Gisèle Pelicot recounts her ordeal: "The policeman told me that fifty-three men had come to my house to rape me."

ParisGisèle Pelicot, The French woman whose husband drugged her with medication so that at least a hundred men could rape her while she was unconsciousShe breaks her silence more than a year after the trial that sentenced Dominique Pelicot to the maximum penalty of twenty years in prison. The woman has not given any interviews or participated in any public events since the trial. It made her a role model for feminismBut he is about to publish his memoir, A hymn in life (Ara Llibres), in which she recounts her love story with Pelicot, the shock of discovering the truth, and everything that followed.

The book will be published in France and other countries around the world, in 22 different languages, on February 17th, and so far the publishers have chosen to keep the text secret, but the newspaper Le Monde This Tuesday afternoon, the French newspaper published excerpts from the book, written by Gisèle Pelicot with the help of journalist and novelist Judith Perrignon.

The account of the victim of one of the most publicized trials in recent French history spares no detail. In one of the excerpts published by the French daily, Pelicot recounts the harrowing moment when a police officer informs her that her husband has been drugging her for years and inviting men to their home to rape her. The officer first shows her photographs of her, motionless, with different men on top of her, sexually assaulting her. Her initial reaction is to deny the evidence.

—It's you, the one in that photograph.

—No, it's not me.

I put on my glasses, and he showed me another photograph. The same woman with her back to the camera, with a tattooed man beside her.

-It's you.

-No.

I didn't recognize those people. Nor that woman. Her cheek was very sagging. Her mouth, loose. She looked like a rag doll.

The difficulty of assimilating the facts

During her testimony in court, Gisèle Pelicot already described that moment, but only briefly. In the book, she offers a longer, more precise account, with more details. After the police officer showed her the photographs, he pretended it was her bedroom and that the woman in the photograph was her. "It's not me. It's a photomontage. The work of someone who wants to hurt Dominique," Pelicot replied, still unable to process the images she had seen.

Then the officer broke the news to her. "The police officer blurted out a number. Fifty-three men had allegedly come to our house to rape me. I asked for water. My mouth went numb," she writes. A psychologist then entered the room, but the victim still couldn't process what she had seen. "I don't need her [the psychologist]. I'm sure of my happiness, of our happiness. Almost fifty years of marriage, and I still have a vivid image of the first time I saw him. His smile. His shy gaze. His long, curly hair down to his shoulders." "My mind stopped in Agent Perret's office," adds Gisèle Pelicot.

May shame change sides

The woman, who has been divorced from Dominique Pelicot for years, also explains why she decided to request that the trial not be held behind closed doors: she wanted to publicly expose her rapists and draw attention to the phenomenon of drug-facilitated sexual assault. If the trial wasn't public, "weren't I giving them a gift? Wasn't I protecting them by closing the door?" she asks in the book, the woman who asked during the trial that "the shame change sides."

Gisèle Pelicot, 73, admits that twenty years ago she might not have dared to refuse a closed trial. "Perhaps shame fades more easily when you're seventy and when no one pays attention to you anymore. I don't know. I wasn't afraid of my wrinkles or my body. I loved Jean-Loup [her partner since 2023], and he loved me. My happiness also weighed heavily in the decision," she writes.

To mark the publication of the book, Gisèle Pelicot has given interviews to some media outlets such as the New York TimesThe interview, which was also released on Tuesday, features a video published by journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro on X. The video shows Pelicot inside a Parisian taxi and then seated at a table with the American journalist, explaining the moment the police officer first showed her photographs of herself lying unconscious in her bed with various men raping her.