At the beginning of the trial, Gisèle Pelicot arrived at court wearing her round sunglasses, as though she still needed one last layer of protection between her face and the eyes of the entire world. But as the weeks passed, something changed. The glasses began to disappear. The woman who had discovered that for years she had been drugged and raped inside her own home began walking toward the courtroom with her head held high and her eyes uncovered.
Until September 2, 2024, very few people outside her family and circle of friends knew her name. She had no social media accounts and no public life that might have prepared her for what was about to happen. Within a few months, however, Gisèle Pelicot had become a global symbol of an idea as simple as it is difficult: when rape occurs, the shame does not belong to the person who suffered it.
It belongs to the person who committed it.
The court found her former husband, Dominique Pelicot, guilty of repeatedly raping her while she was drugged and sentenced him to twenty years in prison. The other fifty defendants who stood trial alongside him were also found guilty.
But the real story had begun years earlier and had remained hidden even from the woman at its centre.
At the beginning of 2020, Gisèle was living with Dominique in Mazan, Provence. They had moved there after retirement, leaving Paris behind and beginning what could have looked like the quiet final chapter of a long marriage.
She regarded Dominique as the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life. He had been a love from her youth, the father of her children, the husband who stood beside her when she began suffering from unexplained health problems.
Gisèle experienced memory gaps. She woke exhausted without knowing why. She even feared that she might be developing Alzheimer’s disease. She suffered gynaecological problems and went from doctor to doctor trying to understand what was happening to her body.
Dominique was there.
He held her hand.
That may be one of the most chilling details in the entire story. The man presenting himself as the husband caring for her was the same man causing the symptoms she was desperately trying to explain to doctors.
She later remembered one evening when he had cooked dinner and then brought her favourite sorbet, raspberry and mango. She thought how lucky she was to have a husband who looked after her so lovingly.
The next morning she would wake exhausted.
She had no idea that what looked like an ordinary act of tenderness could be part of the preparation for what would happen once she lost consciousness.
On September 12, 2020, a security guard at a shopping centre noticed Dominique attempting to secretly film women with a mobile phone.
It was not the first time. He had been caught for a similar offence near Paris in 2010 and had kept the incident hidden from his wife.
This time, however, police seized his electronic devices.
And opened a door nobody could have imagined was there.
On his computer, phones and other devices, investigators discovered a vast and meticulously organised collection of around 20,000 images and videos. Many showed different men performing sexual acts on a woman who appeared to be unconscious.
That woman was Gisèle.
When police first called her in, they asked about her husband. She described him as a wonderful man.
Then they showed her the images.
The life she thought she knew ended in that room.
She later recalled asking the officers to stop. She could not continue looking. She was seeing herself motionless on a bed while a man raped her.
“My world collapsed,” she would later say.
It was not an exaggeration.
A marriage lasting decades, her trust in the man who slept beside her, the illnesses she thought she had, the unexplained blackouts, even her own memory now had to be read again from the beginning.
For almost ten years, Dominique drugged his wife and arranged for men to come to their home and rape her while she was unconscious.
He filmed the assaults.
Using the online name “Fetish45,” he contacted men through a chat room called “Without her knowledge.” The instructions he gave reveal the level of planning involved. Visitors were told to park away from the house, not to smoke and not to wear perfume so that no smell would remain that might cause Gisèle to suspect something.
Dozens of men entered that house.
Around seventy, according to evidence presented in the case. Fifty were identified and ultimately brought to trial alongside Dominique.
In most cases, they did not use condoms. Gisèle was fortunate not to contract HIV, syphilis or hepatitis, but she was diagnosed with four different sexually transmitted infections.
And she knew nothing about any of it.
Her body knew.
She did not.
During the trial, Dominique admitted that he was a rapist and said that the men who came to the house knew Gisèle’s condition before arriving.
Many of his co-defendants offered a different account. They claimed they believed they were participating in a consensual sexual fantasy between a couple, that Dominique had manipulated them, or that they had not intended to commit rape.
Gisèle’s response became one of the defining phrases of the entire trial.
“Rape is rape.”
Nothing more complicated was necessary.
An unconscious woman cannot consent.
The case became even harder to dismiss as the work of one isolated “monster” once the identities and ordinary lives of the other defendants came into view.
Their ages spanned several decades. Among them were truck drivers, soldiers, firefighters, a nurse, a journalist and a DJ. Some had wives and children, jobs, neighbours and entirely ordinary social lives.
They did not resemble the imaginary rapist that societies often prefer to place somewhere safely outside everyday life.
They looked like people you might meet at work, in your building or around a family table.
Fathers. Husbands. Friends. Brothers.
That was one of the most uncomfortable truths exposed by the trial.
Dominique’s defence spoke of “two Dominiques”: the family man on one side and the man with dark sexual behaviour on the other.
But perhaps that distinction makes reality more comfortable than it actually was.
There were not necessarily two men.
There was one.
The man who drugged his wife was the same man who held her hand when she feared she had Alzheimer’s. The man who recorded the rapes was the same man who cooked dinner and brought her favourite sorbet.
The image of the devoted family man did not conceal an entirely different person.
It was his cover.
The investigation also brought other disturbing material to light. His DNA was linked to an attempted rape in Paris in 1999, and he admitted being present. He was also accused in connection with the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Paris in 1991, an allegation he denied.
The court also heard that he had secretly filmed women within the family and had photographed his adult daughter Caroline partially undressed while she slept. She now fears that she too may have been drugged and abused, something he repeatedly denied in court.
The case was no longer only about one house in Provence.
It was about how easily violence can live inside normality without normality appearing to break.
Gisèle could have requested that the trial proceed without public exposure of the details.
She did not.
She chose to allow what had happened to be seen.
That meant sitting in a courtroom while people publicly discussed her body, her sexual abuse, her marriage and the years that had been taken from her memory.
She did it because, as she said, she wanted rape victims to be able to tell themselves that if Pelicot could stand there, they could too.
Above all, she wanted shame to change sides.
For generations, victims of sexual violence have been taught to hide. To ask what they did wrong, what they wore, why they trusted someone, why they failed to understand, why they did not leave, why they did not speak sooner.
Gisèle made one simple shift.
“We are not the ones who should feel ashamed. They are.”
And gradually, the entire trial began to revolve around that idea.
At the beginning, Gisèle often entered court behind her distinctive sunglasses. We do not need to know exactly what she felt each time she wore them to understand how exposed a person might feel when the entire world learns the most private details of her life through files created by the man who betrayed her.
As the trial progressed, she began appearing without them.
Her face became known to millions. Women gathered outside the courthouse, people held signs bearing her name, and the phrase that “shame must change sides” travelled far beyond France.
By the end, when the guilty verdicts were announced, Gisèle once again entered the courtroom with her face uncovered.
The important thing is not that she had stopped being afraid. We do not know whether fear ever truly disappears after discovering, in your seventies, that for almost a decade your own body carried a history that your mind had been prevented from knowing.
The important thing is that she no longer accepted the idea that she should hide because of what other people had done.
Gisèle Pelicot did not choose to become a symbol. She did not ask for this story or the role forced upon her. The only thing she was able to choose was what she would do once the truth was revealed.
And she chose not to hide her face.
For years, she had been unconscious while others were able to look at her.
In the end, they were the ones forced to sit in the light while she looked back.
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