A 72-year-old survivor who exposed France’s largest mass rape case has turned her ordeal into a rallying cry—and is now celebrated with France’s highest civilian honor.
The largest mass rape trial in modern French history concluded in late December in Avignon, France. Fifty-one perpetrators—one the husband, alongside 50 strangers he solicited online—were found guilty of at least one charge and sentenced.
The trial detailed a series of events so perverse that France, along with much of the world, was shocked. The court proceedings revealed how over a span of nine years, from 2011 to 2020, a man had repeatedly drugged and then raped his wife, and invited other men into their home to also rape her.
In total, his wife had been raped at least 92 times. By 84 different men.
It took police almost two years to identify and locate 50 of the perpetrators, men ranging in age from their 20s to early 70s. The remaining offenders are still unidentified.
Yet it had all begun so quietly. For a couple married 50 years, mornings in Mazan, a small village in the Provence region of southern France, were ordinary and predictable: breakfast followed by a short drive together to the supermarket.
But a phone call one autumn morning from local police requesting that Dominique Pelicot, then 67, husband to Gisèle, also 67, report to the local station interrupted their daily routine. A surprised Gisèle listened as her husband told her not to worry: “It won’t be pleasant, but by noon we will be home,” he said, according to The Guardian. But the next time she saw him was at his trial.
It was unbearable. I was inert, in my own bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart. … For 50 years, I lived with a man who I would never have imagined capable of this. I trusted him completely.
Gisèle Pelicot
A few months prior, police had arrested Dominique for the crime of “upskirting.” He had been caught clandestinely filming up the skirts of young women as they grocery shopped. When the police officer assigned to the case asked Dominique why he had done it, he answered that it was simply an “urge.”
The psychiatrist brought in to assess the white-haired pensioner suspected he was holding back on something more grave, and prompted the officer to keep digging. The police examined two mobile phones, a camera and video recorder Dominique had been carrying. What they discovered provoked a search of the Pelicot home.
On a USB drive found in Dominique’s garage, police officers located a folder labeled “abuse” that contained videos and photos of 200 rapes. Overall, they found more than 20,000 photos and videos of rape and sexual assault across his devices, with the same woman in every image: Gisèle. And almost every video had been filmed in the couple’s home: in their bedroom, their daughter’s bedroom, on the dining room table. The folder was meticulously organized by date, time and participant, including the names of dozens of men who had participated in raping Gisèle.
Each man was instructed to wash his hands and trim his fingernails, as Dominique found the idea of ‘long dirty nails’ touching his wife unacceptable.
Rendered unconscious from a combination of Temesta (lorazepam), an anti-anxiety medication, and sleeping tablets—mixed then crushed by Dominique into a glass of his wife’s favorite wine or sorbet—Gisèle had been completely unaware of what was being done to her. More than 700 tablets of Temesta were obtained from Dominique’s doctor, according to France 24. The doctor prescribed the medication to alleviate Dominique’s complaints of recurrent anxiety, which he attributed to financial problems.
In court, Dominique seemed proud, sharing how he had perfected a dosage of medication that would leave his wife unconscious for seven hours. (In fact, the chemical mixture was so potent that a state prosecutor said at the hearing that it could have killed Gisèle.)
Dominique had carefully assembled a tripod with an attached screen in the couple’s bedroom, recording the abuse in part as insurance against the other participants if anything went wrong. The first videos Dominique posted online showed him raping his wife—images intended to attract other men who could be invited into his home to abuse her. Dominique used an anonymous online chat website known as Coco, where members discussed performing sexual acts on women without their consent. Some of Gisèle’s rapists testified that they believed Dominique’s posts were kink fantasy scenes shared by the couple. Others admitted to rape.
Once contacted by interested men, Dominique responded quickly via Skype and then switched to text messaging. One message read: “I am about to dose her [with a sleeping pill], plan to come tonight around 3 am,” according to CNN.
Another read: “I don’t know whether I will try to have her f…ked this evening. Will you come if I do?”
Other times, Dominique was more straightforward: “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my sleeping wife.”
Once a man confirmed his interest, Dominique would send very specific instructions: Do not park in front of the house. Do not wear aftershave. Don’t awaken the neighbors.
Inside the home, further orders were given: Take your clothes off in the kitchen. No smoking or drinking is allowed. Each man was instructed to wash his hands and trim his fingernails, as Dominique found the idea of “long dirty nails” touching his wife unacceptable.
Over the course of nearly a decade, more than 80 men entered the Pelicot home at Dominique’s invitation. “You’re just like me; you like rape mode,” he would tell potential perpetrators when recruiting on Coco.
The use of condoms was sometimes discouraged. As a result, Gisèle now lives with the lifelong consequences of four sexually transmitted diseases.
She turned what could have destroyed her into strength.
Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve described Gisèle, medical examiner
Upon being shown a video of one of the rapes, Gisèle told police she did “not recognize” the sleeping woman. Only after viewing additional videos did she slowly see herself. “It was unbearable,” she later said during her testimony. “I was inert, in my own bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart.”
Gisèle told the court she had been happy, had believed herself lucky for her husband of 50 years and their three children. She spoke about the tranquil village life they shared following retirement. He had taken up cycling, while she sang in the local choir and enjoyed long walks with their French bulldog, Lancôme.
The BBC reported that when Gisèle was asked by a lawyer to describe her marriage, she said, “Our friends used to say we were the perfect couple. I thought we would see through our days, our life, together.” Struggling to understand what had happened, she testified, “This was very difficult for me. For 50 years, I lived with a man who I would never have imagined capable of this. I trusted him completely.”
As the criminal trial progressed and new evidence was presented in court, Gisèle often found her memory triggered. She recalled a time when her husband handed her a beer with a strange greenish tint to it and she poured it down the sink.
“You’re not drugging me by any chance, are you?” she once asked.
She recounted how her husband had broken down in tears, asking, “How can you accuse me of such a thing?”
Medical examiner Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve described Gisèle in the wake of her husband’s arrest as clearly traumatized, appearing calm yet distant—a coping mechanism often employed by survivors of traumatic events like terror attacks. Sainte-Beuve spoke to the BBC of Gisèle’s exceptional resilience: “She turned what could have destroyed her into strength.”
That was not how Gisèle saw herself, at least not initially. Saying that her life had become “a field of ruins,” she shared how overcome by fear she had become—that however long she might still live, there would not be enough time for her to “rebuild herself.”
Prior to the start of the criminal trial, Gisèle went into seclusion. She left the house she had shared with her husband after the videos were discovered in November 2020, and filed for divorce in early 2021. Speaking to the press in what would be her only public statement during the first days of the four-month trial, Gisèle appeared “transformed.” Her lawyer, Antoine Camus, said his client was no longer a“devoted wife and retiree … [but] a woman ready for battle.”
“I will fight till the end,” Gisèle told the journalists.
Like many countries, France has a protective privacy act guaranteeing anonymity for crime victims. Gisèle’s lawyers warned what would happen in a public trial—the intense media attention that would surely follow every development in the case, the probable attacks on her testimony in court and possible threats to her life. Undaunted, Gisèle chose to waive her right to anonymity. “When you’re raped, there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame,” she told the court. “It’s for them.”
Her insistence that her trial be public surprised both her lawyers and the presiding judge—and transformed Gisèle into a feminist hero and icon. French and international media descended on the Avignon courthouse, giving the trial not only a national but a global audience. Each day, as Gisèle entered the courthouse, supporters handed her flowers, chanted her name and cheered her on. Those unable to get inside stood in the hundreds outside, holding aloft placards, loudly shouting “Madame!” and “We are all Gisèle!”
In recognition of her extraordinary courage and her transformative impact, Gisèle Pelicot, now 72, was named a knight of the Legion of Honour—France’s highest civic award—on a list published on the eve of Bastille Day, July 14.
Yet that support did not prevent the accusations Gisèle would face from a legion of 40 defense lawyers—in spite of her age and the uncontested proof of the crimes committed against her. Pointing to one video image shown in court (that of Gisèle lying on a bed, drugged and semiconscious, a sex toy placed at her side) a defense lawyer asked if she considered herself an exhibitionist. Another lawyer wondered why she did not show more anger toward her husband. Yet another expressed surprise that she had not cried more in court.
Gisèle replied that she found such questions insulting. She told the court, “I understand now why rape victims don’t go public, why they don’t press charges.”
When #MeToo went viral in 2017, French women did not rush to embrace its message. Catherine Deneuve, beloved “grande dame” of French cinema, joined other high-profile women in issuing a public letter arguing that #MeToo amounted to an overcorrection, stating: “Rape is a crime. But trying to pick up someone, however persistently or clumsily, is not.”
France has long been protective of men accused of sexual assault. When actor Gérard Depardieu faced rape accusations, an article in Le Figaro, France’s oldest newspaper, stated: “When Depardieu is attacked in this way, it is art that is being attacked.”
Even President Emmanuel Macron spoke out, saying Depardieu had become the target of a “manhunt.”
Gisèle faced deep-rooted misogyny every single day of the trial. Even after all 51 defendants were found guilty, one defense lawyer called the women protesting outside the courthouse “hysterical tricoteuses”—a reference to the women who watched and knitted as the guillotine fell during the French Revolution.
Daphné, a writer from Montpellier in the crowds outside the courthouse that day, was appalled. “There’s a real denial in French society of male violence against women,” she told The Irish Times.
But France is no outlier. The experience of French rape victims is like that of American women—in fact, of women across the globe.
What is the profound, long-lasting emotion that rape victims share? Shame.
Many years ago, when I was just a 15-year-old high school student in south Florida, I was abducted, drugged and gang-raped by six men. When they were finished, they left me face down in an Everglades ditch to die. I had never even kissed a boy.
Like Gisèle Pelicot, I knew I was blameless. Yet despite years of therapy, shame stayed with me as a constant companion. Shame—though I was loath to admit it—felt normal. The #MeToo movement had been too Hollywood, too celebrity-driven to impact me. But Gisèle was an ordinary woman bravely speaking out.
“She wanted shame to change sides, and it has,” said a woman who witnessed the trial in Avignon’s courthouse. “Gisèle turned everything on its head.”
Feminist historian Christine Bard observed to Le Monde, “In its power and impact, the Mazan rape case is already one of those major trials that mark history and served as catalysts, accelerating the evolution of consciousness and legislative changes.”
Yes, courts have a very long way to go before survivors of sexual assault are given the rights, protection and justice they deserve. But in France, the recent conviction of Depardieu on two counts of sexual assault—only two months after Gisèle’s trial—has been heralded by women’s rights groups as another victory for justice.
Following the conclusion of the trial, Gisèle moved far away from the village where she’d once lived with her husband. The BBC reported that she sees a psychiatrist regularly but no longer takes medication. And she has returned to taking long walks in the countryside.
She has taken time to write a memoir, A Hymn to Life, which will be published next year in 22 languages.
“Through this book, I hope to convey a message of strength and courage to all those who are subjected to difficult ordeals,” Gisèle said. “May they never again feel shame. And in time, may they even learn to savor life again and find peace.”
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox—or order a single copy of the Summer issue as a standalone for just $5.
