Tall stacks of books stand on the parquet floor and desks of this office in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, with black-and-white author portraits hanging on the walls. As of this month, Gisèle Pelicot, 73, is among them. In just a few days her first book* will be published. In fall 2024, Pelicot became famous worldwide because she insisted that the trial against her rapists be made public. She wanted everyone to be able to see and hear what had happened to her.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 08/2026 (February 13th, 2026) of DER SPIEGEL.
For nearly a decade, her husband had regularly sedated her and then had complete strangers rape her in their own bedroom – strangers he found through an ad ("Seeking accomplices to rape my drugged wife") in an internet forum that has since been shut down. Most of them came from within a 50-kilometer radius of Mazan, the town in southern France where the couple lived. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, filmed each of the rapes, both to document the assaults and because it aroused him. As a result, unlike in typical rape cases, the evidence against the defendants was overwhelming. Most of them nevertheless denied their actions, declaring in court that they were not rapists. In the end, all of them were sentenced to prison terms of between three and 20 years, only two of which were suspended.
Dominique Pelicot's crimes were only uncovered because the security guard at a supermarket in Carpentras in southern France called the police after he discovered Dominique Pelicot filming up women’s skirts with his cell phone in fall 2020. Gisèle Pelicot later thanked the man.
DER SPIEGEL: Madame Pelicot, the trial in Avignon began more than a year ago, and the appeals trial has been over since October, 2025. How are you doing today?
Pelicot: Better. This story forced me to take stock of my life. I tried to rise up from this field of ruins. The hardest time is behind me. I now allow myself to be happy again.
DER SPIEGEL: And – are you?
Pelicot: I can experience happy moments again. Which is also because there's a new man in my life. I never could have imagined falling in love again. I thought I would spend the rest of my life alone, with my friends and my children. I liked the idea. But then, chance brought me together with Jean-Loup, who has also experienced much suffering. There is an important message behind all this: There is a way out of the darkness. That's something else I hope to communicate with my book.
A demonstration in support of Gisèle Pelicot in Avignon in fall 2024. The lines outside the courthouse grew from day to day.
DER SPIEGEL: You haven’t given a single interview since your case became known, and you have declined various awards people wanted to give you. Now, in a few days, your book is coming out in 22 languages, accompanied by a worldwide press campaign. Why are you putting yourself through this? You could also simply take long beach walks on the Atlantic island where you now live.
Pelicot: I can't forget what happened anyway. So I'm trying to make something of it. I didn't want to remain trapped in pain, and the book helped me with that. I told my story to show others that everyone has enough resources to survive the worst. Can someone like me find pleasure in life again, laugh again? Yes. I'm the best proof of that.
DER SPIEGEL: Your book bears the title "A Hymn to Life." The original versions was "La joie de vivre," "The Joy of Living," not exactly a title one might expect from a rape victim.
Pelicot: That's precisely why I like it. I never wanted to be reduced to the victim role, never wanted to be the "poor little woman," as the newspapers wrote. Of course there's still a deep sadness in me. But it can't be given too much space.
DER SPIEGEL: Even at your first appearance before the court in Avignon in September 2024, you stood upright, spoke with a clear voice and didn't break down. Where do you get this strength, this resilience?
Pelicot: It’s in our family's DNA. My mother became very ill when I was still small, she had a brain tumor and bone cancer. But she never complained. She never let herself cry and she kept her smile until the very end. What Monsieur Pelicot, as I call him today, did to me is not the first tragedy in my life. I was nine years old when my mother died. My brother suffered from severe depression afterward and died far too early, like my father. I'm the only survivor of my family. Back then, I told myself, nothing worse can happen to me, nothing will ever be able to break me.
DER SPIEGEL: Your three children say you maintained your composure even during the first days after you learned about the rapes.
Pelicot: I've always been very controlled, but there were many dark moments at the beginning. I was 68 years old and had lost everything from one day to the next: my previous life, my home, my husband, all my plans for retirement dissolved into thin air. I sold the furniture with the children on the internet, shortly afterward I was standing at the Gare de Lyon in Paris with two suitcases and my dog. That was all I had left. I had to get away from that house, not just because my home had become a crime scene. It was too dangerous to stay there. The rapists still had my address, and many of them were still at large at the time. When I think of that moment at the train station in Paris, my eyes still fill with tears.
DER SPIEGEL: Only three days before that, a police inspector in Carpentras had informed you that your husband had invited a total of more than 80 men to rape you. How long does it take to come to grips with something like that?
Pelicot: At first, I didn't understand anything at all. I didn't recognize myself in the photos of the rapes that the inspector showed me. I didn't know the men who were lying next to this woman. It was like my brain was switched off. What I saw there was impossible. I thought it was maybe a photo montage. I drove home thinking that my husband would come back, that everything was just a terrible mistake. My psychologist later explained to me that I had had a classic dissociation reaction. As a protective mechanism, my brain simply didn't want to accept what I was seeing.
DER SPIEGEL: In your book, you describe how you then began cleaning your entire house.
Pelicot: Exactly. When I was at the police station, the police had searched the house again and everything was in disorder. So I tidied up, started the washing machine, hung up the laundry, ironed and cleaned. I wanted my old life back. The tidying had something calming about it. Then, a friend came over, a person I had called because the inspector had told me I shouldn't be alone under any circumstances. She asked what was wrong. I told her: "Monsieur Pelicot raped me and had me raped." It was the first time I had spoken the word "viol," rape. And it was also the first moment I began to understand what had happened, even if I didn't yet know the full extent of his actions.
Gisèle Pelicot: "I loved my husband."
DER SPIEGEL: Very early on, you tried to separate the years of abuse from the good moments of your marriage. You refused to view the nearly 50 years of your marriage as a single, continuously dark chapter. Was that your way of reducing the suffering?
Pelicot: You can't reinvent your life when you're 70. Life is composed of memories, after all. To be able to go on living, I had to tell myself that those 50 years couldn't have been one single lie. That was important to me. I still have good memories from that time: I loved my husband, I had three children with him, we had many happy moments. He was never violent, never hit me, didn't drink.
DER SPIEGEL: You even described him in court as a loving husband.
Pelicot: And as a good, caring father and grandfather, which he actually was. That was one side of Monsieur Pelicot, the A-side. Nobody knew the B-side back then. Neither our family nor our friends nor my children. No one could have imagined that he was capable of something like that. Nor could the numerous doctors, incidentally, whom I consulted during the 10 years during which he was regularly drugging me.
DER SPIEGEL: You were afraid you had a brain tumor because you were suffering from increasingly severe blackouts and you sometimes couldn't remember what you had done the day before.
Pelicot: I went to three neurologists. None of the doctors became suspicious. How could they? The first suspected a stroke, the second diagnosed anxiety. The third told my children I was showing all the signs of early-stage Alzheimer's disease. The gynecologists I went to also only found recurring inflammation of the cervix. At each appointment, Monsieur Pelicot sat beside me looking concerned. No one concluded that I was being abused. No one could imagine that a husband would drug a woman of my age in order to have her raped.
DER SPIEGEL: Even your pain and your fear of an incurable disease weren’t enough to deter Dominique Pelicot. That made it all the more incomprehensible for your children that you held onto the good times with your husband.
Pelicot: For all three children, their father quickly became a monster. The man they had loved, who had cared for them, suddenly no longer existed. They saw themselves robbed of their childhood and youth. After the revelations at the Carpentras police station, we were all in shock, but each of us reacted differently to it. People always think shared suffering would bring a family closer together. That's a fallacy. For us, it was like an explosion that swept everything away.
DER SPIEGEL: In your book, you describe an episode in your home in Mazan when your daughter Caroline, in a fit of anger, destroyed a number of things: dishes, drawings made by Dominique Pelicot, photo albums. "Everything shattered. The objects. Our story. Us," you write. Was that the first moment of estrangement between you and your children?
Pelicot: Caroline wanted to destroy everything. When she started hurling the plates from the cupboard and I pleaded with her not to smash everything, she screamed: "But what do you want to keep from this life?" For her, these objects were like a betrayal she could no longer bear. I could understand Caroline's anger. At the same time, I felt completely powerless. Her two brothers behaved more calmly, but they were no less angry. All my children still suffer today from the fact that the father they knew no longer exists.
Gisèle Pelicot with her children in the courtroom in September 2024. "For all three children, their father quickly became a monster."
DER SPIEGEL: Your daughter didn't speak to you for several months. She accused you of not seeing her as a victim. There are also photos of her in her underwear, sleeping. Caroline believes she was also raped. How is your relationship today?
Pelicot: On the path to improvement. I had surgery in November, and afterward Caroline called me for the first time in a long while. We now talk on the phone every day, but I think we still need time. She's waiting for answers she hasn't gotten yet. I know how painful it is for her. Having to live with doubt is like eternal hell.
DER SPIEGEL: You write in your book that you would have liked to keep the photos that were destroyed, these pictures of the father, the husband, the family. In court, the defendants' lawyers tried to deduce from your attitude toward Dominique Pelicot that you had willingly submitted to him. They even went so far as to say you hadn't wanted to see what could have been seen.
Pelicot: Hatred and anger are rather foreign to me as emotional states. I'm deeply outraged, disgusted by what he did. And I also pressed charges immediately and divorced him. Nevertheless, we have a shared history that I can't erase. We both come from rather unhappy families: Monsieur Pelicot had a tyrannical, authoritarian father; at nine years old he was raped in the hospital by a nurse. After my mother's death, my father sank into depression. My father's new wife never liked me, there was no warmth there, she was constantly against me.
DER SPIEGEL: Dominique Pelicot opened up a pathway out of this life for you?
Pelicot: When we first met, it was as if we were rescuing each other. As if he could heal me and I could heal him. He was 19 years old at the time, very shy and blushed at every opportunity. My heart went out to him. We were 20 when we married. We were very much in love and happy. Those are among the memories I don't want to erase.
DER SPIEGEL: Your book also reads like a story of emancipation. As he was constantly changing jobs and was repeatedly unemployed, it was up to you to keep the family afloat with your steady salary and career advancement.
Pelicot: I was self-taught, but at EDF, the state-owned electricity company where I started as a secretary, I was offered management positions over time. Monsieur Pelicot took care of the children, took them to school and did the housework. That was rather rare in the 1970s, but I was happy that he readily took on that role and that we were such a modern couple. That made it all the more incomprehensible when I learned in 2020 what he had done.
DER SPIEGEL: A few months before the Avignon trial, you decided that it should be open to the public. It was essentially a political decision, with an uncertain outcome. The director Milo Rau, who made a play about your case, says that he sees this decision as "a triumph of civilization amidst all the darkness of this story."
Pelicot: It wasn't an easy decision. It took me four years. My daughter told me early on that I had to fight against excluding the public from the trial. But at first, I didn't feel ready for it. I didn't want everyone to know. I didn't want everyone to hear what had happened to me. Like all rape victims, I felt terribly ashamed. It's like a double punishment that victims impose on themselves, this terrible shame.
December 19, 2024: the day the verdict was announced. All 51 perpetrators were found guilty.
DER SPIEGEL: Many rape victims take constant showers, as if they could wash away the shame.
Pelicot: I spent hours in the shower. I wanted to get rid of all the filth, the mud that these men had left on my body. I also took long walks. For me, that was like therapy; I was alone with myself and could think in peace. On one of these walks, it became clear to me that if the trial wasn’t public, I would be giving these men the greatest of gifts. No one would see what they did. After that, I called my lawyers and told them my decision.
DER SPIEGEL: Did they agree with you?
Pelicot: They asked me to sleep on it for a night. The next day, I told them my decision stood. They said they would support me on the path I had chosen, but they also said that I had to watch the videos of the rapes right away. They said the videos would be shown in the courtroom, and the danger that I would collapse in front of everyone if I saw them there for the first time would be too great. To that point, I had only seen two or three photos at the police station and had read the defendants' interrogation transcripts with all the details. That was terrible enough. Anything else was beyond my strength.
DER SPIEGEL: Your husband had filmed each of the 50 rapists and labeled the videos with a title, a date and a name like an archivist. Did you watch all of them?
Pelicot: That would have taken several hours. My lawyer Stéphane Babonneau had made a selection of videos that he thought I had to see. I was already living on the Atlantic island Île de Ré at the time. He sent me a link, and we then watched the excerpts together via video conference. Sitting in his Paris office, he described to me beforehand what I would see. After each video, he asked if I wanted to take a break. But I watched them all in one go, even though my heart was racing.
DER SPIEGEL: You later testified in court that it had looked in the videos as if these men were raping a dead woman.
Pelicot: I look like a rag doll. My cheeks were hanging slack and all the tension had gone out of my body. It was hard for me to imagine that it was me.
DER SPIEGEL: What did you do after you watched the videos?
Pelicot: I had to get out of the house. I walked for an hour or two. Outside it was raining and it was very windy that day, but I needed it. Confronting the elements, the rain and the wind gave me the feeling that I was still alive. I cried. A lot. Through the wind, my tears cut into my cheeks like tiny razor blades. At some point, I went home and said to myself: Well, now that's done too.
DER SPIEGEL: During this period, you refused to allow yourself to cry in front of others. That requires almost superhuman discipline.
Pelicot: It may sound strange, but that's how I function. I've always hidden my tears from others. My sadness belongs to me, I don't want to share it with others. I'd rather be the woman who stands upright when others are watching.
DER SPIEGEL: In that, you succeeded. You only left the courtroom in indignation on one occasion.
Pelicot: I was well prepared when I came into that room. You don't just walk in there when you know that 51 defendants and their lawyers will be facing you. I knew what to expect. I knew that all eyes would be on me, that they would try to incriminate me.
DER SPIEGEL: What kind of preparations did you make?
Pelicot: I developed a precise plan for my initial court testimony. At first, I had written down mainly facts, but then my lawyers told me: Gisèle, you also have to talk about your childhood and youth. You have to show the court who you are as a person. I was uncomfortable with that; I belong to a generation that tends to be reserved about such things. But then I followed their advice.
DER SPIEGEL: Were your lawyers satisfied?
Pelicot: No. Stéphane Babonneau said: Now please set your papers aside and speak freely. That seemed like an impossibility to me, but I practiced that too. My new partner adopted the role of judge and would ask me questions and I answered. When I stepped up to the witness stand in Avignon for the first time, I knew what I wanted to say.
Gisèle Pelicot in conversation with DER SPIEGEL journalist Britta Sandberg in Paris. "I've felt like a feminist my entire life."
DER SPIEGEL: Many in the courtroom – the defense attorneys, but also the judges – seemed surprised by your demeanor. They even turned against you. Soon, people were saying: "She isn’t behaving like a victim, so she can't be doing that badly." Was that something you had been expecting?
Pelicot: I had to expect anything and everything. But I want to explain something again because it's important to me. Unlike other victims, I have no memories whatsoever of the rapes. It was as if I was under general anesthesia. I wasn’t afraid for my life like other rape victims are. I didn't feel these men's hands, I didn’t feel their bodies on my body. I don't have to live with these memories for a lifetime like others do.
DER SPIEGEL: The trial went on for almost four months and many days in court lasted eight to 10 hours. What were the most difficult moments for you during this period?
Pelicot: The first weeks were especially hard to bear, when the defendants' lawyers were trying to portray me as an accomplice of Monsieur Pelicot. They showed photos in court of me swimming naked in our pool and in underwear in an effort to discredit me. Monsieur Pelicot had taken them. He was constantly taking photos of me, both with and without my knowledge. It was a gold mine for the defense attorneys. "Might you perhaps have exhibitionist tendencies after all?" they asked me.
DER SPIEGEL: There was also the day when the defendants' lawyers showed photos of a woman who looked very similar to you having group sex in the garage of your house and insinuated that was you.
Pelicot: It was disgusting. My lawyer subsequently asked me in a courthouse conference room if he could photograph my bare stomach with his cell phone. I have a large mole above my belly button and the woman in the photos shown in court didn’t. We needed the photo as proof that it wasn’t me in the garage. It was one of the most absurd moments of the trial, and we laughed about it afterward. One of the many "fous-rires” – fits of laughter – during those months.
DER SPIEGEL: What kinds of things got you laughing?
Pelicot: There was, for example, the one defendant who, when the judge asked why he hadn't simply stopped and left my bedroom, said: "Your Honor, I believe my brain shut down at some point and my genitals took over. They replaced my brain." It was really too funny.
DER SPIEGEL: Despite the overwhelming evidence, they still tried to pin the blame on you – just like in other rape cases. Is that because the patriarchy was being put on trial and society still isn’t ready for it?
Pelicot: My lawyers had prepared me for all of that, but when I then heard these pathetic excuses from my rapists, it was something else again. The banality of their excuses was unbearable. "No, I didn't rape this woman," they said. Or: "Her husband had given his consent." Or: "I thought she'd wake up right away and join in. I was lured into a trap." By what right did these men enter my bedroom without my consent? Because a husband can still dispose of his wife's body? That's over.
Courtroom drawing of primary suspect Dominque Pelicot: "That was one side of Monsieur Pelicot, the A-side. Nobody knew the B-side back then."
DER SPIEGEL: During your second questioning in court, you didn't even try to hide your anger about the things you had heard.
Pelicot: I can still remember my first sentences in the witness stand today: "Monsieur Le Président, I believe I'm the guilty one here, and behind me sit 51 victims. Because none of them committed rape, none of them noticed anything, even though one of them testified that he thought I was dead when he entered the bedroom." I also later said that it had been a trial of cowardice. The patriarchy was cowardly and banal.
DER SPIEGEL: When the videos were shown in the courtroom, you always focused on your cell phone. What were you looking at?
Pelicot: Photos, pictures of my favorite beaches on the Île de Ré. Of my grandchildren, of landscapes I love, of the mountain Mont Ventoux in the Vaucluse. I had already seen the videos. I had to occupy my brain with something else. I wanted to get away from the courtroom, mentally at least.
DER SPIEGEL: Did you ever have any regrets about your decision to make the trial public?
Pelicot: Quite the contrary, without the public I would have been alone in the room with my lawyers and children next to these 51 defendants and their defense attorneys. This way, journalists and the public were present. Without the publicity, no one would have believed what could be seen on the videos. The defendants and their lawyers would have been able to subsequently explain to the press that it hadn’t really been all that bad. The trial wouldn't have received the same attention. I wanted this publicity. Both for me and because I wanted to bring about social change.
DER SPIEGEL: When did you first realize that public opinion had shifted to your side and that you had suddenly become a symbolic figure of the women's movement?
Pelicot: At the end of the second week of the trial. Suddenly, there were these women applauding me when I left the court and giving me bouquets of flowers. A man who had traveled from Lille told me: "I'm ashamed of what you have to suffer." It all had something liberating about it. Initially, I had only wanted to attend the first two weeks of the trial. But when I saw that the lines in front of the court were getting longer every day, I thought, I can't leave now, I have to stay.
Women applauding Gisèle Pelicot as she leaves the courthouse.
DER SPIEGEL: Feminists hailed you as an icon and the sentence "Shame has to change sides!" began circling the globe. Does your new role come with a special responsibility?
Pelicot: I've felt like a feminist my entire life, as a free and financially independent woman. But I was never militant and won't become so at 73 years old either. I support this fight. I wanted this trial to accomplish something.
DER SPIEGEL: Do you think it did?
Pelicot: Society doesn't change from one day to the next. At least the French Parliament has since incorporated the principle of a woman's consent to sexual intercourse into law more clearly than before. And everyone now knows what is meant when one speaks of chemical submission, meaning the administration of sedatives to render women as well as men defenseless. I believe I've laid a small building block so that things can change for women.
DER SPIEGEL: Still, aren't you paying a high price for your decision to have the trial take place publicly? The relationship with your children is no longer the same as before. You can no longer walk down the street unrecognized. Paparazzi photographed you with your new partner and these photos then appeared on the cover of the magazine Paris Match.
Pelicot: The fact that I was once again photographed without my knowledge and consent while walking with Jean-Loup – that was deeply violating after everything that had happened. What are these people thinking? I sued them and donated the 40,000 euros in compensation to two victim organizations. I didn't want the money. People who approach me on the street, on the other hand, don't bother me. They're often touching encounters. Many young women are among them, and that makes me happy.
Gisèle Pelicot: "People who approach me on the street don't bother me. They're often touching encounters."
DER SPIEGEL: In your book, you write about a rather unusual wish: You want to visit your ex-husband Dominique Pelicot in prison.
Pelicot: I haven't been able to speak directly with Monsieur Pelicot since November 2020, since my visit to the Carpentras police station. Not even during the trial. I have to see Monsieur Pelicot again. It will be my way of saying goodbye to him. But I also need answers to questions I still have. Answers also for my daughter Caroline, I have to know what happened there. He has to tell me the truth.
DER SPIEGEL: Have you already applied for the prison visit?
Pelicot: No. But I hope to be able to see Monsieur Pelicot this fall.
DER SPIEGEL: Madame Pelicot, thank you very much for this interview.
Gisèle Pelicot, Judith Perrignon: "A Hymn to Life. Shame Has to Change Sides." Penguin; 256 pages; 25 euros. Published February 17.
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