Online Reporter
LONDON. — Gisèle Pelicot, the woman at the centre of France’s largest rape trial, has told BBC Newsnight she was “crushed by horror” on discovering that, for years, her husband had repeatedly drugged her unconscious and invited dozens of men to rape her.
Over 50 men were convicted for the mass rape.
Her husband is serving more than 20 years in jail.
“Something exploded inside me,” says Ms Pelicot, 73, of the moment she realised the scale of her husband’s crimes.
“It was like a tsunami.”
In an extensive interview ahead of the publication of her memoir, ‘A Hymn To Life’, she describes how phoning her three children with the news of what she had discovered about their father was possibly the toughest experience of her life.
‘Descent into hell’
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.
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.”
She pauses, fiddling with her red-framed reading glasses. As she recounts the shock that engulfed her, her voice grows quieter but never falters.
Police told Ms Pelicot that she had been repeatedly raped by dozens of men. Although her husband had recorded, labelled and neatly catalogued the videos of the rapes on a hard disk, many of the men could not be identified.
She was advised by the police not to be alone after receiving this news. She went home in a daze and phoned a friend. “I told her: ‘Dominique is in custody because he raped me and had me raped.’ That’s when I used the word rape. It was after five hours of questioning that I put words to Mr Pelicot’s crime.”
Her three grown-up children – David, Caroline and Florian – also had to be told what their father had done.
“I was well aware that for my children it was going to be immensely difficult,” says Ms Pelicot. She now believes making those three phone calls was the hardest thing she has ever had to do.
She remembers Caroline’s reaction: “I heard my daughter scream. It was almost inhuman, that scream.”
She remembers David, her eldest, being in a state of shock, and Florian, the youngest, immediately asking how she was.
“They realised I was alone, and that I might do something stupid. For them, too, it was like an explosion.”
Her children travelled to be with her in Mazan the following day. All three have since recalled destroying or throwing out the family’s belongings — from furniture to photo albums – in an attempt to cancel their father’s existence.
Their mother stood by and watched.
“I told myself that my life was in ruins, that I had nothing left apart from my children.”
Since David’s birth, when Ms Pelicot was in her early 20s, her children had been the centre of her life. Motherhood became a way to leave behind a childhood steeped in sadness.
“I lost my mother at a very young age, my brother and my father too,” she recalls. “So I needed to rebuild everything I had lost.”
In the interview, Ms Pelicot talks of her beloved parents, whose marriage profoundly shaped her own understanding of love.
She was nine when her mother died of cancer, plunging her father and the family into grief they never truly recovered from. Meeting Dominique Pelicot – 19 years old, handsome and just as bruised by a tough upbringing – had provided her with a chance to start anew. They married in 1973.
“We were very in love, and we threw ourselves into life. And we started a family, because that was the main goal for me,” she recalls in a steady voice.
Inconceivable betrayal
By 2011, Ms Pelicot had started suffering from memory loss. She attributed this to neurological problems, but she was also suffering from persistent gynaecological issues.
These were later proven to have been caused by the sedatives she was plied with, and the strangers who came to rape her multiple times a week.
She consulted a number of doctors.
Her husband was by her side throughout the inconclusive examinations. He was also there every morning after the night-time assaults.
“It was inconceivable that this man who shared my life could have committed these horrors,” says Ms Pelicot.
“I would get up and have breakfast, and he would look at me in the eye. And I don’t know how he could have betrayed me for so many years.”
She would later learn that, alongside the drugs, her husband had given her powerful muscle relaxants, so that the next day she would not feel any pain for what her body had been put through.
She now believes her abused body was close to giving up, and that her survival was at risk.
“It is hard for me to recognise that he had no mercy,” she says.
The revelations have taken their toll on the whole family, says Ms Pelicot.
“It’s wrong to think that such a tragedy brings a family together. It took us a long time to rebuild ourselves.”
Her daughter Caroline, in particular, has been condemned to a “perpetual torment”, she says, as photos of her asleep in her underwear were found on her father’s laptop. – BBC
