Most surprising revelations from Gisele Pelicot’s e-book – from laughing rapists to well being horrors

WARNING DISTRESSING CONTENT: A year on from facing 51 of her abusers in court, brave Gisèle Pelicot has written a book sharing a number of devastating revelations about her decade-long mass rape ordeal

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Brave Gisèle Pelicot has told how her husband arranged for her to be raped by strangers while they looking after their grandson during the summer holidays in a tell-all book.

Depraved Dominique Pelicot had packed black lingerie so he could dress his wife up after she passed out. Gisèle, 73, writes: “He had known all along that the nice grand-père he was for the first week was going to turn into the monster in the second.”

In the powerful memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides, Gisèle said of the countless nights on which her husband drugged her, raped her and brought other men into their home to rape her too: “For 10 years, my sleep [was] a kind of execution.”

Her horror ordeal began in 2011, but she only learnt of it when he was arrested in 2020 for “upskirting” in a local supermarket and the police officers who seized his computer discovered the videos he had made of the abuse.

After attending the police station and being shown images of an unconscious woman laid out “like a rag-doll”, Pelicot refused to believe she was looking at herself until a cop pointed out the decor and said: “This is your bedroom. Aren’t those your bedside lamps?”

Chillingly, Gisèle is able to pinpoint the dates of the crimes, such as the times she was raped on her birthday and on St Valentine’s Day.

On one occasion, she returned from a trip to Paris to find that dinner was in the oven. She thought it a nice gesture, but it turned out Dominique had laced the mashed potatoes with lorazepam and zolpidem.

Health horrors

Gisèle started to experience concerning health problems, including memory lapses, inexplicable weight loss, and personal gynaecological issues.

She remembers calling Dominique one morning, telling him it felt as though her “waters had broken”, and that he’d treated her symptoms as a joke, quipping: “What have you been getting up to during the day?”

Gisèle said: “The leaking body of an ageing woman was suspect, and therefore the woman herself was suspect. I must have laughed with him, laughed with my torturer.”

She also feared something was wrong with her brain as she would forget that she had been to the hairdresser or have no recollection of getting up. One day, she lost control of her car and almost veered into a ditch. She gave up driving after that, she said.

Friends and family suspected Alzheimer’s and she thought it might be a brain tumour. They were chilling the effects of the sedatives. Dominique would also feed her a powerful muscle relaxant, which is why she never felt sore the day after the rapes.

Plagued by memory gaps and frustrated by inconclusive brain scans, Gisèle even jokingly questioned her husband as to whether he had drugged her, little knowing how close to the truth she’d gotten.

Children destroyed by perverted father

Gisèle lost her own mum to cancer when she was just nine years old and was left at the mercy of a resentful stepmother whose alleged cruelties ate away at her confidence as a young woman. She had longed to give her children the parent she never had.

But devastatingly, the revelations about her husband’s crimes have driven a significant wedge between Gisèle and her three adult children, David, Caroline and Florian.

The situation is especially complicated with the Pelicots’ only daughter Caroline, who has had to deal with the realisation that her own father took voyeuristic photographs of her and her sisters-in-law without her knowledge.

The book does not hold back when it comes to highlighting Caroline’s anger, detailing how she let out a “shriek of anguish” and “the howl of a wounded animal” when her mother informed her of what her father had been accused of in a haunting phone call.

Gisèle wrote: “My daughter was breaking down. The words I was saying to try to calm her were not getting through.”

After learning that some “grim details” from their ordeal had been published in a local newspaper, Caroline’s mental health took a serious decline, and she ended up spending the night in a psychiatric unit.

Gisèle reflected: “She was terrified. I was, too. Did she let out the screams that I held in, allowing herself to collapse as I did not I could have asked these questions without hope of finding any answers.”

Suicidal thoughts

Gisèle revealed she has had to deal with dark thoughts during her ordeal, which she has remained determined to overcome. She wrote of one occasion: “I drove back to the police station, where the children and I had arranged to meet.

“They were on their way in a taxi from Avignon station. The fleeting temptation to let go of the steering wheel and put an end to everything crossed my mind – no more than a few seconds, the time it took to dismiss it. I would never give death a helping hand.”

‘Pack of rapists’

Gisèle bravely waived her anonymity as a rape victim in 2024 to stand up for women’s rights and attended the trial with her head held high. She faced her rapists in court, suffering the horrific details of their crimes but also bravely exposing their identities in the process.

Recounting one particularly horrifying testimony given by one of the dozens of attackers, Gisèle wrote: “I saw a dead woman in the bed.

“But when I touched her, she was warm. I didn’t see her face,’ one of the defendants said… an expert witness testified that this particular scene was so violent, I could have died.”

During the trial, Gisèle was forced to “squeeze past” her “pack of rapists” during breaks in the proceedings, noting how many of them did not even bother to “lower their voices”.

Painting a portrait of the defendants’ grotesque “camaraderie”, Gisèle remembered: “I saw them high-fiving each other, going to the café across the street at lunchtime, chatting at the bar, buying rounds of beer, laughing.

“They bonded with each other simply because they were convinced they had done nothing wrong.”

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