The challenge for anyone reading about the mass rape and meticulous degradation of Gisèle Pelicot as told in her extraordinary new memoir, is to separate it from all the other stories about the degradation of women. Otherwise, one might drown. This time it’s not the billionaires or world leaders repeatedly using the word “pussy” to connect to a sex offender indicted for federal sex trafficking of children. It’s not the weaponised mass rape and sexual torture of women and children in Sudan or Bucha. This time the victim is a modest, reserved French woman in her 60s, a loving wife, mother and grandmother, happily retired to the neighbourly civility of Mazan, a Provencal village.
Gisèle Pelicot’s most intimate details are already known to the world. We know that Dominique, the kind and caring father of her children, the “great guy” who never made jokes about women or behaved inappropriately towards them, the man with whom she had “this joie de vivre” for half a century, was also the man who drugged and raped her and invited more than 80 apparently ordinary men to their family home to violate every part of her unconscious body while he recorded them. Rape reports often sanitise details; hers doesn’t. One haunting detail is of a dental crown dislodged due to “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into my slack mouth”.
For the sceptics – the defence lawyers, the doctors, the true crime obsessives – who wondered why her body hadn’t been in daily agony, the answer is that the drugs included powerful muscle relaxants. When she developed sexually transmitted diseases, Dominique said she must be cheating on him. The pelvic pain, gynaecological symptoms, alarming memory lapses just meant she was getting old, doctors told her repeatedly. A neurologist put her symptoms down to a mini-stroke, another told her children she had early signs of Alzheimer’s. That her husband has since confessed to the attempted rape of a young woman in the 1990s and is being investigated for the rape and murder of another feels like the denoument of a particularly deranged Harlan Coben storyline.
Yet her first reaction was deep shame. “Beyond the pain of the revelations and the shame of my body being turned into a sack, there was also the shame of having understood nothing – of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own,” she writes. It is impossible not to weep when she is trying to accommodate her daughter’s rages at her, while struggling to stay “invincible” herself.
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It’s almost impossible to retain faith in humanity knowing that all 51 convicted men aged from 22 to 70 were recruited online from within a 65km radius of that small village. All from a website called Without Her Consent. Dozens of her assailants remain unidentified, leaving her wondering whether strange men like the one who paid for her lunch one day might be one of them. Is it possible that such concentrated malignancy can pulse around that one small village, but not yours or mine?
Women of her era (she is 73 now) will recognise the thought processing that went into her extraordinary decision to waive her anonymity, to “make shame change sides”. Had she been 20 years younger she might not have “dared” because she was so frightened of “those damned stares that a woman of my generation has always had to deal with. Perhaps shame fades all the more easily when you’re 70, and no one pays attention to you any more. I don’t know. I wasn’t afraid of my wrinkles, or my body.”
And so, at the last minute she made shame change sides. She had to begin by watching the horrific videos.
The natural response to such profound betrayal, you might think, would be to dismiss all men as rapists. But part of her extraordinary, self-challenging spirit is her refusal to accept simplistic tropes. It’s not all men, she says, but it’s too many. But she doesn’t let women off the hook. A parade of rapists’ wives and partners took the stand to swear their men would never do such a thing. She could have been one of those women had their positions been reversed, she admits. A mother of about her own age testified to the character of her “baby boy”, a man of 45.
If the solution, as she says, is to educate our children at a very early age, then many – and not only men – have a long way to travel.
A simple way to educate our children – our boys to begin with – would be to tell them about the heroes of Gisèle Pelicot’s story. The first is a man, the one whom she credits with saving her life. He was the outraged supermarket security guard who in 2020 spotted Dominique Pelicot filming up the skirts of three women and reported him to the police. Empowered as a direct result of changes to French law campaigned for by Me Too activists, the police searched Dominique Pelicot’s devices and found the videos. Then there were her unstinting lawyers – both men – who never left her side. The boys’ education might also include a module on courage: the security guard had to go into hiding for a while because of local abuse.
For our girls, the education lies in the person of Gisèle Pelicot herself, still vigorously campaigning for shame to switch sides. Far from drowning in hatred, victimhood and despair, she has retained her faith in humanity and found new love in what she truly believes to be a good man.
