Gisèle Pelicot removes all traces of her husband in the French public rape case

It was November 2011, and Gisèle Pelicot was fast asleep.

He spent many weekends sleeping. He was upset, because during the week he worked hard as a supply chain manager, and his free time was precious.

However, he seemed unable to stay awake, often drifting off unconscious and waking up hours later with no memory of ever having slept.

Despite this, 58-year-old Gisèle was happy. She considered herself lucky to have her husband of 38 years, Dominique, by her side. Now their three children Caroline, David and Florian were grown, the couple planned to retire soon and move to Mazan, a town of 6,000 people in the beautiful southern French region of Provence, where Mr. Pelicot could ride bicycles and pick up Lancôme. , their French bulldog, on long walks.

He had loved Dominique since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw that young man in the blue jumper it was love at first sight,” Gisèle thought, much later. They both had complicated family histories marked by loss and trauma, and found peace in each other. Their four decades together had their ups and downs – frequent financial problems and his affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they were successful.

Years later, when asked by a lawyer to summarize their relationship, he said: “Our friends used to say we were the perfect couple. And I thought we would see our days together.”

At that moment, Gisèle and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of the court in Avignon, not far from Mazan: surrounded by their children and his lawyers, and he, dressed in gray prison clothes, in a glass case for the defendants. .

He was He is charged with aggravated rape and he was quickly recognized in France and beyond as – in his daughter’s own words – “one of the worst molesters of the last 20 years”.

But in 2011, when Gisèle heard that she was sleeping a lot, she could not have guessed how that would happen.

She did not know that, in her late 50s and about to retire, her husband Dominique Pelicot spent a lot of time on the Internet, often talking to users in open forums and chat rooms where sexual material – often extreme or illegal – was freely available. .

In court, he would later point to that section as the trigger for his “distortion” after the childhood trauma of rape and abuse: “We are perverted when we find something that gives us the means: the Internet.”

Sometime between 2010 and 2011, a man claiming to be a nurse sent Mr Pelicot pictures of his wife, taking sleeping pills until she passed out. He also shared precise instructions with Mr. Pelicot to do the same for Gisèle.

At first he hesitated – but not for long.

Through trial and error he realized that with the right amount of pills he could put his wife into such a deep sleep that nothing would wake her up. They had been legally prescribed by his doctor, who thought Mr Pelicot was suffering from anxiety due to financial problems.

He will then be able to dress her in underwear that she refuses to wear, or engage her in sexual activities that she would never accept sober. He could record scenes, he wouldn’t allow it when he was awake.

At first, he was the only one raping her. But by the time the couple settled in Mazan in 2014, he had finished and expanded his operations.

He kept tranquilizers in a shoebox in the garage, and switched brands because the first one tasted “too salty” to sneak into his wife’s food and drink, he later said.

In an interview called “without his knowledge” he hired men of all ages to come and abuse his wife.

He would record them again.

He told the court that his wife was unconscious 71 men came to their house within a decade. “You’re like me, you like to rap,” he told one of them in an interview.

Over the years, the effects of Mrs. Pelicot’s nocturnal abuse seeped more and more into her waking life. She lost weight, her hair fell out and her seizures increased. He was full of anxiety, convinced that he was about to die.

His family was worried. He seemed healthy and active when he visited them.

“We called her but most of the time it was Dominique who answered. She told us that Gisèle was sleeping, even during the day,” said her son-in-law Pierre. “But it seems possible because he did a lot [when she was with us]especially running after the grandchildren.”

At times, Gisèle was almost suspicious. Once she noticed the green color of the beer her husband had given her, she hurriedly poured it into the sink. Once, he saw a bleach stain he couldn’t remember making on a new pair of pants. “You don’t take drugs any chance, do you?” he remembered asking her. He burst into tears: “How can you blame me for such a thing?”

Mostly, though, he felt lucky to have her as he dealt with his health issues. She developed gynecological problems, and underwent several neurological tests to see if she was suffering from Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor, as she feared, but the results did not explain the increased fatigue and blackouts.

Several years later, during the trial, Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor, was asked how it was that medical professionals never put together a clue and understood that Gisèle was the victim of a little-known chemical delivery – drug-induced rape. . “In the field of medicine we only get what we want, we look at what we know,” he replied.

Gisèle only felt better when she was away from Mazan – a strange thing she had never seen.

It was when he returned from one of these trips, in September 2020, that Dominique told him, with tears in his eyes: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothes in a supermarket,” he recalled during the trial.

He was very surprised, he said, because “in 50 years he had never behaved inappropriately or used abusive words towards women”.

He said he forgave her but asked her to promise that she would seek help.

He agreed, “we also left it like that”, he said.

But Dominique must have known that the end was near.

He was recently arrested in the store, the police confiscated his two phones and his laptop, where they will find more than 20,000 videos and photos of his wife being raped by him and others.

“I watched those videos for hours. It was disturbing. Yes, they had an impact on me,” said Jérémie Bosse Platière, the director of the investigation, told the court.

“In my 33 years working in the police, I had never seen anything like that,” said colleague Stéphane Gal. “It was dirty, it was shocking.”

His team was tasked with tracking down the men in the videos. They examined the faces and names of the men carefully entered by Dominique alongside facial recognition technology.

They were able to identify 54 of them, while the other 21 remained unknown.

Some men who have not yet been identified said that in the interviews they had with Dominique, they were feeding themselves with drugs that they had sex with. “That, for me, is the most painful part of the case,” said Mr Bosse Platière. “Knowing that there are women who may be victims of their husbands.”

On November 2, 2020, Dominique and Gisèle had breakfast together before going to the police station, where Mr. Pelicot was called about the incident. He was asked by the policeman to follow him to another room. She confirmed that Dominque was her husband – “a good guy, a good man” – but denied that he had ever participated in skating with her, or participating in triathlons.

“I’m going to show you something you’re not going to like,” the police officer warned him, before showing him a photo of the sexual act.

At first he didn’t know either of these two people.

When he did, “I told him to stop … Everything fell apart, everything I built for 50 years”.

He was sent home in a panic accompanied by his friend. He had to tell his children what had happened.

Remembering that time, Gisèle said “her daughter’s cry always echoes in my mind”. Caroline, David and Florian went down to Mazan and cleared the house. Later, images of Caroline, who appeared to be on drugs, were also found on Dominique’s laptop, although she denied abusing her.

David, who is the oldest child, said that they no longer have family photos because they “deleted everything connected to my father right away”. In a few days, Gisèle’s life became a suitcase and her dog.

Meanwhile, Dominique confessed to his crimes and was formally arrested. He thanked the police for “presenting a burden”.

He and Gisèle would not see each other again until they sat face to face in the Avignon court in September 2024.

At that time, the story of a husband who drugged his wife for ten years and invited strangers to rape him had started to gain traction around the world. Gisèle’s unusual and surprising decision to withdraw her anonymity and open a case to the public and the media.

“I want any woman who wakes up in the morning with no memory of the night before to remember what I said,” she said. “So that no more women will be victims of chemical importation. I was sacrificed on the altar of evil, and we need to talk about it.”

Her legal team also forced the footage to be shown to the court, arguing it would “correct the theory of accidental rape” – challenging the defense that the men had no intention of raping Gisèle as she did not know. he was unconscious.

“He wanted shame to change sides and it happened,” said a woman who came to watch the case in Avignon in November. “Gisèle turned everything on its head. We didn’t expect a woman like this.”

Medical examiner Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve said that after her husband’s arrest, Gisèle was visibly traumatized but calm and distant – a coping mechanism often used by survivors of terrorist attacks.

Gisèle herself has said that she is “a wasteland” and fears that the rest of her life may not be enough to rebuild herself.

Ms Sainte-Beuve said she found Gisèle to be “very strong”: “She turned around what could have weakened her.”

Days before the trial began, the Pelicots’ divorce was finalized.

Gisèle has reverted to her maiden name. She went by the name Pelicot in the lawsuit so that her grandchildren would be “proud” to be related to her and not be ashamed of having Dominique.

He has moved to a village far away from Mazan. He is seeing a psychiatrist but he is not taking any medicine, because he doesn’t want to swallow anything anymore. He continues to walk a long distance, but he is not tired anymore.

In the early days of the trial, Caroline’s husband Pierre took the initiative.

The defense attorney asked her about the Mazan years, when Gisèle had memory problems and her husband accompanied her to the doctor’s appointments which were fruitless. How could this family not see what was happening?

Pierre shook his head.

“You forget one thing,” he said. “You can’t imagine the unthinkable.”