Gisèle Pelicot removes all traces of husband in a mass rape case in France

It was November 2011 and Gisèle Pelicot overslept.

She spent most of her weekends in hibernation. She was annoyed because during the week she worked hard as a supply chain manager and her time off was precious.

Still, she couldn’t seem to stay awake, often drifting off without realizing it and waking up hours later with no memory of going to sleep.

Despite this, Gisèle, 58, was happy. She counted 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 soon planned to retire and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in France’s idyllic southern region of Provence, where Mr. Pelicot could go on bike rides and she could take Lancôme, their French bulldog, on long walks.

She had loved Dominique since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw the young man in a blue shirt, it was love at first sight,” thought Gisèle much later. They both had complicated family histories marked by loss and trauma and had found peace with each other. Their four decades together had hit hard—frequent financial problems and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s—but they had pulled through.

Years later, when asked by a lawyer to sum up their relationship, she said, “Our friends used to say we were the perfect couple. And I thought we’d see our days through together.”

At that time, Gisèle and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom in Avignon, not far from Mazan: she was surrounded by their children and her lawyers, and he, dressed in gray, prison clothes, in the defendant’s glass case.

He was risk the maximum prison sentence for aggravated rape and quickly became known in France and beyond as – in the words of his own daughter – “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”.

But in 2011, when Gisèle felt like she was sleeping too much, she couldn’t have guessed that this is how things would turn out.

She had no idea that her husband Dominique Pelicot, in his late 50s and nearing retirement, had spent a lot of time on the Internet, often talking to users on open forums and chat rooms where sexual material – often extreme or illegal – was freely available. .

In court, he would later identify that phase as the trigger for his “perversion” after a childhood trauma of rape and abuse: “We become 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 his wife, sedated with sleeping pills into unconsciousness. He also shared precise instructions with Mr. Pelicot so he could do the same to Gisèle.

At first he hesitated – but not for long.

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

He would then be able to dress her in lingerie she refused to wear or subject her to sexual acts she would never have consented to while conscious. He could film the scenes, which she would not have allowed while she was awake.

At first he was the only one who raped her. But by the time the couple settled in Mazan in 2014, he had perfected and expanded his business.

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

In a chat room called “without her knowledge”, he recruited men of all ages to come and abuse his wife.

He wanted to film them too.

He told the court that his wife’s unconscious state was clear to him 71 men who came to their house over the course of a decade. “You’re like me, you like rape,” he told one of them in the chat.

As the years went by, the effects of the nighttime abuse Mrs. Pelicot suffered increasingly began to seep into her waking life. She lost weight, clumps of hair fell out, and her blackouts became more frequent. She was marked by anxiety, certain that she was approaching death.

Her family became worried. She had seemed healthy and active when she had visited them.

“We called her, but most of the time it was Dominique who called. He told us that Gisèle was sleeping, even in the middle of the day,” said her son-in-law Pierre. “But it seemed likely because she was doing so much [when she was with us]especially running after the grandchildren.”

Sometimes Gisèle was close to suspecting. Once she had noticed the green color of a beer her husband had given her and hastily poured it down the sink. Another time she noticed a bleach stain she couldn’t remember doing on a new pair of pants. “You’re not accidentally drugging me, are you?” she remembered asking him. He burst into tears, “How can you accuse me of such a thing?”

Mostly, though, she felt lucky to have him with her as she navigated her health issues. She developed gynecological problems and underwent several neurological tests to determine whether she was suffering from Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor, as she feared, but the results did not explain the increasing fatigue and blackouts.

Several years later, during the trial, Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor, was asked how it was possible that doctors had never put the clues together and understood that Gisèle was a victim of the little-known phenomenon of chemical submission – drug-facilitated rape. “In medicine we find only what we look for, and we look for what we know,” he replied.

Gisèle only felt better when she was away from Mazan – an oddity she barely noticed.

It was when she returned from one of these trips, in September 2020, that Dominique told her, in streams of tears: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothing in a supermarket,” she recalled during the trial.

She was very surprised, she said, because “in 50 years he had never behaved inappropriately or used obscene words against women”.

She said she forgave him but asked him to promise her he would seek help.

He agreed, “and we left it at that,” she said.

But Dominique must have known the end was near.

Shortly after he was arrested at the supermarket, police confiscated his two phones and his laptop, where they would inevitably 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 worrying. Of course it had an impact on me,” Jérémie Bosse Platière, the head of the investigation, told the court.

“In 33 years in the police, I had never really seen anything like this,” said his colleague Stéphane Gal. “It was miserable, it was shocking.”

His team was tasked with tracking down the men in the videos. The cross-checked faces and names of the men, which were carefully logged by Dominique along with facial recognition technology.

They were eventually able to identify 54 of them, while another 21 remained nameless.

Some of the unidentified men said in conversations with Dominique that they also drugged their partners. “That to me is the most painful part of the matter,” said Mr. Bosse Platière. “Knowing that there are some women out there who may still be victimized by their husbands.”

On 2 November 2020, Dominique and Gisèle had breakfast together before going to a police station where Mr. Pelicot had been summoned in connection with the incident next door. She was asked by a policeman to follow him into another room. She confirmed that Dominque was her husband – “a great guy, a good man” – but denied ever taking part in swinging with him or engaging in threesomes.

“I’m going to show you something you won’t like,” the police chief warned her before showing her a picture of a sexual act.

At first, she didn’t recognize either of the two people.

When she did, “I told him to stop… Everything came crashing down, everything I built for 50 years”.

She was sent home in a state of shock, accompanied by a friend. She had to tell her children what had happened.

Recalling that moment, Gisèle said her “daughter’s scream is forever etched in my mind”. Caroline, David and Florian came down to Mazan and cleaned out the house. Later, images of an apparently drugged Caroline were also found on Dominique’s laptop, although he has denied abusing her.

David, the eldest child, said they no longer had any family photos because they “got rid of everything associated with my dad then and there”. Within days, Gisèle’s life was reduced to a suitcase and her dog.

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

He and Gisèle would not meet again until they faced each other in the Avignon courtroom in September 2024.

By then, the story of the man who drugged his wife for a decade and invited strangers to rape her had begun to make waves around the world, aided by Gisèle’s unusual and remarkable decision to renounce her anonymity and open the trial to the public and the media.

“I want every woman who wakes up one morning with no memories of the night before to remember what I said,” she said. “So that no more women can be victims of chemical subjugation. I was sacrificed on the altar of vice and we need to talk about it.”

Her legal team also pushed for the videos to be shown in court, arguing they would “rebut the theory of accidental rape” – pushing back against the defense line that the men had no intention of raping Gisèle as they were not aware she was unconscious.

“She would be ashamed to change sides, and she has,” said one woman who came to see the trial in Avignon in November. “Gisèle turned everything upside down. We didn’t expect such a woman.”

Coroner Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve said that in the wake of her husband’s arrest, Gisèle was clearly 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 that she fears that the rest of her life may not be enough to rebuild herself.

Ms Sainte-Beuve said she had found Gisèle “exceptionally resilient”: “She turned what could have destroyed her into strength.”

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

Gisèle has gone back to her maiden name. She went by the name Pelicot for the trial so that her grandchildren could be “proud” to be related to her and not ashamed to be associated with Dominique.

She has since moved to a village far from Mazan. She goes to a psychiatrist, but takes no medication because she no longer wants to take any drugs. She continues to go for long walks, but is no longer tired.

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

A defense lawyer asked him about the Mazan years, when Gisèle suffered from amnesia and her husband dutifully accompanied her to fruitless doctor’s appointments. How could the family not have realized what was happening?

Pierre shook his head.

“You’re forgetting one thing,” he said. “You cannot imagine the unthinkable.”