Gisele Pelicot, the French woman who survived years of rapes arranged by her husband Dominique Pelicot in their home in southern France, has published a memoir co-written with journalist Judith Perrignon. The book was released on February 17 in 22 languages. Pelicot said she wanted it to speak to people who have endured severe ordeals and to remind them that shame belongs not to victims.
As retold by The New Yorker, with reference also to interviews with The New York Times and BBC Newsnight, in October 2020 police informed Gisele that her husband had been detained for filming under women’s skirts in a supermarket. Weeks later, during a separate interview, officers told her that he had been drugging her and then bringing other men into the house to rape her. Police showed her photographs and videos in which she was lying unconscious in her own bedroom.
“It was impossible to imagine that the man I had lived with all my life could commit such horrors,” Pelicot said in an interview with BBC Newsnight.
Investigators said Dominique had kept a list of more than 50 men who raped her over about ten years, and that the number of assaults was at least 200, according to a police officer. Gisele then filed a complaint. When she returned home, she found her children in shock: they were throwing away their father’s belongings and destroying family photographs, while she asked them not to erase the decades she had lived through.
The deepest rift came with her daughter Caroline, who also considers herself a victim of her father. Police showed her images of herself asleep and naked, which she took as proof that she too had been abused. Gisele long doubted that this had happened, though she later told the court that she ruled nothing out. The issue became one of the most painful moments of the trial and further damaged the family relationship.
On September 2, 2024, the public trial began. Dominique Pelicot admitted the charges, while most of the other defendants denied guilt. In December 2025, the court sentenced Dominique to 20 years in prison, and more than 50 accomplices received prison terms ranging from three to 15 years. Pelicot said she did not regret choosing an open trial because she wanted to give strength to other victims.
“Suffering does not necessarily unite a family. It is like an explosion that sweeps everything away,” she told The New York Times.
After the verdict, Caroline and her brother David stopped speaking with their mother; only her son Florian remained by her side. Still, by the time the book was published, The New Yorker reported that Gisele and Caroline had begun speaking again by phone and were trying to rebuild their relationship, though the future remains uncertain.