For about a decade, prosecutors allege, her husband drugged her and recruited men online to rape her while she was unconscious — leaving her with troubling gaps in her memory and other lingering physical and psychological scars she couldn’t explain.
Standing in front of her now-former husband, Dominique Pélicot, and some of the dozens of men accused of raping her between 2011 and 2020, she told judges how her world — and her identity — crumbled around her when police told her what happened to her.
“Inside, I am a field of ruins,” she said in court Thursday on the fourth day of her ex-husband’s trial, which is set to last until Dec. 20.
The extraordinary and sordid allegations at the heart of this trial have sent shock waves through the French public — as did the alleged victim’s request Monday for the trial to take place publicly, with members of the press and others present. One of her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau, previously told The Washington Post that she wanted the world to know what had happened to her. She has since divorced Pélicot and changed her last name, Babonneau said. Although The Post typically does not name victims of sex crimes, in this instance the woman asked to be identified by her married name, Gisèle Pélicot. She is 72.
Dominique Pélicot does not deny any of the facts of the case, according to his lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, who told journalists that Thursday’s court hearing would be the first time he would be confronted with his ex-wife’s “anger.”
“I think it’s a moment he’s dreading,” Zavarro said, according to French television station BFM.
The alleged victim took the stand around 9 a.m. Thursday. She said that for her, everything began on Sept. 19, 2020, when her then husband told her he had been caught filming three women under their skirts in a public venue. She was shocked, she recounted — “in 50 years of life together, he never made any obscene gestures.” But she decided to move past it. “I tell him, ‘This time, I will forgive you, but there will be no next time. You will have to apologize to these women,’” she said, according to BFMTV. “I could not imagine the extent of what I would discover next.”
Following Pélicot’s arrest on charges of upskirting, as the crime is known, police seized his laptop, phones and other devices, where they found hundreds of photos and videos allegedly showing his wife being sexually assaulted by multiple men, Babonneau previously told The Post. Police also found photos of the couple’s daughter and two daughters-in-law that appeared to have been taken without consent while they were in the bathroom or sleeping, he said.
Less than two months later, the couple was summoned to a police station near their home about 20 miles northeast of Avignon in southern France. There, officers showed her photos of herself, dressed in clothes she did not recognize, with men she did not recognize, according to her lawyer.
“My world falls apart,” she told the court Thursday while recounting that day. “Everything I built with Mr. Pélicot collapses. Three children, seven grandchildren, a close-knit couple,” she said, according to BFMTV. In that moment, all she wanted to do was “disappear,” she said.
She told the judges that she watched all the recordings that her ex-husband allegedly made of her being raped while she was unconscious. She criticized any attempt to characterize the footage as “sex scenes,” saying, “They are rape scenes.”
“When you see this woman, drugged, mistreated, dead on a bed — of course the body is not cold, it is warm, but I am like dead,” she said. “These men are defiling me, taking advantage of me.”
“I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she added.
Police believe that at least 72 men raped the alleged victim a total of at least 92 times, with some men returning to rape her up to six times. They say Dominique Pélicot laid out strict rules, including that the men should not smell of perfume or smoke that might jog his wife awake, and that they should not wear condoms, Babonneau previously told The Post.
According to French media, more than half of the 51 men accused in the case have acknowledged the charges against them but claim they did not know the woman was drugged and had not consented. Some have said they thought the couple were swingers living out a sexual fantasy. Dominique Pélicot has said the men were all aware that his wife was drugged and unconscious, according to Le Monde.
Emmanuelle Piet, president of the Feminist Collective Against Rape, a French advocacy group, said this case is unique because the alleged rapes were meticulously recorded and catalogued. Many victims of rapes committed with the use of drugs do not remember what happened to them, Piet told The Post in an interview Thursday. When they do report to law enforcement, they are often not taken seriously, she said.
“There is a culture of denial of violence against women, even more so a culture of denial of rape,” Piet said. Rape committed using drugs — a form of “chemical submission,” as it’s known in France — is even less accepted, she added.
There has been greater awareness of chemical submission in France since last year, when a lawmaker, Sandrine Josso, accused a colleague in Parliament, Joel Guerriau, of drugging her in his apartment, where she said she went to celebrate his reelection. After she realized she had been drugged, she said she left the scene to go to a hospital and later filed a complaint with police. Guerriau was detained on suspicion of drugging Josso so he could sexually assault her. His lawyer, Remi-Pierre Drai, said in a statement at the time that his client was “not a predator” and claimed without elaborating that “a handling error” caused Josso to feel sick.
Josso, who has since fought in Parliament for greater recognition of chemical submission in France, said in a post on X on Wednesday that she was traveling to Avignon to attend Dominique Pélicot’s trial and to stand with the alleged victim and her family.
“Shame and fear must change sides,” she said.
