Gisèle Pelicot is French, he lives in Mazan, in the south of Francewhere she moved with her husband Dominique Pelicot when they both retired. They met in 1971, Gisèle and Dominique, and not even two years later they decided to get married. Soon his children arrive, two boys and a girl, but also financial troubles: Pelicot loves to live beyond his means, which makes him go into heavy debt, until he has to bankrupt his company that worked in electricity to confirm. sectoral. The couple divorced to protect their assets from creditors, but they remarried in 2007. Because, as Gisèle Pelicot says today from a courtroom where one of the the most mass rape trials ever followedin these fifty years of life together she felt above all “lucky” to have “the perfect husband” by her side. Love is worthy of the greatest trust.
Of course, like all couples, the Pelicots also had their problems: she admitted that she had an affair, but he himself was not always faithful to her, nevertheless the two chose to continue together and, she recalls today with Gisèle’s disappointment. , mutual love. Until 2020 the police stopped Dominique for filming with a small camera up the skirts of some women at the local supermarket. They seized his phone, computer and various hard drives and then police found thousands of exchanges that took place on a free dating site, Coco.fr, and a separate chat room called “His son in them”, “Unbeknownst to him”. In this conversation the men talked about what they themselves defined as sexual relations. but that was really rape: carnal relations with their partners without their knowledge. In 2024, after an 18-month investigation spanning Europe, the site was closed and its owner arrested.
By reading this conversation, the police discovered that from July 2011 and up to the beginning of the investigations, so for about ten years, Dominique Pelicot had regularly given some Tempesta tablets to his wife at dinner time and grind them into food. , the drug sold in Italy as Tavor, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety and insomnia. He then allowed the men from the conversation with whom he had previously made arrangements to enter the house, allowing them to rape his unconscious wife. He filmed everything. On a USB stick investigators found a folder called “ABUS”. Hundreds of videos were cataloged by date, the name of the rapist as it appeared in the conversation and the number of rapes. There were 128 files present in this folder and 92 were the rapes apparently committed against the woman. The names of 83 rapists were on the list. The police, during the two years of investigations that followed, identified 51 of them, who were then arrested. Although you can ask to remain anonymous and have a closed door trial, as French law allows in cases of sexual violence, Gisèle Pelicot decided to have a public one so that her story and her words would reach as many people as possible. “I wanted to do this as a media event because I want society to change”he said.
Something is particularly close to the heart of Gisèle Pelicot, who does not want to be described as a heroine, and says firmly that this is not a story of courage but of “will and determination to change society”., and it is the theme of shame. If, as many say, this is a mass rape trial that is changing the way we talk about sexual violence, it is because of the clarity that “ruined woman” is precisely defined. in her destruction she clearly refuses to feel shame. “Often when you are a victim of violence you feel ashamed, but It’s not us who should be ashamed, it’s them.” Gisèle Pelicot said she never noticed her ex-husband’s attempts to make her unconscious, and that the drugs she was sedated with were most likely hidden in the meals her husband prepared for her. “Often, when there was a football match on TV, I would leave him to watch it alone. Then he would bring me ice cream in bed: my favorite flavor, raspberry. And I thought: lucky me .”
Pelicot also said that during the period of her husband’s turmoil, she often had memory lapses and that she was very tired, for which reason she suspected she had Alzheimer’s. Her husband supported this feeling, and accompanied her to several neurological visits. Referring to testimonies from the wives, mothers and sisters of the defendants who described them in recent weeks as “exceptional men”, Pelicot said: “He is just like the person I had inside my house. the rapist is not just someone you meet in a dark parking lot late at night. You can find it in the family too, among friends”. Pelicot added: “I’m asking all the women who are victims of rape – not just when they’re drugged, there’s rape at all levels – to say: Mrs. Pelicot did it, so we can”.
In the deposition, Pelicot specifically mentioned the so-called “rape culture,” a term used by gender studies and feminism to describe a “culture” in which gender-based violence and abuse is widespread, minimized, and normalized. . And the 83 rapists of Mazan, of which only 51 have been tried because they were identified through videos, they teach us that rape culture affects us all, and we need to start talking about it differently. Because in that courtroom in Avignon we are still looking at the denial of one’s responsibilities. In almost two months of testimony, the court heard a dozen accused men, and most of them denied the rape, because, as they said in court, they really thought that Gisèle was pretending to be asleep or that he is playing or they felt that it was enough that her husband consented. The men on trial with Dominique Pelicot are aged between 26 and 74, they include a nurse, a journalist, a prison guard, a local councillor, a soldier, several lorry drivers and agricultural workers, and could be sentenced up to Get 20 years. They supported each other for ten years, ten years during which if even one of them had broken that terrifying agreement of silence and concession, Gisèle Pelicot would have been able to report first, that husband to bring to court to cook her dishes with drugs and then do what it was with her. Shame, Gisèle Pelicot is right, but on the one hand in this story, there is the hope that the rapists who grew up in a society that has been granted and forgiven them everything that comes to feel it. Until today. Up to Gisèle Pelicot.
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