Gisèle Pelicot

Until 2020 Gisèle Pelicot thought she had the perfect French life. She had been happily married to Dominique Pelicot for nearly 50 years. They had three children, and she had a career as an executive at a utility company. When she retired, they moved to a small town in southern France to a house with a pool in which their seven much-adored grandchildren romped. And then she learned that over the course of almost a decade her husband had repeatedly raped her and arranged for more than 50 other men to do the same while she was drugged and unconscious.

Her decision to waive her right to anonymity and face her attackers in open court at the 2024 trial made her one of the 21st century’s most unlikely feminist icons and earned her worldwide respect.

Early life

Gisèle Guillou was born in West Germany in 1952 while her father was serving in the French army. Her family moved to France when she was a child, and her mother died of cancer when she was nine. Her father remarried a woman whom she didn’t get along with. She met Dominique Pelicot when they were both 19. In a 2026 interview with The New York Times, she described wanting to get away from her stepmother “and live a happy life.” And she did: Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot married in 1973, and the first of their three children, David, was born the next year.

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In the same interview with The Times, she described the idyll that she once thought was her life as well as the realization that it was not real:

I had this joie de vivre with Monsieur Pelicot. All our friends and family liked him. He was always ready to help, athletic. I only knew a kind and caring man. Which is terrifying.

The abuse

In 2010 Dominique Pelicot was arrested for using a camera hidden in a pen to film under women’s skirts. He was fined about $120 and released. Gisèle Pelicot didn’t learn of the arrest until 2020. In 2011 Dominique Pelicot began drugging his wife, mixing crushed sleeping pills and antianxiety medications into her food and drink. While she was unconscious, he repeatedly raped her and invited dozens of men to do the same, using a chat room titled “Without Her Knowledge” on the French messaging site Coco to solicit his fellow rapists. The site, which was referenced in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity between 2021 and 2024, has since been shut down by authorities.

Gisèle Pelicot suffered from physical issues related to the drug cocktails and abuse, including hair loss, memory loss, and gynecological issues. But she had no recollection of the attacks—which at times were shockingly violent—and so she went to doctors in search of a diagnosis, terrified that she had Alzheimer disease and was dying.

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The revelation

Dominique Pelicot was arrested again for filming up women’s skirts in September 2020. The French police seized a number of his electronics, including two phones, filming equipment, and his laptop. Later that year Gisèle Pelicot met with the police, who told her about videos they had found on her husband’s devices showing that he had been drugging and raping her and allowing other men to rape her. The police also showed the couple’s middle child, Caroline, recovered photos of herself sleeping in lingerie that she did not recognize as her own. The police also discovered photos of the couple’s daughter-in-law and former daughter-in-law taken without their knowledge. Dominique Pelicot was arrested.

Law enforcement began arresting the other men who had raped Pelicot in February 2021. Dominique Pelicot had directed the police to a hard drive in his garage that contained thousands of images and videos. Many were stored in a folder labeled “abuse.” In total law enforcement identified at least 92 counts of rape by 72 men ranging in age from 26 to 74.

The trial

The trial began in September 2024 and riveted the country. Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to remain anonymous and insisted that the court show images and videos taken by her former husband. She was one of the first witnesses in the three-and-a-half-month-long trial, taking the stand and looking out on the dozens of men accused of raping her. When asked why she had chosen to testify publicly, she calmly told the court:

So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pelicot. No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized. We must address this scourge.

During the course of the trial, which shocked much of France, demonstrators took to the streets in some 30 cities to express their outrage at the crimes and their support for Gisèle Pelicot.

In December 2024 Dominique Pelicot was found guilty of all charges; he received the maximum sentence, 20 years in prison. The 50 other men tried (not all 72 could be located) were also found guilty: 46 of rape, two of attempted rape, and two of sexual assault. One man, Jean-Pierre Marechal, was on trial not for raping Gisèle Pelicot but for using the same methods to rape his own wife and letting Dominique Pelicot rape her as well. Only one man, Husamettin Dogan, appealed the court’s verdict. Dogan argued that he was innocent, despite video evidence shown in court of him raping Pelicot, arguing that he didn’t know that Pelicot had been drugged against her will. The appeals court rejected his appeal and increased his prison sentence from 9 years to 10. The French media referred to the men as Monsieur Tout-Le-Monde (“Mr. Everyman” in English) because of their varied ages, professions, and family lives.

Moving on

In the wake of the verdicts, Gisèle Pelicot stated, “I wanted all of society to be a witness to the debates that took place here. I never regretted making this decision.” Pelicot’s decision turned her into a feminist icon, with citizens and journalists praising her. She was included in the 2025 Time 100 list and was named a knight of France’s Legion of Honour. Her trial also contributed to legal reform; in October 2025 the French Senate passed a law stating that “any non-consensual sexual act constitutes sexual assault.”

In February 2026 Gisèle Pelicot released a memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, which she wrote with journalist and novelist Judith Perrignon. In it she dismisses her attackers and all who would attack women:

Parrots, deplorable mouthpieces, violent, cowardly little people. I want all that remains of them to be the words they used to trample over me, to reduce one woman—and therefore all women—to absolute submission in the name of male domination.