Gisèle Pelicot found out she was the victim of a crime when police showed her the evidence: Photos and videos spanning a decade, in which a series of men raped her unconscious body in her own bedroom. More confounding still was the perpetrator: the 71-year-old’s husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot. Police say that between 2011 and 2020, Dominique routinely drugged his wife and invited strangers to join him in assaulting her, often filming the encounters. Gisèle has no memory of the attacks but will see many of them played in court as dozens of defendants go on trial in Avignon, France, between now and December. Her ex-husband, also 71, has already pleaded guilty to a suite of charges, which — according to the New York Times — include aggravated rape, drugging, and the violation not only of his wife’s privacy but also his daughter’s and daughters-in-law’s: Police also found illicit photos of them when searching Dominique’s devices. The revelation of his abuse has destroyed a formerly tight-knit family, and the why behind his actions remains an open question.
Although she has the right, under French law, to keep the proceedings private, Gisèle opted to open the trial to the public, so that “when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pelicot,” she explained, adding: “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized.”
Here’s what’s been reported about the case so far.
What happened to Gisèle Pelicot?
Gisèle and Dominique met when they were 19 and married at 21. The Times reports that, despite periods of financial strain and even brief infidelity, she considered Dominique the great love of her life. “I thought we were a strong couple,” she said, per the Times. “We had everything to be happy.” They had three children, seven grandchildren, and regularly vacationed all together. “Even our friends said we were the ideal couple,” Gisèle said in court, according to the Guardian.
For years , Dominique appeared a devoted husband: After the couple retired to the southern town of Mazan in 2013, and Gisèle fell inexplicably ill — she was losing weight; her hair was falling out; she randomly experienced significant lapses in her memory, which she called “total blackouts” — it was Dominique who took her to see various doctors. “I was persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor,” Gisèle testified, according to the Times. But now, her symptoms appear to be the result of crushed sleeping pills Dominique had been slipping into her food and drinks.
When Gisèle passed out, investigators say Dominique invited strangers into their home to join him in raping her. According to the AFP, he found these men via a forum called “without her knowledge” on the now-defunct website coco.gg, which had reportedly been involved in tens of thousands of police investigations before French authorities shut it down in June. Beginning around 2011, he is believed to have orchestrated more than 200 rapes this way, enlisting more than 90 men, the Guardian reports. Dominique allegedly subjected these men to certain rules while they were in the couple’s home. Usually, the men would wait nearby as Dominique drugged his wife and arrive at their house once she’d lost consciousness. They had to speak quietly, according to the Associated Press, and to avoid arousing suspicion, they could not wear perfume or show up smelling like tobacco smoke. Clothes were to be removed in the kitchen.
In court, Dominique again admitted to the premeditated assaults, his lawyer stating — per the Guardian — that after his arrest, Dominique “always declared himself guilty,” and admitted: “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.” He reportedly told police that he started drugging his wife so that he could make her wear clothes and do things she wouldn’t while awake and said he never took money from the men he invited to rape her. Gisèle, referring to her husband now only as “Monsieur Pelicot,” described it differently. “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she testified. “They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.” For her, the most accurate word to describe her husband’s crimes is torture.
How did she find out?
In 2020, the Deutsche Welle reports, a security guard at a grocery store caught Dominique attempting to upskirt several women, allegations that led to his arrest. The case snowballed from there: On the devices investigators confiscated from Dominique, they found some 300 photographs and video footage of men sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman, who would turn out to be Gisèle; per the Times, the count eventually rose to 20,000. Rounding off Dominique’s damning digital footprint, officers also discovered meticulous records of the assault: The messages he had sent to his recruits, in which he “boasted of drugging his wife,” per the Times, and solicited strangers’ participation. Dominique had also organized his photos in a folder on his computer, labeled “abuse,” adding dates and file names to most of the footage.
But other women featured in his accounts, too. The Guardian reports that he kept a folder entitled, “Around my daughter, naked,” which contained collages of her similarly incapacitated and nude. (She wrote a memoir about her father’s crimes, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa, in 2022, under the pen name Caroline Darian.) Dominique had also taken surreptitious photos of his daughters-in-law, naked, without their knowledge or consent.
When police summoned Gisèle to the precinct, DW reports, she at first defended her husband as a “great guy.” Then they showed her his archives. “For me, everything collapses,” she told the court, according to the AP. “These are scenes of barbarity, of rape.”
Gisèle left the police station, packed “all that was left for me of 50 years of life together” into two suitcases, and filed for divorce from her husband, she told the court. Subsequent testing revealed she had multiple sexually transmitted infections. “I no longer have an identity,” she testified, according to the AP. “I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself.” She has since changed her surname, but is using Pelicot at trial.
Exactly how many men are on trial?
In addition to Dominique, the 50 men police have identified stand accused of having raped Gisèle; according to the Times, a second defendant’s box had to be built in the court room to contain them. The suspects range in age from 26 and 74, and worked as journalists, plumbers, nurses, IT consultants, truck drivers, and more. Some have purported that they had no idea that she had been drugged, and that Dominique had tricked them, promising a threesome with his wife who was merely pretending to be asleep; others said they thought she was a consenting participant. Gisèle does not buy it, telling the court: “They knew exactly what they were doing and what shape I was in.” According to the Guardian, she even recognized one of the men accused of raping her: A man who’d visited their home to talk about cycling with her husband, or so she believed. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello,” she recalled in court. “I never thought he’d come and rape me.”
Most of the defendants have been charged with aggravated rape, and face up to 20 years in prison if convicted; one, according to the Times, is accused of having replicated Dominique’s methods on his own wife and inviting other men — including Dominique — to assault her while she was unconscious.
Who are Dominique Pelicot’s other alleged victims?
As mentioned, Dominique also took unsolicited photographs of his daughter and his daughters-in-law and faces violation-of-privacy charges for those as well. In court, Darian recalled the moment she first saw her father’s photos, in which she lay in bed, ostensibly asleep. “I realized right away that I was drugged in that photo,” she testified, according to the Times. While Dominique has not been charged with drugging and abusing his daughter, she cannot escape her suspicions, calling her father “the greatest sexual predator of the last 20 years” in court. “What can you do for a person like me to heal?” she asked. “To have a normal life of a woman, a normal sex life.”
As for the daughters-in-law, one — Céline Pelicot — testified that the anxiety over the photos Dominique had taken, as well as over how he might have behaved with his grandchildren, prevented her from sleeping more than two to three hours per night. “We are all asking our children, whom we left with their grandparents, things we normally don’t ask them — what did he do to you?” she said, per the Times. The other, Aurore, now the ex-wife of Pelicot’s other son, recalled overhearing Dominique asking her kid about not wanting to “play doctor,” which she brushed off at the time. “Obviously, I ask myself now, if I had said something,” she said, according to the Times. “We all carry a kind of guilt about what we could have done, and this is mine.”
And in addition to the charges pertaining to his family members, Dominique is also under investigation for two sex crimes that occurred in the 1990s, according to the Times: the rape and murder of a 23-year-old in 1991, which he denies, and the attempted rape of a 19-year-old in 1999, to which he has admitted.
How long is the trial expected to last?
The trial began on September 3 and is expected to run into December. According to the AP, groups of defendants will be tried together before a panel of judges. We will update as the case develops.
