17 Details From Gisèle Pelicot’s Memoir That Show What Her 50-Year Marriage Was Really Like

Gisèle Pelicot is a 73-year-old French woman who became the subject of media attention when she waived her right to anonymity and insisted on a public trial for her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot.

In 2020, the couple had been married for almost 50 years when a bombshell was dropped on Gisèle. Dominique was caught taking upskirt photos of women at the local supermarket. When police investigated the crime, they found photographic evidence that Dominique had spent the last nine years drugging and raping Gisèle. He also invited more than 72 men into their home to rape Gisèle while she was unconscious.

Dominique and 50 other men were tried and convicted. 71-year-old Dominique was given the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Now, Gisèle has written a memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, about the crimes and how she endured her husband’s immeasurable betrayal.

Here are some of the revelations from Gisèle’s memoir about her marriage to a monster hiding in plain sight.

1. Gisèle thought she was in a happy marriage. She was completely blindsided when police sat her down and explained the photos and videos they found. A big part of why she wrote the memoir, was to spend time trying to understand how the man she loved could be such a monster.
2. The couple met as teens. They married quickly and had two sons and a daughter. Gisèle says Dominique’s father was authoritarian and abusive, and believes he was sexually abused as a child.
3. Gisèle was the breadwinner in the family. Dominique tried and failed to start several businesses.
4. Both Gisèle and Dominique cheated in the past. Gisèle had an affair in the 80s and Dominique lived with another woman in the 90s. Gisèle says she cheated because the marriage was tense, citing that Dominque frequently pressured her sexually to do things she did not want to do like allowing Dominique to videotape her during sex, swinging and anal sex.
5. The couple divorced in 2001 for financial reasons — to keep assets from being seized by creditors after one of Dominque’s businesses failed. They remarried in 2007.
6. In 2013 the couple retired and moved from Paris to southeastern France. Gisèle thought this was the happiest time of their marriage. However, Dominique had begun drugging and raping her around 2011, before they left Paris. He used a website called Coco Chat to recruit stranger men to come to the couple’s home and rape an unconscious Gisèle.
7. Police found more than 20,000 photos and videos Dominique had taken of Gisèle being abused, organized by perpetrator name and date.
8. In order to avoid detection, Dominique recruited only non-smokers and insisted they not wear cologne or use condoms.
9. As a result of being drugged and raped, Gisèle began to experience “mysterious” health problems. She lost weight, had “persistent gynecological problems”, had anxiety and memory issues, and had a crown come loose as a result of oral rape.
10. Police also found footage Dominique had taken with a hidden camera of his daughter and granddaughters in the shower.
11. In France, the victim has the power to decide whether a trial is closed or public. The defense was shocked when Gisèle said she wanted it to be public. They expected her to request it to be closed so that her name would not be released.
12. At Dominique’s trial, a psychiatrist testified that he had a split personality. He also said that Dominque was a narcissist who had no empathy and was a sexual sadist.
13. Dominique told the judge he avoided watching the video evidence being presented because it would turn him on.
14. One of the defendants said “If I had wanted to rape someone, I’d hardly have gone for a fifty-seven-year-old woman, I would have picked a prettier one.” Yet the video evidence of the man’s choice exists, and he was convicted.
15. Gisèle had to watch all of the videos before the trial so that she wouldn’t be blindsided.
16. Dominique testified that he was motivated by a desire to “force
    an insubmissive woman into submission.” Gisèle writes that she thinks he meant that he needed to punish her for having boundaries throughout their relationship, like the fact that she wouldn’t submit to his desire for swinging or anal sex. While she was unconscious, Dominique even dressed her in the kind of lingerie she had previously refused to buy.
17. Gisèle questions whether Dominique abused their daughter, and plans to visit him in prison in order to ask.