Just over a year after her former husband and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her while she was in a drugged state, Gisèle Pelicot says she is happy and at peace.
She is in good health, with no flashbacks from the years of abuse. A recent operation cleared her of cervical cancer from one of the four sexually transmitted diseases that the rapists passed to her. In February, she paid off the last of the debts racked up by her former husband. And she has fallen in love with a man who shares her life and home, and sits in the next room waiting for the interview to end.
She smiles at me and squeezes my knees as I get teary.
Her message to rape victims: “You must not give up on being happy.”
After months of keeping hermetically silent, refusing hundreds of interview requests and retreating to a small island on France’s west coast to heal, Ms. Pelicot is now speaking out in a spectacular way.
Her memoir, “A Hymn to Life,” was released this past week in 22 languages, with an English audiobook read by the actress Emma Thompson. And she has started a whirlwind two-month book tour to give talks and interviews about how she survived her ordeal and chose happiness as her revenge. On Friday, she was in London for an event with the actresses Kristin Scott Thomas and Kate Winslet, who were recruited to read aloud excerpts from the book to an audience of thousands.
At the tour’s end in April, Ms. Pelicot, a former logistics executive, will stand alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to receive a major award recognizing her bravery in speaking out.
For the first time in years, she is looking to the horizon and not through the rearview mirror. She wants to heal her relationships with her three children, two of whom broke contact after the traumatizing trial. On Thursday, she had lunch with her eldest grandson, Nathan, whom she said she had not spoken with since the trial. And she now hopes for a shared future with Jean-Loup, her new partner and a retired steward for Air France.
While she once felt uncomfortable with her status as a feminist icon, she has now accepted the mantle to honor the thousands of women who wrote her heartfelt letters, lined up outside the courthouse to cheer her and still stop her regularly in the street to thank her.
“Those women truly gave me such incredible strength,” she said.
Ms. Pelicot has survived a horror that is hard to imagine. Her beloved partner of 50 years mixed sleeping and anti-anxiety medication in her food and drink for almost a decade. Then, when she was in a near-comatose state, he raped her and invited dozens of men he met online to rape her, too. He documented it all, in thousands of videos and photographs that he stored in a digital folder called “abuse.”
Dominique Pelicot’s crimes were only discovered because he was caught in a grocery store taking pictures up women’s skirts and arrested. After investigating his computer and phones, the police called Ms. Pelicot and asked her to come to the station.
The next time she saw her husband in person was at the trial, almost four years later.
For years, Ms. Pelicot had intended to stay anonymous through the ensuing trial and keep private her personal hell. But the thought of being captive inside a room with all of those men, being “hostage to their gaze, their lies, their cowardice and their contempt,” as she wrote, felt oppressive. She would be offering them the gift of anonymity, she realized.
After a walk to the beach, a slogan she heard from a feminist lawyer decades ago flashed in her mind: “Shame has to change sides.” It would become a mantra throughout the trial, pasted on walls and protest signs throughout the country.
She decided to open the courtroom doors to the public.
During the trial, Ms. Pelicot revealed little of herself. I joined the hordes of journalists in line each day outside the courtroom and watched in awe as she remained calm, poised and delivered sharp testimony in measured tones. Her comments were laced with acute feminist analysis, though she said she had never taken interest in feminist causes.
Her calm and composure made her an enigma to the investigating judge and police officers, her therapists and even her own children.
Now, in the book she worked on with the French journalist and writer Judith Perrignon over 10 months, she has taken off the emotional “body armor” she explains that she learned to don when she was 9 after her mother got ill and died.
She discloses intimate details of her childhood and motherhood, when her youngest son slept on a mattress he had dragged next to her bedside. She revealed that she finished school at 14, but got a job at the French national electrical company and rose through its ranks over decades. But mostly, she recounts her love story with Mr. Pelicot, her now former husband whom she met at 19. She describes their laughter, their brief separation, their financial troubles, their active sex life and even how she experienced her first orgasm in her 30s, while having a brief affair with a man at work.
“I left that in,” said Ms. Pelicot, now 73, because she wanted women reading the book to “know who I really was.”
After Mr. Pelicot’s arrest, her children arrived to disassemble her home like a crime scene. Her daughter, Caroline, ripped up all of the family pictures. Ms. Pelicot’s life was reduced to two bags and her bulldog, Lancôme.
After months staying with her children, she moved to Île de Ré, where she went for long walks with Lancôme, ransacking her memory for signs she missed, wondering how “I might have prevented it all, I might have saved us,” she wrote.
She consumed the classic victim’s cocktail of shame and guilt. In the end, she said, she found no explanation for what happened, except what she learned from psychiatrists who said during the trial that her former husband had a split psyche.
There was his Face A that he showed his family and friends — an attentive spouse and father who often was the family cook and grandchildren’s babysitter. And then there was his Face B — the perverse, manipulative man who drugged and raped his wife and hid cameras in the bathroom to take photographs of his daughter and daughters-in-law.
“For the nearly 50 years that I lived with Mr. Pelicot,” she said, “I didn’t see this Face B.”
To their children, the heinous revelations found in Mr. Pelicot’s “abuse” folder were proof that their happy childhood memories were unbearable lies. But Ms. Pelicot refuses to let his crimes poison the memories of her former husband’s Face A. It was her survival strategy.
“I needed to believe that the 50 years spent with Mr. Pelicot hadn’t been just one big lie, in order to keep on living,” she explained. “Otherwise, I would be dead. I would no longer exist.”
Those mental guardrails extend toward the questions that haunt her children.
Caroline, their daughter, remains tormented by the thought that her father drugged and raped her, too. Police investigators recovered two intimate photographs of her asleep in bed among his erased digital files.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot offered inconsistent testimony. He initially denied taking the images, but he later said he had been forced to by a blackmailer. He repeatedly denied sexually abusing his children or grandchildren.
In the end, Mr. Pelicot was convicted on charges of having taken the intimate photographs without Caroline’s permission, not rape, because there was not enough evidence, the prosecutor explained.
Ms. Pelicot took hope from that. “Without evidence, without a confession, I could not bring myself to say that the irreparable had taken place,” she wrote. “Above all for her sake.”
Her daughter saw it as both an abandonment and denial. The two stopped talking after the trial, though they have recently rekindled their communication, Ms. Pelicot said. She has not spoken to her son David in more than a year. David declined an interview, and Caroline did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Pelicot said she hoped the book would help heal her family, by revealing parts of her life her children and grandchildren never heard, and help them understand why she reacted to the horror the way she had. Her lunch with her grandson this past week — “a beautiful moment,” she said by phone on Friday — was hopefully “the beginning of a long journey” of reconciliation, she said.
“Don’t believe that tragedy brings a family together,” Ms. Pelicot said. “It’s a blast that swept everything away. And today, everyone is trying to rebuild themselves as best they can, above all. Not as they want to, but as they can.”
Maybe they need to get some family therapy, she said. They have not done that yet.
She knows many will be surprised that she found love again. In 2023, she met Jean-Loup, a widower with two adult children, through new friends. He attended most days of the trial, though he walked in separately from her to avoid attention and sat apart from her team.
While the trial horrified the public by exposing a staggering number of seemingly ordinary men who felt entitled to rape a near-comatose woman, fueling a widespread distrust of masculinity, Ms. Pelicot said it did not have that effect on her. She described falling in love again as her strength and her revenge.
“You can’t live your life being paranoid,” she said. “I think you have to trust.”
She added, “That, too, is a message of hope: to tell yourself that at 73 years old, you can still live a love story.”
Her story, perhaps, offers victims a different path for survival. Her message, she says, is not that they can forget everything, but “you can choose what to do with it all.” The title of her book, in French, is “The Joy of Life.”
But she is still looking for answers. Ms. Pelicot said she hoped to visit her former husband in prison at some point over the next year, though she has yet to reach out to him.
“It is part of my journey of reconstruction,” she said. “I also need to hear from him, face to face: Why did you do all of this to us?”
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
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