She was a victim and became an icon: Gisèle Pelicot tells publicly for the first time how she experienced the spectacular rape affair from her perspective. And what she advises other women.
02/12/2026, 03:3002/12/2026, 05:42
Stefan Brändle, Paris / ch media
It’s Gisèle Pelicot’s turn. For almost ten years, the French woman had been drugged by her own husband and left to strangers to violate her marriage bed. She later had to sit out a trial against 51 defendants that was followed worldwide for four months. But perhaps the most famous face in France never said a single word in public.
Gisèle Pelicot publishes her memoirs and speaks publicly for the first time.Image: keystone
Now she takes it twice. Next week her “memoirs” will be published – because it will be a world bestseller – in several languages at the same time; the German title is “A Hymn to Life” (by Piper).
On Wednesday evening, the neat 73-year-old woman with the pageboy cut and the pointed nose faced the television cameras for the first time. Dressed simply in white trousers and a light blue blouse, she appeared on the French literary program “La Grande Librairie”, flanked by the journalist Judith Perrignon, who assisted her in writing the book.
Her demeanor is just as simple: serious, concentrated, as she was during the monster trial in Avignon, she answers the moderator’s questions soberly, without any obliging smile. How is she? “I’m trying to rebuild myself by writing this book,” she says, before adding after a pause for thought: “On this field of ruins.”
Mother’s smile
But no, she reassures the questioner: despite everything she has been through, she is neither depressed nor suicidal, as happens to many victims. She discovered unexpected powers within herself and even found her joy in life again. The moderator wants to know how. Although she lost her mother as a child – to cancer – she still remembers her smile to this day. That makes her strong.
She compares what she has experienced since then, starting with the police telling her that her husband was in custody, to a TGV speeding past, a tsunami, even an explosion.
Gisèle Pelicot says all of this matter-of-factly. She shows little emotion and describes herself as “shy and discreet”. When she was shown the horrible amateur porn videos, at first she simply didn’t believe that it was her, naked on the bed, being filmed by her husband.
«I saw a strange woman lying there unconscious, soulless. My brain couldn’t handle the realization that it was me. It wasn’t until four or five hours later that I finally came to the realization that I had been raped by my husband and a lot of other men without my knowledge. Again and again.”
The moderator asks very directly: Many people thought that it couldn’t be possible for a woman to “not notice anything” for ten years. Yes, the person addressed answers. And she wasn’t the only one: she consulted two neurologists, gynecologists and other doctors about her misfires and memory lapses. Everyone made a different diagnosis, but no one made the right one: rape. “When I heard that word at the police station, my world collapsed,” says Gisèle Pelicot.
“It was all impossible – after all, I had just spent my fiftieth year with this man for whom I had a coup de foudre as a young woman.”
Today she feels upset, betrayed. But she doesn’t feel any hatred for her ex-husband – from whom she has been divorced since 2024:
“You can’t throw your whole life in the trash. We also had good moments together.”
It was different with the 50 men who accepted the invitation to rape: “Sorry, but they weren’t ordinary men, as they say everywhere,” says their victim. «They were rapists. And not a single person reported my husband to the police.”
During the trial, these defendants gave her evil looks.
“But I looked back with my head held high until they lowered their eyes. I’m proud that I stood up to these men.”
Only twice did she no longer stand it in the hearing room. At one point, a defense attorney explained that a video showed that she had apparently moved her pelvis with pleasure. The medical examiner made it clear that I did it out of pain.
Now Gisèle Pelicot gets slightly angry about “these men” who were all convicted:
“It would take a strong kick into this anthill of our machistic, patriarchal society.”
From the thousands of letters she receives from women who have been raped, it is clear that all of these criminal perpetrators feel unpunished.
Her husband also tried to subdue her, but he didn’t succeed. She is just an ordinary woman, but she has an independent spirit. “I say to all abused women: don’t be ashamed, don’t feel guilty, go to the police. If even one woman does that because she thinks she can do what I did, then I have already achieved my goal.”
When the show ends and Gisèle Pelicot leaves the studio, what happened in Avignon happens: the audience in the TV studio spontaneously begins to applaud. (bzbasel.ch)