Woman in France Testifies Against Husband Accused of Bringing Men to Rape Her

Dominique Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, including aggravated rape and drugging. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, his daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at times distributing, intimate photos of them. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

He hopes to use the trial to explain himself to his now ex-wife and estranged children, according to his lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro.

Standing at a lectern before the row of judges in the courtroom, Gisele Pelicot never showed much emotion. She referred to her former husband formally, as “Monsieur Pelicot.”

As she told it, they fell madly in love at just 19 and were soon married. They’d had three children and now seven grandchildren. They’d been together through some illness, financial problems and even at least one fleeting affair but they made it through.

Pelicot told the court she had trusted her husband implicitly and she said they had what she considered a normal sex life.

“I thought we were a strong couple,” Pelicot said. “We had everything to be happy.”

After she retired in 2013, they moved from the Paris region to Mazan, a small town in southern France.

There, she said, her husband supported her through a strange, undiagnosed illness. She was losing her hair, losing weight and, most worryingly, losing her memory of some nights and days, she told the courtroom. She would sometimes awake in the morning with no recall of saying goodbye to her children, watching a movie or getting into bed, she said.

These gaps, which she described as “total blackouts”, frightened her so much that she had stopped driving.

“I was persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour,” she said. She had also suffered gynaecological problems.

Her husband drove her to appointments with specialists, one of whom did a CT scan of her brain. She was never given a satisfactory explanation.

“I could not have imagined for a single second that I had been drugged,” she said, though later she recalled he once gave her a beer that glowed mint green before he threw it in the sink. She said she now believes he was doing “trials” of ways to drug her.

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The reality of what prosecutors say was happening was discovered by chance, after Dominique Pelicot was caught trying to film under women’s skirts in a grocery store. Gisele Pelicot forgave him, thinking it was a rare slip in a 50-year marriage.

Only later would she learn that he had been caught doing the same thing earlier, in 2010, and was let off with a fine, prosecutors said. It was a warning sign she said she never got to see. She said she would have been more vigilant had she known.

“I lost 10 years of my life,” she said. “Those are years I will never get back.”

Dominque Pelicot sat apart from the other accused men in a separate glass box and cast his eyes down throughout his wife’s testimony. He had met most of those men on a notorious, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France. It was shut down in June.

He has argued to the police and through his lawyer that all the men knew his wife had been drugged into submission, and followed that they had the rules he had established to ensure she didn’t wake up. He filmed the scenes, storing more than 20,000 digital videos and photographs that the police used to track down the accused.

Most of the men on trial have been accused of rape with “many aggravating circumstances”, one being the use of drugs to put her to sleep. Many have pleaded not guilty. Some say they were tricked into having sex with a drugged woman, lured by her husband for a playful three-way encounter and that they had been told she was pretending to sleep because she was shy.

In the days after meeting the police and seeing some of the shocking photos that her husband had kept, Pelicot said she contemplated suicide. But with the help of her children and friends, she began to slowly gather the shards of her broken life and identity. She sold most things in the home in Mazan and moved elsewhere.

She has divorced her husband, and while she is keeping her married name for the trial, she intends to take up her maiden name as soon as it is over, she said.

Notably, since the day she stepped into the police station, she said she has not had a single blackout.

While she seemed strong and described herself as like a boxer who repeatedly stood back up after being knocked down, she also told the court, “inside, there is a field of ruins”.

“I will try to rebuild my life,” she said. “I don’t know how.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.