An Extraordinary Account of a Dangerous Marriage
One afternoon in 2024, when her session in court had ended unusually early, Gisèle Pelicot went to the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras, a picturesque town in Provence. She asked to meet the security guard who, four years earlier, had confronted her husband, Dominique, after observing Dominique trying to use his phone to film up the skirts of unsuspecting female shoppers.
The guard had been irate at the time. He had been thinking, he later told the Daily Mail, about his mother and sister, who shopped at that supermarket and might have been vulnerable to this creep with a cameraphone. Police officers who arrested Dominique Pelicot went to his home, seized his personal devices, and found more than 20,000 images and videos of Dominique—and of other men he had invited into his home—raping his drugged wife.
Gisèle Pelicot wanted to thank the guard, who she believes saved her life. Prior to her husband’s arrest, her physical health had been deteriorating due to almost a decade of being drugged and violently assaulted. Had no one intervened, she thinks, he eventually would have killed her.
Pelicot recounts this story in her new book, A Hymn to Life. It’s an extraordinary account of her marriage to Dominique, their life together, the revelation of his crimes, and the public trial of him and 50 other defendants, men from a wide range of ages and backgrounds whom Dominique had met online in a chat room called À Son Insu (“Without Her Knowledge”) and invited to his home to assault Gisèle. (All 51 defendants were found guilty of varying charges, many for aggravated rape; Dominique, who is 73 years old, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.)
In her account, Pelicot also mentions other security guards who, around 2010, had also caught Dominique taking upskirting photos. Back then, she writes, “the police clearly didn’t think filming under women’s skirts was terribly serious, because he got away with a fine of 100 euros, and I never heard a thing about it.” At the time, upskirting was still something paparazzi photographers did to female stars—many of them teenagers—with apparent impunity; the words nonconsensual pornography weren’t applied to this kind of behavior until much later, and the act itself wasn’t officially criminalized in France until 2018. But if the police had taken Dominique’s earlier offenses seriously, would they have been able to prevent what he became?
I’ve been stuck on this question because the central mystery of the Pelicot case seems to have been what kind of man could do such a monstrous thing to his wife. What kind of man reverberates as a bass line through the news coverage of the trial, the interviews with Dominique’s family members, the books, even my own writing. It’s a strange inquiry, because we know very well what men can do to women when they feel untouchable. In 2024, some 83,000 women and girls were killed intentionally, 60 percent of them by their intimate partner or a family member—137 a day. (That’s compared with just 11 percent of male homicides in which the victim was killed by an intimate partner or family member.)
Since Dominique Pelicot was arrested, news stories have emerged of an Italian Facebook group where users posted intimate photos of women to its tens of thousands of mostly male members; a Telegram channel reportedly devoted to swapping tips on how to sedate women before assaulting them had more than 70,000 members. The latest tranche of the Epstein files has revealed messages between world leaders or billionaires and a convicted child sex offender in which the dehumanizing catchall word pussy abounds in subject lines and sentence fragments, as a party password and a buddy-buddy bonding prompt.
[Read: Not all men, but any man]
We know that there are also many good men, honorable men. The outraged security guard, for one. The lawyers who flanked Gisèle Pelicot in court, protected her from cameras, took her to lunch every day so that she wouldn’t be intimidated by seeing some of the men who were on trial for assaulting her drinking beer and laughing together in a nearby café. But for half a century, Pelicot thought she was married to one of these good men. Her husband claimed during his trial that he himself was one for four decades, until his urges became too strong to resist.
People who commit appalling sexual crimes are generally “more like us than not like us,” the clinical psychologist Veronique Valliere argues in her 2022 book, Unmasking the Sexual Offender. Down in the undercurrents of the internet, Dominique Pelicot found not just fantasy but community. And it’s been hard lately not to notice the trend toward more flagrant male transgression out in the open—more performative vice signaling among some of the most powerful people in the world. So the question after reading A Hymn to Life becomes slightly different from What kind of man would do such a thing to his wife? Gisèle Pelicot famously said that she wanted a public trial because “shame has to change sides.” But what do we do when many men can’t—won’t—feel it? What if there are simply more rewards these days for monsters?
A Hymn to Life is an astonishing book—unflinchingly honest, open to self-interrogation, evocative, determined. Co-written with the journalist Judith Perrignon, it begins on November 2, 2020, when Gisèle Pelicot accompanies her husband to the police station for an interview over “something foolish” he’d been caught doing at the supermarket, only for her to be confronted with the truly unimaginable. The deputy sergeant asks her about her husband’s character. “He’s kind, attentive. He’s a lovely guy,” she replies. “That’s why we’re still together.”
The deputy sergeant asks if she and her husband are swingers. Pelicot is disgusted by the question. He tells her that her husband has been arrested for aggravated rape and administering toxic substances. He shows her photographs of a woman wearing a suspender belt being penetrated by an unfamiliar man. “That’s you in the photograph.” “No,” she counters. “That’s not me.” There are more photographs, more men, dozens of them, he says (the police eventually determined 72 in total). Pelicot asks for water. “My mouth is paralysed,” she recalls. “A psychologist comes into the office. A young woman. I don’t need her. I am far away, even though we are in the same room. I am secure in my happiness, our happiness.”
She’s submerged instantly in deep, deep shock. She automatically goes home to wash and dry clothes for her husband, now in police custody, as though she’s “a dog waiting by the garden gate for its master.” Pelicot writes that she had met Dominique when they were teenagers; they were both from very unhappy backgrounds. Gisèle had lost her mother to a brain tumor when she was 9 (the symptoms of which would haunt Gisèle later in life when she started having unexplained blackouts), and her stepmother was unloving and cold. Dominique’s father, Denis, tormented his wife and was suspected of abusing their daughter—a girl with learning disabilities whom they’d adopted when she was 5. (Denis moved her into his bedroom, according to Gisèle’s memoir, as soon as he was widowed.) During his trial, Dominique testified that on a family camping trip, he once discovered his mother in her tent, her hands bound, “being forced to fellate her husband.” Gisèle writes that the bond she had with her husband was based on mutual suffering and mutual rescue: “We were lovers and we were twins. We would always be together; our suffering behind us, we would escape from our damaged families. I would be his cure and he would be mine.”
One of the cruelest ironies of love is how vulnerable it makes you to danger. In her book, Valliere—who as a therapist has frequently worked with sexual abusers—states plainly that “a relationship is the best avenue to sexual offending. It is the path to love, trust, hope, and denial.” Confronted with the images shown to her by the police, Gisèle Pelicot simply cannot process the gap between her idea of her husband and the reality of what he has done to her: the deceit, the manipulation, the degradation; intentionally exposing her to sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV; letting her agonize over inexplicable gynecological symptoms and the terrifying idea that she might be losing her mind.
The reaction of her three children, especially her daughter, Caroline, is totally different. Hearing the news of her father’s arrest, Caroline screams out loud—“a shriek of anguish. The howl of a wounded animal.” The next day, she begins destroying her father’s possessions, smashing plates and tearing up a nude painting hanging in the hallway that turns out to have the word coercion written in pencil on the back. Pelicot is troubled by her children’s immediate disavowal of their father, of their entire childhood. “All their memories had certainly turned out to be unbearable lies,” she writes. “But mine hadn’t.”
Pelicot’s honesty is breathtaking, and it helps make A Hymn to Life all the more revelatory as a sociological document. Despite her confident assertion early on that her husband was a terrific guy, un super mec, her narrative reveals more complexity than her own interpretation of Dominique seemed to allow. From the beginning, by her account, the couple’s sex life bears the dynamic of Dominique pushing Gisèle further than she wants to go. He demands fellatio, then anal sex, which she refuses. In her book, she casually reveals that she didn’t have her first orgasm until she had an affair in her mid-30s, because sex had always been about gratifying her husband. Dominique begins consuming pornography, asking her to replicate certain things he enjoys and taunting her as a prude when she declines. He calls her a “bitch” during sex. He has a tendency to become “aggressive” when contradicted. He’s constantly on his computer. One day, his son’s partner walks in on Dominique masturbating behind his desk, which Dominique seems unembarrassed about, so much so that you can’t help but wonder whether he’d planned it. (In fact, at some point, he set up secret cameras to film each of his two daughters-in-law in the shower; he then posted the images online.) His email handle is “Fétiche45.”
He repeatedly loses his job and runs up huge debts that Gisèle, the main breadwinner, has to pay down. Once, in 2013, she finds bleach on her clothes but has no memory of how it might have gotten there; she jokingly asks Dominique if he has been drugging her, to which he responds with incredulous outrage. The portrait that emerges is that of a domineering liar and narcissist who seems to get off on punishing his wife and making her uncomfortable. That none of this has ever been clear to Gisèle is perplexing even to her. “Beyond the pain of the revelations and the shame of my body being turned into a sack,” she writes, “there was also the shame of having understood nothing—of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own.”
Since the trial, multiple people involved have published books elucidating their own sides of the events. (Dominique Pelicot is apparently writing one from prison.) Caroline, whom Dominique took sexualized photos of while she was sleeping but has always denied abusing, has written I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in which she recounts her family’s history as a “chronicle of horror and survival.” Tormented by her instinct that she was also drugged and assaulted by her father, Caroline can only lash out: at Dominique, who has “soiled” their family; at the “gutter press” that plagues them; and at her mother, whose calm resilience she’s baffled by, and who refuses to concede that Caroline might also be a victim. “Maybe her doubt is an unconscious attempt to shield herself, but it hurts me all the same,” Caroline writes. Her raw anger feels totally alien from her mother’s remarkable strength, and yet both are understandable. “If I allow the full extent of my pain to be seen, all my pain, I will drown in it,” Gisèle writes. “I have no choice but to be invincible.”
In another book about the Pelicot trial, Living With Men, the philosopher Manon Garcia notes that both Gisèle and Caroline were reproached during the trial for not responding correctly to what had happened to them: Caroline was gently asked to behave “more properly” by the judge, who seemed “taken aback by the fury of her pain,” while Gisèle was apparently criticized by one of the defendants’ lawyers for being so calm. “One thing is clear,” Garcia writes. “Whatever you do, you will always be someone’s bad victim.”
But she, too, is torn between expressing a kind of primal rage of her own and deploying a more detached analysis of the “cultural scaffolding of rape,” the social systems that enabled Dominique to easily find scores of men within a 40-mile radius who would rape his wife. The defendants have nothing in common except a culture where, as Garcia puts it, “the only relationship that might count is with other men.”
That many of the defendants came to court expressing not shame but intense anger at Gisèle Pelicot—they were “simmering with rage,” Gisèle writes—suggests that they simply did not think they had done anything wrong. And the reality we are left to confront, Garcia argues, is that they’re not aberrations for feeling this way. They really might be just your average guys next door.
Not all is quite so dismaying. Garcia believes that Gisèle Pelicot would not have been confident enough to ask for a public trial if #MeToo had never happened. Dominique Pelicot was exposed as a direct result of changes to French law that activists had been campaigning for. And in some ways, the generational divide between Gisèle’s long-standing marital devotion (“The principal axis of our lives was the man we had married or were hoping to meet,” she writes in A Hymn to Life) and Manon Garcia’s skepticism (“Can we live with men? And if so, at what cost?”) reveals a growing unwillingness among women to accept an inferior or unsafe status as the price of being loved.
But many are also noticing who’s devastated by the news these days and who isn’t. “I just think it’s funny how men don’t seem to be adequately upset or outraged by the Epstein files,” the artist Chloe Wise posted recently, noting that all the women she knows “can’t sleep” or are “spiraling,” “disturbed,” and “forever scarred,” while “every man is like: ‘Oh yeah, it seems bad, I haven’t really looked into it.’”
[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]
And you’d be forgiven, observing recent news cycles, for coming to the conclusion that, for too many people, a culture that tacitly condones and even enables exploitation is not that big a deal. Consider Meta’s new smart glasses, which make filming someone without their consent far too easy, or the flood of sexualized images of women and children that Grok has generated. Or the ways in which both adult-content sites such as OnlyFans and chatbot platforms habituate users (primarily men) to intimate relationships that are entirely sycophantic and affirming. One of the defining characteristics of generative AI, Paul Ford emphasized in Wired last year, is that it is “totally shameless.” In that sense, he wrote, it’s an apt reflection of the minds that created it, who are themselves just as shameless: “They insist we remake civilization around them and promise it will work out. But how are they going to teach a computer to behave if they can’t?”
The shame must change sides, Gisèle Pelicot still insists. Her story, she argues, “stirs up our violence, our barely concealed sordidness, our dormant traumas, our silences, our equivocations. It is the grubby reflection of the domination and predatory activity that still structure our world.” Her takeaway is that love can be an antidote to such misery, and her faith in it is extraordinary. Possibly even superhuman.