Gisèle Pelicot was nine years old when her mother died of cancer. Standing over her mother’s body at home, she didn’t understand and gently shook her shoulder to try and wake her. Three years later, her father married again.
His new wife resented her stepchildren and was cruel to them when his back was turned. For Pelicot, the memory of her mother became “my strength as much as my sorrow. Nothing worse could ever happen to me, nothing could hurt me more than losing her, nothing could ever break me now.”
As we know, there was far worse to come. In November 2020, a story surfaced in Mazan, France, about a man who had drugged and assaulted his wife over the course of 10 years and who had arranged for scores of strangers to rape her while she lay unconscious. Throughout this time, his wife – who initially retained her anonymity – struggled with brain fog, blackouts and persistent gynaecological problems which were dismissed by doctors as a symptom of old age.
The cause became clear after her husband was arrested for taking pictures up women’s skirts in a local supermarket. Police called her to the station and told her about the hundreds of videos and photographs they found on his computer that showed her being raped – footage that would make investigators vomit.
When the case came to court in Avignon in 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waived her anonymity and requested an open hearing so the world could lay eyes on her attackers, of which 51 had been charged, including her now ex-husband Dominique. “Shame has to change sides,” she said. All were convicted and sent to prison.
Gisèle Pelicot leaves the courthouse in Nimes in October 2025 (Photo: Christophe Simon/AFP/ Getty Images)Now Pelicot, 73, has written a memoir with the help of the French journalist Judith Perrignon in which she recounts, in unsparing detail, the before, during and after of the case that shocked the world. As well as a powerful tapestry of Pelicot’s life, the book endeavours to answer some of the questions that would plague her, and others, following the case, the most insistent being: how could she not have known?
As well as digging into her own childhood, Pelicot tells of Dominique’s background as the son of a tyrannical father, Denys, who was abusive to his wife and children. After Denys’s wife died, he announced he was in a relationship with their 25-year-old daughter, whom the couple had fostered as a child. The court case also revealed how Dominique had been hospitalised in childhood after his brother threw a rock at his head. Overnight, he woke up choking on the penis of a predatory male nurse.
Pelicot shares these details not to make allowances for her ex-husband, whom she met when he was a shy teenage electrician, but to show how two damaged people came together both hoping to right the wrongs of their past. Until 2020, Pelicot believed they had been successful. Instead, unbeknown to her, she had become “the plaything of his barbaric fantasies.”
Pelicot’s book, at once courageous and grimly illuminating, is by no means the first to show what it is to survive the “cataclysm” that is sexual abuse. Last year, Virginia Giuffre’s posthumously published Nobody’s Girl shed chilling light on the real-life impact of the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of women and girls, and the powerful men in his orbit who participated or turned a blind eye. James Rhodes, Rose McGowan, Alan Davies, Chanel Miller and Jennette McCurdy have also written with bravery and candour about the horrors of their respective pasts.
Gisele Pelicot in Avignon in December 2024 (Photo: Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images)Nonetheless, Pelicot’s memoir exists in a strange subcategory of its own, being by a victim of industrial-scale rape who bears the scars yet has no memory of it. The book takes us meticulously through the aftermath of that trip to the police station in 2020: the disbelief, the desolation, the betrayal, the reframing of old memories tainted by Dominique’s violence and gaslighting. On arriving home from the station, Pelicot furiously cleaned the house for two hours and then called a friend who dropped everything and came over.
Pelicot also called her three adult children, blowing their worlds apart one by one. Collecting them from the train station later, she briefly thought of suicide but then dismissed it: “I would never give death a helping hand.”
The next day, the police came looking for the medication that Dominique – who was being held in custody – had secreted into his wife’s food and drink, finding blister packs of lorazepam in balled-up socks in his walking boots. They needed to find out, Pelicot notes, “what it takes to change a woman into a dead weight, her features melted into the pillow so she doesn’t even have a face anymore.”
Where Pelicot, exhausted by shock and insomnia, remained quiet and seemingly stoical in the days and weeks afterwards, her daughter Caroline – who has written her own memoir – screamed, shouted and was eventually hospitalised, spending a night in a psychiatric unit. “Did she let out the screams that I held in, allowing herself to collapse as I did not?” asks her mother.
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What began as a small fissure in the mother-daughter relationship turned into a chasm that remains to this day. One thing this book makes clear is that violence and tragedy does not bring families together; on the contrary, it pits members against each other and devastates them.
Though there is unfathomable horror recounted in Pelicot’s memoir, it feels important to note there is more to it than that. The author flinches at being called an icon even though she has no problem being a catalyst for change.
What comes through is not just her preternatural strength but her enduring optimism. Rare will be the reader who doesn’t wonder how they would hold up in such circumstances.
Those close to Pelicot, including her children, were incensed by her apparent lack of anger after she learned of Dominique’s crimes, and that she still clung to happy memories. In her children’s minds, their whole lives had been reduced to a lie. Pelicot refuses to believe that. It also irks her that there are those who presume to lecture her, from lawyers to court psychologists to press commentators, about how she should feel and act as a victim.
It is testament to her fortitude that she recently found love again, and that she still, despite everything, believes in the goodness of people. Back when Pelicot was a child standing over her mother’s body, she recalls feeling “a wave of infinite love wash over me, far stronger than death.”
That love, she says, has saved her. “The feeling persists: love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.”
A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, is published by Bodley Head, £22
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