A new memoir by Gisèle Pelicot — the 73-year-old French woman whose husband was ordered jailed for 20 years after he was convicted of drugging her unconscious to be raped by dozens of men over several years — recounts how she survived the ordeal that made her a global symbol of the fight against sexual violence.
“A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides,” published Monday by Penguin Random House, offers a long-anticipated look at Pelicot’s life before, during and since the 2024 mass rape trial in France in which she waived her right to anonymity. That decision allowed the world to follow the proceedings against her former husband of 50 years, Dominique, and the dozens of men he recruited to rape her over nearly a decade. (The Pelicots have since divorced.)
MS NOW is reviewing a copy of the memoir, which Pelicot wrote with French journalist Judith Perrignon. It was translated from French to English.
In the book, Pelicot recounts her happy childhood in the French countryside before her mother’s death from a brain tumor when Pelicot was 9 years old. Years of grief and sadness followed, partly due to her father’s subsequent marriage to a woman whom Pelicot describes as never uttering “a single kind word.” When she met Dominique, who was helping her aunt’s family with electrical work, in 1971, the promise of their future together offered an “escape” from her unhappy family, she writes.
“We would always be together; our suffering behind us, we would escape our damaged families,” she writes that she imagined.
After marrying in 1973, the couple went on to have three children, with Dominique working as an electrician and a real estate agent and Pelicot rising through the ranks at the French national electric company. The couple later retired to Mazan, a town in the Provence region of southeastern France, where they took long walks, socialized with friends and hosted their children and grandchildren.
But Pelicot’s sense of their idyllic life was shattered in November 2020, when a police officer told her that “fifty-three men had come to my house to rape me” at her then-husband’s direction — a crime authorities discovered after they arrested Dominique two months earlier for taking photographs up women’s skirts in a supermarket.
Dominique facilitated the rapes by slipping a cocktail of anti-anxiety and sleeping medications into his unsuspecting wife’s food and drinks, rendering her unconscious. He recruited his coconspirators in the rapes through a since-shuttered website. Photographs and videos that Dominique captured of the sexual abuse of his wife, which were later shown in court, offered proof of the crimes.
The discovery of the years of mass rapes orchestrated by her husband, Pelicot writes, felt like her life was being plunged into an “enormous shredder,” adding, “I had nothing.”
Once the trial began in September 2024, Pelicot became known for attending each day of the proceedings and warmly greeting an army of well-wishers and supporters outside the Avignon courthouse. Pelicot writes that they were an “enveloping, comforting throng.”
“This crowd saved me,” she added.
Inside the courtroom, Pelicot faced defense attorneys who argued that she was somehow to blame for what happened to her, or was a willing participant.
“I told the court that now I understood why many rape victims don’t press charges, since so often they end up feeling as if they are the ones being accused,” she writes.
She also had to face her ex-husband, writing that he “looked like a worn-out old man,” and the dozens of other co-defendants accused of assaulting her.
“Not one lowered his eyes,” she writes of those men in court on the first day of the trial. “The accused men stared at me defiantly.”
During the proceedings, women throughout France and around the world held protests and marches in support of Pelicot, crediting her with raising awareness about the problem of sexual violence and praising her courage. In addition to her husband’s conviction, 50 other men were also found guilty, mostly of rape, and sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison. (One of those men appealed his sentence, and subsequently his initial sentence was increased by a year.) The trial, and Pelicot’s strength, had national and international reverberations. It was credited with playing a role in French lawmakers passing a bill last year to redefine rape as any nonconsensual sexual act. Pelicot was also awarded France’s top civilian honor last year. Since the trial, Pelicot has managed to move forward, finding love again with a new partner, Jean-Loup, whom she describes as “cheerful, good-humored, and discreet.” But there are still questions about the full scope of her ex-husband’s crimes, including whether he abused their daughter, Caroline Darian, who was found pictured in her underwear in two photographs on her father’s computer. Darian filed a legal complaint against her father last year, also accusing him of drugging and raping her, which he denied in court. Dominique is also being investigated in a pair of cold cases from the 1990s: a 1991 rape and murder in Paris that he has denied and a 1999 attempted rape that he admitted to after his DNA was identified at the scene. Between 20 and 30 of the men who raped Pelicot have yet to be identified. Pelicot writes that she wants to visit her ex-husband in prison “even though so many people have told me not to,” with the hope of getting answers to some of the lingering questions. “Did you never think, ‘I must stop’?” she writes she will ask him. “Did you abuse our daughter? Did you commit the most abject crime of all? Do you have any idea of the hell we’re living in?” “I’ll ask him all these questions,” she writes. “I need answers; he owes me that much.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky. Recommended
