Gisèle Pelicot has said a “stroke” and Alzheimer’s disease were considered as potential causes of memory loss until she discovered she had been repeatedly drugged by her husband over a nine-year period.
Pelicot was repeatedly raped by her husband and dozens of other men while unconscious in her own bed from 2011 until 2020 in Mazan, France, with the 73-year-old saying she “couldn’t imagine” that she had been living with a rapist for nearly five decades.
Noting that she was unable to remember “anything” during the period of the drugging, she consulted a neurologist and had a scan, though no condition was diagnosed.
“I really had no recollection, and that also was terrifying me,” she said, in an interview aired on RTÉ’s Prime Time on Tuesday night.
READ MORE
“Everybody thought maybe I was having a stroke, that I was incredibly anxious, and I had all the beginnings of Alzheimer’s.”
[ Gisèle Pelicot’s powerful memoir A Hymn to Life: ‘Love is not dead. I am not dead’ ]
Her husband invited the other men to abuse her, and had taken videos of the rapes. The footage was discovered by police in France after he was caught filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket.
She was subsequently told two months later in November 2020, what her husband and dozens of other men had done to her.
“That really did terrify me,” she said.
Pelicot said she did not recognise herself when she was shown photos of the attacks, adding: “I wasn’t able to accept the reality of what was going on.”
“The person who was next to me wasn’t Mr Pelicot, he was a man I didn’t know. The second photograph was the same,” she said, believing at the time they were “Photoshopped”.
“When I realised really what he’d done, my perception of him was totally destroyed and it not only affected me, but it also affected, of course, my children,” she said.
Her daughter, Caroline, was also photographed while asleep through a “hidden camera”, she said, saying her daughter, who is pressing charges against him, was “totally devastated and she didn’t have any answers”.
In 2024, her former husband, Dominique Pelicot, was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Fifty other men were also found guilty of raping and assaulting Gisèle Pelicot.
She waived her right to anonymity so that her then-husband and the 50 other men could be named, saying “shame must change sides”.
However, she said it “took time” to make that decision.
“I felt destroyed. Everything was devastated. I had lost everything,” she said.
Although her former husband’s actions are “unforgivable”, Pelicot denied that she feels hate or anger towards him.
“I won’t accept them because it’s a way of destroying yourself,” she said.
