Gisèle Pelicot publishes her memoirs: "I am alive and I need to believe in love"

ParisAfter a trial that made headlines around the world and sentenced her ex-husband to 20 years for drugging her and handing her over to a hundred men to be raped, Gisèle Pelicot publishes her memoirs this Tuesday. A hymn in life (Now Books). The book, originally written in French, is being published simultaneously in more than twenty countries and has been translated into 22 languages, a rare feat in the publishing world. "I have rarely been the first editor of a book translated into 22 languages. It is also unique in that it is a book with a significant social impact," explained Sophie de Closets, the book's editor and president of Flammarion, the French publishing house that has put 150,000 copies on sale, on BFMTV.

Gisèle Pelicot became a feminist icon and a figure in the fight against sexual violence for her courage in demanding that the trial of her ex-husband and the men who raped her not be held behind closed doors. It was a conscious gesture, to expose those men to the public eye and to draw attention to drug-facilitated sexual assault. "The shame had to change sides (...). Everyone had to see the 51 rapists. They were the ones who had to hang their heads, not me," Pelicot writes.

During the public trial, videos were shown of the men sexually assaulting her while she lay motionless in bed. "I would like this story to serve others, so that a woman who wakes up in the morning, who doesn't remember what she did the day before, asks herself and says: 'Hey, that reminds me of the Pelicot trial,'" she stated in an interview on France 5.

Stop being a victim

In both the interviews she has given recently and in her book, Pelicot asserts her determination to stop being a victim. "I am a woman who is still standing," is one of the phrases she has repeated most often. She recounts how she has rediscovered happiness thanks to her grandchildren and her new partner, Jean-Loup, who discreetly accompanied her during the trial and with whom she lives on the Île de Ré, off the French Atlantic coast. "To explain that I am alive, that I need to believe in love," she writes in the book. "To explain that you can rise from the ashes, that I have recovered the joy of living, that I love Jean-Loup and that I often go to leave flowers on his wife's grave, because the present can never trample on the past." She also maintains that thanks to her new partner, she dared to request that the trial be public: "I wanted it, and Jean-Loup loved me. I was happy, and that also played a part."

Pelicot maintains that she feels neither hatred nor resentment toward her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, and that she has tried to understand his "descent into hell." A descent that led him to contact other men through a website to rape his wife while she was unconscious, sedated with medication he had secretly administered. In the book, she announces that she will visit him in prison to speak with him, "even though many advise against it." Since the day they went to the police station where the police informed her that she had been raped by strangers, she has not had a single private conversation with him. "I need him," she says.

Audiovisual material, key to the conviction

Dominique Pelicot, who also raped her while she was sedated, recorded everything for his own pleasure. The video footage was key in the trial to convict Pelicot and the fifty or so men who also sexually assaulted her. The police counted around one hundred assailants, but were only able to identify half. The whole thing came to light in 2020, when Gisèle Pelicot's ex-husband was caught in a supermarket recording up customers' skirts with his mobile phone. The police arrested him and confiscated his computer. There they found photographs and videos of the sexual assaults.

The book was written with the help of journalist and novelist Judith Perrignon, who spent time at Pelicot's home to get to know her better and interview her. Since the trial, held at the end of 2014, the book's protagonist had remained very discreet and had not made any statements or public appearances until recently, when she granted interviews to various media outlets to mark the book's publication. She will now embark on a tour, first in France and then in other countries, to present her memoirs and plans to visit Barcelona in March. In addition, HBO Max is preparing a documentary about her story.