned for the warmth of his embrace, transported me to some other place, did not remember. All the images, all the abuse, all the numbers that were that were now public knowledge, they had no place in my bedroom.”
Jean-Loup was secretly by her side during the tumultuous trial against her “pack of rapists” – but that she kept their relationship hidden because she was afraid that it would be weaponised against her during the legal proceedings.
He also helped her make the brave decision to waive her anonyminity and face the 51 perpetrators in the courtroom. Staring down the barrel of 400 pages worth of indictment documents, Gisele said: “I was going to have to read it all in one go, the detailed descriptions of how my husband and dozens of strangers had raped me over the course of ten years. Jean- Loup printed the whole thing out for me – I didn’t want to read it on a computer screen. I wanted to be able to go through the big sheaf of pages alone, curled up inside or out in a comfortable chair.”
And he’s even helped Gisele mend her relationship with her children. “Jean-Loup was the saviour, filling the empty space at their mother’s side, the abyss into which their father had dragged us all,” she wrote.
A voice for survivors
Gisele’s decision to speak publicly and demand the trial be held in open court has sparked significant public discourse in France and beyond about sexual violence and chemical submission – the term used to describe being drugged without consent. One of her anchors has been helping other victims find their voice.
“This story is no longer just about me,” she writes. “It has roused a deep, silent pain as old as time. It has sparked an extraordinary seismic shift. How to make sense of what has happened, of what my ordeal has unleashed?
“All those women who write to tell me they have finally found the strength to speak out, to face up to their struggles, in some cases to divorce their husbands, all those thousands of letters; the man I met on a train platform who thanked me on behalf of his two young daughters; the teenage girls on the other side of the world who recognised me beneath Rio de Janeiro’s monumental statue of Christ the Redeemer and came up to me with tears in their eyes; the couple I met on the dunes not far from my house who told me they loved me. I smile and thank them, tell them I love them too, try to tamp down the overflowing admiration in their eyes. All I’ve done is pick my way along the fault line that runs through me.”
Gisele Pelicot’s memoir A Hymn to Life is set to be released on February 17.
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