Gisèle Pelicot found out she was the victim of a crime when police showed her the evidence: photos and videos spanning a decade, in which a series of men raped her unconscious body in her own bedroom. More confounding still was the perpetrator: The 72-year-old’s husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot. Between 2011 and 2020, Dominique routinely drugged his wife and invited strangers to join him in assaulting her, often filming the encounters. Gisèle has no memory of the attacks, but beginning in September, saw many of them played in court as dozens of defendants stood trial in Avignon, France. Three months later, the verdict came in: All 51 men accused were guilty on rape charges.
Most of Dominique’s co-defendants received sentences of eight to ten years in prison, falling short of the ten to 18 years prosecutors requested. Gisèle ex-husband, also 72, will serve 20 years in prison, having pleaded guilty to a suite of charges before the trial began. According to the New York Times, these included aggravated rape; drugging; and the violation of not only his wife’s privacy, but also his daughter’s and daughters’-in-law: Police also found illicit photos of them when searching Dominique’s devices. The revelation of his abuse destroyed a formerly tight-knit family, while the why behind his actions remains an open question: In all those months of testimony, the accused never gave Gisèle a satisfactory explanation for their participation in the scheme.
Although she had the right, under French law, to keep the proceedings private, Gisèle opted to open the trial to the public so that “when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pelicot,” she said as proceedings began. “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized.” Thanking her supporters outside the courthouse on December 19, Gisèle reiterated that despite the extreme difficulty of the hearings, she “never regretted making this decision.”
Here’s what’s been reported about the case.
What happened to Gisèle Pelicot?
Gisèle and Dominique met when they were 19 and married at 21. The Times reports that, despite periods of financial strain and even brief infidelity, she considered Dominique the great love of her life. “I thought we were a strong couple,” she said, per the Times. “We had everything to be happy.” They had three children, seven grandchildren, and regularly vacationed all together. “Even our friends said we were the ideal couple,” Gisèle said in court, according to The Guardian.
For years, Dominique appeared a devoted husband: After the couple retired to the southern town of Mazan in 2013 and Gisèle fell inexplicably ill — she was losing weight; her hair was falling out; she randomly experienced significant lapses in her memory, which she called “total blackouts” — it was Dominique who took her to see various doctors. “I was persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor,” Gisèle testified, according to the Times. But now, her symptoms appear to be the result of crushed sleeping pills Dominique had been slipping into her food and drinks. At trial, Dominique’s brother, a physician named Joël Pelicot, testified to writing Gisèle a prescription for the psychoactive Temesta (Lorazepam in the U.S.) because she “suffered from bouts of anxiety and had trouble sleeping,” according to France 24. Dominique evidently secured a Temesta prescription for himself, as well, and when he wanted to knock out his wife, began dosing her with as many as three to ten tablets in a day. France 24 reports that by the time he was arrested, Dominique had been prescribed almost 780 Temesta pills. “To understand the origin of all this, we would have had to think of the unimaginable,” Joël told the court, explaining how doctors could’ve missed the signs that something sinister was going on, or failed to consider “chemical submission” as a possibility. “You only find what you look for — and you only look for what you know.” On top of which, Joël added, Dominique was a “great manipulator” and a liar, even from childhood. But because he was the little brother, Joël explained, the family gave him a pass.
When Gisèle became unconscious, investigators say Dominique invited strangers into their home to join him in raping her. According to the AFP, he found these men via a forum called “without her knowledge” on the now-defunct website coco.gg, which had reportedly been involved in tens of thousands of police investigations before French authorities shut it down in June. Beginning around 2011, Dominique is believed to have orchestrated more than 200 rapes this way, enlisting more than 90 men, The Guardian reports. He allegedly obligated these men to follow certain rules while they were in the couple’s home. Usually, they would wait nearby as Dominique drugged his wife and arrive at the house once she’d lost consciousness. They had to speak quietly, according to the Associated Press, and to avoid arousing suspicion, they could not wear cologne or show up smelling like tobacco smoke. Clothes were to be removed in the kitchen, and hands to be warmed before entering the bedroom.
In court, Dominique again admitted to the premeditated assaults, his lawyer stating — per The Guardian — that after his arrest, Dominique “always declared himself guilty.” Dominique admitted, “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.” He reportedly told police that he started drugging his wife so that he could make her wear clothes and do things she wouldn’t while awake and said he never took money from the men he invited to rape her. Gisèle, referring to her husband now only as “Monsieur Pelicot,” described it differently. “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she testified. “They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.” For her, the most accurate word to describe her husband’s crimes is torture.
How did she find out?
In 2020, the Deutsche Welle reports, a security guard at a grocery store caught Dominique attempting to upskirt several women, allegations that led to his arrest. The case snowballed from there: On the devices investigators confiscated from Dominique, they found some 300 photographs and video footage of men sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman, who would turn out to be Gisèle; per the Times, the count eventually rose to 20,000. Rounding off Dominique’s damning digital footprint, officers also discovered meticulous records of the assault: the messages he had sent to his recruits, in which he “boasted of drugging his wife,” per the Times, and solicited strangers’ participation. Dominique had also organized his photos in a folder on his computer, labeled “abuse,” adding dates and file names to most of the footage.
But other women featured in his accounts, too. The Guardian reports that he kept a folder entitled, “Around my daughter, naked,” which contained collages of her similarly incapacitated and nude. (She wrote a memoir about her father’s crimes, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa, in 2022, under the pen name Caroline Darian.) Dominique had also taken surreptitious photos of his daughters-in-law, naked, without their knowledge or consent.
When police summoned Gisèle to the precinct, DW reports, she at first defended her husband as a “great guy.” Then they showed her his archives. “For me, everything collapses,” she told the court, according to the AP. “These are scenes of barbarity, of rape.”
Gisèle left the police station, packed “all that was left for me of 50 years of life together” into two suitcases, and filed for divorce from her husband, she told the court. Subsequent testing revealed she had multiple sexually transmitted infections. “I no longer have an identity,” she testified, according to the AP. “I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself.” She has since changed her surname, but is using Pelicot at trial.
Exactly how many men were on trial?
In addition to Dominique, the 50 men police had identified stood accused of having raped Gisèle; according to the Times, a second defendant’s box had to be built in the court room to contain them. The suspects ranged in age from 26 and 74, and worked as journalists; plumbers; nurses, IT consultants, truck drivers, and more. Many purported that they had no idea that she had been drugged, and that Dominique had tricked them, promising a threesome with his wife who was merely pretending to be asleep; others said they thought she was a consenting participant. Gisèle did not buy it, telling the court: “They knew exactly what they were doing and what shape I was in.” According to the Guardian, she even recognized one of the men accused of raping her: A neighbor who’d visited their home to talk about cycling with her husband, or so she believed. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello,” she recalled in court. “I never thought he’d come and rape me.”
Most of the defendants were charged with aggravated rape; one, according to the Times, was accused of having replicated Dominique’s methods on his own wife, and inviting other men — including Dominique — to assault her while she was unconscious.
Who are Dominique Pelicot’s other alleged victims?
As mentioned, Dominique was also accused of taking unsolicited photographs of his daughter and his daughters-in-law, and was also found guilty on violation-of-privacy charges for those. In court, Darian recalled the moment she first saw her father’s photos, in which she lay in bed, ostensibly asleep. “I realized right away that I was drugged in that photo,” she testified, according to the Times. While Dominique has not been charged with drugging and abusing his daughter — he denies ever physically violating her — she cannot escape her suspicions, calling her father “the greatest sexual predator of the last 20 years” in court.
In addition to the charges pertaining to his family members, Dominique is also under investigation for two sex crimes that occurred in the 1990s, according to the Times: The rape and murder of a 23-year-old in 1991, which he denies, and the attempted rape of a 19-year-old in 1999, to which he has admitted. Both victims were real estate agents, as was Dominique, at least for part of his working life. In early October, the UK Times (citing Le Parisien) and Daily Mail reported that France’s cold case squad had identified Dominique as a potential suspect in five other crimes — rapes, assaults, and one murder — perpetrated against female estate agents between 1991 and 2004. The investigations reportedly “surprised” Dominique’s lawyer, and are ongoing. It’s possible Dominique could land back in court for these at a later date.
What did Dominique Pelicot say in his testimony?
Originally, Dominique was slated to testify during the trial’s second week, but a kidney infection with several concurrent ailments delayed his testimony until September 17. When he finally addressed the court, he once again admitted his guilt. Dominique claimed that his supposed sex addiction was too strong for him to give up the scheme, but he also expressed remorse. “She didn’t deserve this,” he said of Gisèle, according to the New York Times. “I regret what I did and ask for forgiveness, even if it is unforgivable.”
Part of Dominique’s testimony answered accusations from his fellow defendants that he had — according to one of the lawyers for the accused — “totally duped, fooled, tricked and trapped” some of those who participated in the rapes. “Today I maintain that I am a rapist, like those in this room,” he testified, per the Times. “They all knew her condition before they came, they knew everything. They cannot say otherwise.” According to local media, Dominique maintained that the men came to him of their own volition. “They asked me, I said yes,” he told the court. “I didn’t put anyone in handcuffs to bring them here.” He also added that the obligations he placed on them — in addition to those mentioned above, he asked them to bring test results and condoms but said he still “let it happen” when they neglected the latter — “left no doubt” as to Gisèle’s state.
Dominique reportedly also recalled experiencing abuse in his youth, saying he was sexually assaulted at age 9 and forced to watch a rape at age 14. “From my childhood I remember only shock and trauma,” he said, according to the French news report. He also indicated that it was Gisèle who lifted him out of it and that he was happy with her throughout their marriage. “I’m crazy about her,” he said. “Even if it’s paradoxical, I never thought of my wife as an object.” Observing that “a person isn’t born perverted, they become perverted,” Dominique also addressed the footage he filmed of the rapes, saying they were “part pleasure” and “part insurance.” As to why he labeled them so meticulously, he told the judges, “It was perversion, vice, but it was also an outstanding means of helping me remember certain people,” he explained, according to local media. Because of his recordings, he claimed, “we could find all those who participated.”
While Dominique did not refute the allegations that he abused his wife, he did deny drugging or raping his daughter, and he denied ever having inappropriately touched his grandchildren. “When you suffered as a child what I suffered, you are not at all tempted by that kind of thing,” he told the court, according to the Times. “I have never touched a child. I would never touch one.”
As testimony came to an end in November, Dominique addressed the court one last time. He blamed the sexual violence he allegedly suffered in his youth, saying it “created a crack” in his personality that never closed. His “fantasy,” he explained, was to “subdue an unruly woman,” but “without making her suffer.” It was “selfish,” he admitted, per local media. Nonetheless, he emphasized, these other men were part of that plan. They “voluntarily accepted what I proposed,” he said, adding, “Without me, they wouldn’t be here and without them, I wouldn’t be here.”
What have the other accused said in court?
For the most part, the men who testified claimed that Dominique lured them to his home under false pretenses, and that they couldn’t have raped Gisèle because they had no idea she didn’t consent. While several have acknowledged that their actions qualified as rape, they largely maintained that any blame should lie with Dominique and Dominique alone. “If I had not met Mr. Pelicot, I would have never committed this act. He was reassuring, like a cousin” one of the first men to testify, who allegedly copied Dominique’s plan on his own wife, said in court. Another of the men recalled remarking that Gisèle must be “dead,” she was so unresponsive; nonetheless, he continued to assault her for the next half hour. ”I am not a rapist,” he insisted. “That’s too much for me to bear. It’s her husband. I never thought that guy could do that to his own wife.”
A number of other men claimed they thought Dominique and Gisèle were engaged in a sex game, and role-playing a sort of fantasy. That, they have said, is why they didn’t ask questions. “I had this idea of a promiscuous couple, where the wife might be asleep, perhaps because she was a shy person,” another of the men, Jacques C., testified. Even though Gisèle’s unresponsive state suggested to him that something was wrong, Jacques C. performed oral sex on her; indeed, he only left when Dominique shooed him out, because Gisèle appeared to react. “When he came back I told him I did not want to be there,” Jacques C. recalled. As he was leaving, he said, he “thought about reporting the incident. But then life resumed its course; the next day I went to work very early, and that was that.”
At the same time, as Gisèle herself has pointed out, none of them made an effort to confirm that she had consented to this purported game. “I have been called an alcoholic, a conspirator of Mr. Pelicot,” she said, according to France24. “In the state I was in, I absolutely could not respond. I was in a comatose state; the videos show that.”
As the first of her alleged abusers took the stand, Gisèle told the court that she felt “humiliated” by the process. “Rape is rape,” she said, according to France24. These “degenerates” could’ve checked with her, she noted; they didn’t. “When they see a woman sleeping on her bed, no one thought to ask themselves a question? Don’t they have brains?” she said, per The Guardian. “When does a husband decide for his wife?”
Read our full coverage of testimony from the accused here.
What has Gisèle Pelicot said in court?
About halfway through the trial, Gisèle gave a second round of testimony, hitting back at the idea — repeated by character witnesses throughout the trial — that the accused are upstanding men of whom her ex-husband had taken advantage. “Me, I had the same in my house,” she said, according to the New York Times. Before police alerted her to her husband’s crimes, she had believed him to be the “perfect man,” she added. “So many times, I said to myself, How lucky am I to have you at my side. For me, he was someone I trusted entirely,” she said, per The Guardian. “I wouldn’t have stayed 50 years if he had behaved like a violent brute.” The feeling she is left with is “total incomprehension,” she said. “I would never have imagined a man could do this.” But, she added, “The profile of a rapist is not someone met in a car park late at night. A rapist can also be in the family, among our friends.”
Gisèle spoke about her ex-husband’s method and how he was able to keep it from her. The answer appeared to boil down to trust. “Often when there’s a football match on TV, I’d let him watch it alone,” she testified, according to The Guardian. “He brought my ice-cream to bed, where I was, my favorite flavor, raspberry. And I thought, How lucky I am, he’s a love.” Gisèle said she never noticed the drugs’ effects. “I never felt my heart flutter, I didn’t feel anything. I must have gone under very quickly. I would wake up with my pajamas on. The mornings, I must have been more tired than usual, but I walk a lot and thought it was that.”
Though she wasn’t able to look at him, she addressed herself directly to Dominique, asking, “How could you betray me to this extent? Bring these strangers into our bedroom? For me, this betrayal is immeasurable.”
“I’m a woman totally destroyed,” she told the court, as reported by France Bleu. In testifying, she said, her goal was not to “express her anger, nor her hatred, but [her] determination to change society.”
“I hear people say, ‘You have so much courage,’ but it’s not courage,” she said. What propels her is her desire to “move society forward on the question of rape. I want to because I have all these women and all these men behind me, helping me to continue this fight because it’s not just mine; it’s the fight of all rape victims.” Similarly, she explained, she wanted an open trial so that “all women [who are] victims of rape can tell themselves, ‘Madame Pelicot did it, we can do it.’ I don’t want them to be ashamed. It’s not us who should feel ashamed, but them.”
In her final statements, Gisèle said she had witnessed “the trial of cowardice.”
“Since the beginning, I have heard things that are … unacceptable,” she told the court. “I saw on parade those who deny rape, those who talk about it as banal.” She addressed herself to those men in particular: “When you entered the room, at what moment did Madame Pelicot give you consent? Faced with this inert body, at what moment do you become conscious? At what moment are you not going to the police?”
Gisèle also had to answer questions from various defense attorneys. “But an admitted rape, is it less serious?” one, Carine Monzat, asked, per France Bleu. “I won’t respond to that question, it’s indecent,” Gisèle answered. Instead, she spoke to an idea several of the defense attorneys brought up: that she remained under Dominique’s “very strong influence,” as attorney Nadia El Bouroumi put it. “You don’t stay under the influence for 50 years,” she said. Dominique subjected her to chemical submission, she went on, “but he never forbade me from doing anything. I did what I wanted. I couldn’t detect anything abnormal about him.”
Questioned on why she seemed able to reserve some sympathy for Dominique — why she didn’t seem angrier with him — Gisèle said she hadn’t forgiven him but returned to his 50 co-defendants. “They could have had my death on their conscience,” she said, per France Bleu. “They really came to satisfy their sexual urges. Yes, I’m angry with these individuals. They could have stopped. Not a single one went to the police, and that really raises questions.” Speaking about the version of herself displayed for the court on Dominique’s video, she added, “She isn’t sleeping, this woman; she’s unconscious.”
Speaking on Gisèle’s behalf, her attorney — Antoine Camus — reminded the court why his client wanted to air these crimes in public: to trigger “deep reflection” within and about French society. “How, in France in 2024, can a woman still suffer what was inflicted on Gisèle Pelicot for at least ten years?” he asked, per France Bleu. “How, in France in 2024, can one find at least 50 men, but in reality 70 individuals, in a 50-kilometer radius, to take advantage of this inert body, unconscious, which one would think was dead?”
“It’s time we understand that rapists aren’t necessarily serial [rapists],” Camus said. “You can rape once in your life.”
Camus also underscored the importance of the video evidence, without which, he said, “it is likely that Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse would have continued until she was killed. They speak and spare us the word-against-word to which the vast majority of rape trials in France are reduced.”
Gisèle’s second lawyer criticized the ways in which the defense had tried to explain away or minimize their clients’ actions, even in the face of all that proof. “They explain [it was] an ‘accidental’ rape, an ‘involuntary’ rape, an ‘altruistic’ rape, or even now an ‘irresponsible rape,’” said Stéphane Babonneau, according to France Bleu. The trial, he hoped, would “change the idea, anchored in the male imagination, that a woman’s body is an object of conquest.”
What was the verdict, and how were the men sentenced?
On the morning of December 19, chief judge Roger Arata read out the verdicts and sentences over the course of an hour, the Associated Press reports. Dominique, who received the maximum sentence for his crimes, cried as the decisions came in. His lawyer said he has not yet decided if he will appeal.
The judges found 46 of his 50 co-defendants guilty of rape, two of attempted rape, and two of sexual assault. Per the BBC, their sentences ranged between three and 15 years in prison, though six men who received suspended sentences thanks to health problems and time already served walked free.
Hassan Ouamou, currently on the run from French authorities in Morocco, was tried in absentia and sentenced to 12 years in prison. According to the New York Times, Jean-Pierre Maréchal, who replicated Dominique’s operation on his own wife, was sentenced to 12 years in prison and has no plans to appeal. Charly Arbo, who nearly attempted the scheme on his own mother, and who visited the Pelicots’ home six times, was sentenced to 13 years. Romain Vandevelde, who also made six trips to the Pelicot house and who never wore a condom despite his HIV status — positive, but suppressed — was sentenced to 15 years.
Given that most sentences fell below the minimums prosecutors requested, the Pelicot children felt “disappointed” by the court’s leniency, an unnamed family member told the AFP. All of the men convicted now have ten days in which to file any appeals.
How did Gisèle react to the verdict?
As Arata read out the verdicts, the woman at the trial’s center reportedly rested her head against the courtroom wall. When she walked out of the building, a crowd of cheering supporters greeted her, shouting, “Merci, Gisèle,” according to The Guardian. She then read prepared remarks, calling the trial “a very difficult ordeal” and thanking “all the people who supported” her and had given her “the strength to come back every day.”
“I think of the unrecognized victims whose stories often remain in the shadows. I want you to know that we share the same fight,” she said. “I wanted, by opening the doors of this trial on September 2, that society could take hold of the debates that took place there. I have never regretted this decision. I now have confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which each woman and man can live in harmony with respect and mutual understanding. I thank you.”
This post has been updated.