Gisèle the brave

"Shame must change sides." Rather than opt for a closed trial, Gisèle Pelicot has chosen to publicly confront each of the 50 men who raped her while she was unconscious.

This is a piece I desperately wish I didn’t have to publish. I have been writing about sexual crimes against women since I began my journalism career in the early 1990s. I do not enjoy it. But now, given the immense courage that 71-year-old Gisèle Pelicot has shown, I am compelled to address the issue once again. Not to amplify her voice in every way possible would be to do her a terrible disservice.

What Gisèle lived through is unthinkable. For nearly a decade, her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, now 71, secretly drugged her at night and invited men he met in an online chat group called “Without Their Knowledge” to join him in raping her. Scores of them. Gisèle had no idea. She believed her marriage was happy and healthy and that the two of them shared a normal sex life. Both teenagers when they fell in love, Dominique was the only man Gisèle had ever slept with.

A bit more than a decade ago, Gisèle started to think something was wrong with her. Seriously wrong. Alzheimer’s, maybe. She woke up in the morning not remembering how she had gotten to bed the night before. Sometimes she forgot whole days at a time. She saw doctors, lots of them, gynecologists and neurologists, but no one could find anything wrong with her. Dominique was always at her side, ever the concerned husband, dutifully driving her to her appointments. She no longer trusted herself behind the wheel of a car.

Her life might have gone on in the same way indefinitely, but in 2020 Dominique was arrested for filming up women’s skirts in a grocery store. When the police seized and searched his electronic devices, they found hundreds of pictures of an unconscious woman being raped, over and over, by different men. Gisèle. By the time they concluded their investigation, police had uncovered more than 20,000 photos and videos that dated back to 2011, stored in a file that Dominique had labeled “abuse”. From those images, authorities put together a list of 83 suspects. They identified and charged 50 men. Their trial began last week. Dominique has already pleaded guilty to the crimes committed against his wife.

Gisèle could have asked for the courtroom to be closed, but instead she pushed for a public trial in the hopes that her testimony will help other women avoid a similar ordeal and to show that the shame is not hers, but that of her rapists. The proceedings will go on for months, but already she has had to listen to men say that they thought she was a willing participant, that she had wanted to be drugged, that it wasn’t rape because her husband had given them permission to have sex with her. The husband they had met in the chat room called “Without Their Knowledge”.

"It's important that we talk about this scourge,” Gisèle said at the courthouse. “I'm doing it on behalf of all the women who may be subjected to it. Maybe one morning, a woman who wakes up with no memory will think of my testimony."

Activists contend that involuntary drugging—called “chemical submission”—is vastly underreported. Like Gisèle, many victims are unaware that they have been intoxicated. Others are reluctant to go to the police. A 2022 #MeTooGBH social media campaign in the UK led to a 70 percent increase in crime reports. Leila Chaouachi, a French pharmacist who is part of an effort to develop training to help doctors and nurses better recognize the symptoms of someone who has been drugged and assaulted, said that fewer than 10 percent of victims go to the police. Most such incidents take place in someone’s home and are perpetrated by a person the victim knows.

I dearly hope that Gisèle’s bravery will pay off and that she will get some semblance of justice. It’s not a foregone conclusion. France has a dismal record on rape; the vast majority of rapes that are reported here—90 percent—don’t result in criminal prosecution and fewer than 15 percent end with the perpetrator being sentenced.

I hope these rape prosecutions will be the exceptions and result in every one of these men going to prison. That seeing her tormentors punished helps Gisèle find some semblance of recovery and peace. As strong she appears in the courtroom, she says she is broken. "The facade is solid, but inside, it's a field of ruins," she said at the trial.

And, most fervently, I hope for the day when I never to have to write an article like this again.