Testifies to the horror: “Like a rag doll” • The man filmed • The trial shakes France
French police “saved her life” when they searched her husband, Dominique Pélicot’s, computer in 2020. The computer was seized after he was caught filming up women’s skirts in a shopping mall.
The police found a file named “abuses” that contained over 20,000 videos and photos of his wife, who is raped nearly 100 times by over 80 men. During all the rapes, Gisèle Pélicot is said to have been so drugged that she was unconscious.
– My world fell apart. Everything fell apart, everything that I had built up for the last 50 years, Gisèle Pélicot said of when the police first showed her the evidence and she learned what had happened to her all these years.
She says she barely recognized herself in the photos and videos.
Don’t remember the abuse
Gisèle Pélicot says that she could wake up one morning with a new haircut, which she did not remember having cut the day before. Not knowing that she was drugged and raped every night, she had found it hard to remember things and hard to concentrate.
The children became worried that she was demented or had Alzheimer’s, but when a doctor examined her, it was determined that she did not. However, the majority of sexually transmitted diseases were discovered in medical examinations.
When the police showed the videos to Gisèle Pélicot, she told her children what had happened. The daughter’s scream was so piercing that it was “etched into her memory.”
50 men have been identified and charged
Of all the men who allegedly raped Gisèle Pélicot in the films, only 50 have been identified. They are now being prosecuted together with her husband.
The man is said to have given them specific instructions before the rapes, so that she would not be awakened from her coma-like state. For example, they were not allowed to wear perfume or cold hands.
– They treated me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag, says Gisèle Pélicot when she sees the videos of the abuse.
The men who are charged are men in many different professional categories, aged 26 to 73. A psychologist, a former policeman, a journalist, a soldier, a prison guard, a firefighter and a nurse are among the suspects. Many lived around the small town of Marzan, which has only 6,000 inhabitants.
“I never thought he would come and rape me”
Several of them deny in court – and say that the husband, Dominique Pélicot, had deceived them into believing that she consented to the abuse. The husband himself admits in court that he raped, filmed and sought out other men to rape his wife.
Several of the defendants now risk 20 years in prison for aggravated rape. Gisèle Pélicot states that out of all 80 she recognized only one of the rapists, who used to ride a bicycle with her husband.
– I saw him from time to time at the bakery, I used to say hello. I never thought he would come and rape me.
Gisèle Pélicot herself has underlined the importance of the trial being held in front of open doors and that she is testifying “for all the women” who have been drugged and raped.