The shame that changed sides Gisèle Pelicot refuses to be a victim in her memoirs

Gisèle Pelicot calls her memoirs "a hymn to life" - even though they tell of years of sexualized violence. The book draws its strength from this apparent contradiction: it is the refusal to bear shame that belongs to perpetrators.

Note: The following text contains descriptions of sexualized violence that can be incriminating.

It may seem strange that a book in which a woman recounts how she was sedated hundreds of times over the years and raped unconscious by her husband and more than fifty other strange men is entitled "A Hymn to Life".

But therein lies the power of Gisèle Pelicot's memoirs, which will be published simultaneously in twenty languages on Tuesday, February 17. They tell of a crime that shook the world - and of a woman who refuses to be reduced to it.

The now 73-year-old French woman begins her stories in 2020, the moment she learned of the actions of her husband Dominique, to whom she had been married for almost fifty years.

She describes going to the police station after Dominique was caught filming women up their skirts in the supermarket. How she initially thought the pictures the policeman showed her there were a photomontage. "And how she didn't believe that the woman lying motionless in her underwear on the bed in the photos while men penetrated her was her.

She talks about how she then went home and cleaned the whole house for the first time and hung up the washing. As if she was trying to bring order to a life that had just fallen apart. As if the monstrosity she had just learned about could simply be wiped away. Only then was she able to say it out loud for the first time: "Dominique has just been arrested. He raped me for years and had me raped by strange men."

Was he always the devil or did he just become one?

Then Pelicot flashes back. Back to 1971 and the following fifty years. She writes about the time when she met Dominique and fell in love with him. Of his shoulder-length curls, the sailor sweater he wore back then. Of the tenderness he gave her and the self-confidence he gave her.

She refuses to erase the fifty years of marriage that she shares with her rapist as a lie. Instead, she asks a question that accompanies her throughout the book: Was Dominique Pelicot always the "Devil of Avignon", as the media later called him, or did he become one? And what to do with the memories of their life together, which did not consist of violence? A marriage that was Gisèle's refuge from her mother's early death and Dominique's salvation from his violent father.

The search for answers sustained her in the days, weeks and years following her husband's arrest. "I couldn't come to terms with losing everything, I fought against complete collapse, my collapse," Pelicot writes. "If the last fifty years of my life were ripped away from me, I would have practically ceased to exist. I would be dead."

This attitude was later interpreted as her protecting her ex-husband - as was her composed, almost cool presence in court. Many could not understand how she could sit in the courtroom without tears and with her head held high. Today, she explains her apparent imperturbability by the fact that she cannot remember the crimes.

The only witness to the crimes is not herself, but photos and videos that Dominique had meticulously archived and which the police found when they confiscated his cell phone. Clear evidence - which is rare in cases of sexualized violence.

Pelicot refused to watch the videos for a long time. "I didn't need the videos, I was already imagining enough. And I didn't want to know every last detail of what had been done to me," she writes. She only watched some of the recordings shortly before the trial. When they were shown in the courtroom, Pelicot bowed her head. She looked at her cell phone, at pictures of her grandchildren, at the sea and at the Atlantic island of Île de Ré, where she now lives.

For her children, who knew her file better than she did for a long time, this looking away, as Pelicot writes in the book, was not protection for a long time, but repression. They accused Gisèle of not sufficiently acknowledging the extent of her father's crimes. While Gisèle was still struggling with what to call the man she had called "Doumé" or "Mino" for decades, her children no longer spoke of a father, but of a monster.

When photos emerged showing their daughter Caroline sleeping on the bed in her underwear, Caroline immediately realized that she too could have been a victim of her father. Gisèle Pelicot, on the other hand, clung to any argument that made this possibility seem unlikely. Dominique had never visited alone and she always slept in the same bed as her husband, she argued.

"I could understand the shock, the pain, the terrible doubts that befell her, I knew it was shaking our family to the core," she writes. "But she wasn't going to perish from it. The children had experienced so much love and warmth."

But the pain and dealing with what the father had done was different for each family member. What was a survival strategy for Gisèle Pelicot felt like betrayal for Caroline - who has also written a book in the meantime. As a relativization of the incomprehensible. As if Gisèle Pelicot was not acknowledging the sacrifices that the children had also made.

And so Pelicot writes openly about how her family fell apart and how they stopped talking to each other. Only now, she says, are they slowly feeling their way back towards each other.

Even if Pelicot still believes that her ex-husband may be a rapist, but - as long as she is not proven otherwise - he is not incestuous. And not necessarily a murderer either. Although Dominique Pelicot is now suspected of having raped and murdered a young woman in Paris in 1991. He denies the accusations.

Unconscious state was an invitation for the perpetrators

The cruelty of Dominique Pelicot's actions is one thing, the other is the frightening simultaneity that Gisèle Pelicot reports: there is her husband, whom she perceived as loving, who accompanied her to countless doctors' appointments while she talked about her dropouts. How she kept forgetting things and was afraid of dying of a brain tumor like her mother. And Dominique, who sat next to her - and knew that these blackouts were the result of his sedation.

Or how he pulled out a tooth crown that had become loose. She had given in to the pressure of the penises that her rapists had put in her mouth the night before.

It is the ultimate form of male power that Pelicot describes in these scenes: The power of interpretation over a woman's body and mind.

And that is why Gisèle's memoirs cannot be read as a journalist - and this article cannot be written - without also doing so as a woman. Without thinking about her own reality. Without addressing the subliminal caution that accompanies many women in their everyday lives.

It is borne by the interchangeability of the perpetrators, who were husbands, fathers, grandfathers, brothers and sons. Journalists, doctors, craftsmen, nurses. 26- to 70-year-old "average guys", as Gisèle Pelicot calls them. "Monsieur Tout-Le-Monde", as the French media wrote. Pelicot's unconscious state was not a limit for them all, but an invitation.

30 perpetrators are still unidentified today

In December 2024, all 51 defendants were found guilty. Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to twenty years in prison, his co-defendants received prison sentences of between three and twenty years.

And yet around thirty other perpetrators who can be seen on the videos remain unidentified to this day. They continue to be part of an everyday life in which women can never completely let their guard down - and even have to fear that it will be taken away from them involuntarily by men.

This is precisely where the political confrontation of this book lies: it is not only directed against a perpetrator, but against a system that let him get away with it. And it directs shame back to where it belongs, where Pelicot already placed it during the trial when she said: "Shame must change sides."

A sentence that went around the world. A sentence that pushes shame - the patriarchy's effective instrument of control that prevents countless victims of male violence from defending themselves, seeking help, reporting perpetrators - away from the victims and towards the perpetrators.

It is the same attitude that motivated Pelicot to make the court case public. She never wanted to be a victim, but wanted to ensure that the perpetrators had to answer not only to her, but to the public. "The whole world should look at the fifty-one rapists. They had to grovel," Pelicot writes.

"I am still able to trust others"

In doing so, she rose above the violence that was done to her. But it does not make her an infallible saint. She is a woman who has survived unimaginable trauma, wrestling with denial, doubt and conflicting emotions. It is a painful struggle that runs through the pages and Pelicot makes so clearly public for the first time in the book: bringing the man she loved for most of her life together with the monster who raped her over and over again.

By describing this so precisely and at the same time in such a humanly imperfect way, she gives something back to herself - but also to all women: the right to be ambivalent and complex. And thus the right to go on living.

And so she also writes about cautiously approaching it. Of being alone. Of falling in love again. "I am aware that my story is the best proof that there are a large number of potential rapists all around us," Pelicot writes. But love has not abandoned her. "I am still able to trust others. That is my strength. Ultimately, my victory."

Behind the decision to write this book in this way - and to call it "A Hymn to Life" - is the refusal to allow herself to be erased as a living, loving and suffering human being. And it makes Gisèle Pelicot a woman you not only have to listen to, but absolutely want to listen to.