In November 2011, Gisèle Pelicot found herself sleeping excessively.
Weekends were mostly spent in a deep slumber, which frustrated her because, as a hard-working supply chain manager during the week, her free time was invaluable. Despite her desire to remain awake, she often unexpectedly drifted off, waking hours later with no recollection of falling asleep.
Regardless, Gisèle, aged 58, felt content. She considered herself fortunate to have Dominique, her husband of 38 years, by her side. With their three children—Caroline, David, and Florian—grown up, the couple was planning to retire soon and relocate to Mazan, a charming village of 6,000 residents in France’s picturesque southern region of Provence. There, Dominique could enjoy bike rides while she took their French bulldog, Lancôme, on long walks.
Since their first meeting in the early 1970s, Gisèle had cherished Dominique. “When I saw that young man in a blue jumper, it was love at first sight,” she would later reminisce. Both had complex family backgrounds filled with loss and trauma, but they had found solace in each other. Their four decades together had not been without challenges—frequent financial difficulties and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s—but they had persevered through it all.
Years later, when a lawyer asked her to describe their relationship, she replied, “Our friends always said we were the perfect couple. I believed we would spend the rest of our lives together.”
By then, Gisèle and Dominique found themselves on opposite sides of a courtroom in Avignon, near Mazan: she was supported by their children and her legal team, while he sat in the defendant’s glass enclosure, clad in grey prison attire.
Dominique faced the maximum sentence for aggravated rape, gaining infamy in France and beyond as—according to his own daughter—”one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years.”
Back in 2011, when Gisèle was concerned about her excessive sleeping, she could never have anticipated the turn of events that lay ahead.
She was unaware that, as he approached retirement in his late 50s, her husband Dominique Pelicot had been spending considerable time online, frequenting open forums and chatrooms where sexual content—often extreme or illegal—was readily accessible.
In court, he later identified this period as the catalyst for his “perversion,” exacerbated by a childhood of rape and abuse: “We become perverted when we find something that provides the means—the internet.”
Between 2010 and 2011, a man claiming to be a nurse sent Mr. Pelicot photos showing his own wife incapacitated by sleeping pills, along with detailed instructions on how to do the same to Gisèle.
Initially, Mr. Pelicot hesitated—but not for long.
Through experimentation, he discovered that the correct dosage could induce a sleep so profound in his wife that she wouldn’t awaken. These pills had been legally prescribed by his doctor, who believed Mr. Pelicot was suffering from anxiety due to financial difficulties.
This allowed him to dress her in lingerie she refused to wear or subject her to sexual acts she would never consent to while conscious. He could also film these scenes, something she would not permit when awake.
While it began with him as the sole perpetrator, by the time the couple settled in Mazan in 2014, he had refined and expanded his heinous actions.
He stored tranquilizers in a shoebox in the garage, eventually changing brands because the first type was “too salty” to discreetly mix into his wife’s food and drink, as he later admitted.
On a chatroom titled “without her knowledge,” he recruited men of various ages to come and violate his wife.
He filmed them as well.
In court, he stated that his wife’s unconsciousness was evident to the 71 men who visited their home over a decade. “You’re just like me, you like rape mode,” he told one participant in their online chats.
As the years passed, the effects of the abuse Gisèle Pelicot suffered at night began manifesting in her waking life. She lost weight, experienced significant hair loss, and her blackouts became more frequent. Anxiety consumed her, leaving her convinced she was nearing death.
Her family grew increasingly concerned. She appeared healthy and energetic whenever she visited them.
“We’d call her, but most times Dominique answered. He’d say Gisèle was asleep, even in the middle of the day,” recalled her son-in-law Pierre. “It seemed plausible because she was so active when she was with us, especially running after the grandchildren.”
Police station visit changed everything
At times, Gisèle nearly grew suspicious. Once, she noticed the green tint in a beer her husband handed her and quickly poured it down the sink. On another occasion, she discovered a bleach stain on new trousers that she couldn’t recall making. “You’re not drugging me by any chance, are you?” she asked him. He broke down in tears: “How can you accuse me of such a thing?”
For the most part, however, she felt fortunate to have him by her side as she dealt with her health problems. She developed gynecological issues and underwent numerous neurological tests, concerned she might have Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor, but none of the results explained her increasing fatigue and blackouts.
Years later, during the trial, Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor, was asked why medical professionals hadn’t identified Gisèle as a victim of the little-known phenomenon of chemical submission—drug-facilitated rape. “In medicine, we can only find what we’re looking for, and we look for what we know,” he replied.
Gisèle only felt better when she was away from Mazan—a peculiarity she hardly noticed.
Upon returning from one of these trips in September 2020, Dominique tearfully admitted to her: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothes in a supermarket,” she recounted during the trial.
She said she was very surprised because “in 50 years, he had never behaved inappropriately or used obscene language towards women.”
She forgave him and asked him to promise to seek help.
He agreed, “and we left it at that,” she said.
But Dominique must have known the end was near.
Soon after his arrest at the supermarket, police confiscated his two phones and laptop, where they would inevitably discover more than 20,000 videos and photos of his wife being raped by him and others.
“I watched those videos for hours. It was troubling. Naturally, it affected me,” Jérémie Bosse Platière, the director of the investigation, testified in court.
“In 33 years in the police force, I’d never encountered anything like it,” added his colleague Stéphane Gal. “It was sordid and shocking.”
Their team was tasked with identifying the men in the videos. They meticulously cross-referenced the faces and names that Dominique had recorded with facial recognition technology.
They managed to identify 54 individuals, while 21 others remained unidentified.
Some of the unidentified men mentioned in conversations with Dominique that they were also drugging their partners. “That, for me, is the most distressing aspect of the case,” Mr. Bosse Platière remarked. “Knowing there might be women out there who are still victims of their husbands.”
On November 2, 2020, Dominique and Gisèle shared breakfast before heading to a police station, where Mr. Pelicot had been summoned regarding the upskirting incident. There, a policeman asked her to accompany him to another room. She confirmed Dominique was her husband—”a great guy, a good man”—but denied any involvement in swinging or threesomes with him.
“I will show you something you won’t like,” the police chief warned her before presenting a photo of a sexual act.
At first, she didn’t recognize the two people.
When she did, “I told him to stop… Everything fell apart, everything I’d built for 50 years.”
She returned home in shock, accompanied by a friend, and had to inform her children about what had happened.
Reflecting on that moment, Gisèle said, “My daughter’s screams are forever etched in my mind.” Caroline, David, and Florian came to Mazan to clear out the house. Later, photos of a seemingly drugged Caroline were discovered on Dominique’s laptop, though he denied abusing her.
‘You cannot imagine the unimaginable’
David, the eldest child, shared that all their family photos were discarded because they “removed everything connected to my father immediately.” Within days, Gisèle’s life was whittled down to a suitcase and her dog.
Meanwhile, Dominique confessed to his crimes and was formally arrested. He expressed gratitude to the police for “relieving him of a burden.”
Gisèle and Dominique wouldn’t see each other again until they faced each other in the Avignon courtroom in September 2024.
By that time, the shocking story of the husband who drugged his wife for a decade and invited strangers to assault her had gained international attention, propelled by Gisèle’s courageous decision to waive her anonymity and open the trial to the public and media.
“I want any woman who wakes up one morning with no memory of the night before to remember what I said,” she declared. “So that no more women can fall prey to chemical submission. I was sacrificed on the altar of vice, and we need to talk about it.”
Her legal team successfully argued for the videos to be shown in court, contending they would “disprove the notion of accidental rape,” countering the defense’s claim that the men were unaware Gisèle was unconscious.
“She wanted shame to change sides, and it has,” remarked a woman attending the trial in Avignon in November. “Gisèle turned everything on its head. We weren’t expecting a woman like this.”
Medical examiner Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve noted that following her husband’s arrest, Gisèle appeared clearly traumatized yet maintained a calm and distant demeanor—a coping mechanism often used by survivors of terrorist attacks.
Gisèle herself described feeling like “a field of ruins” and feared that the remainder of her life might not suffice to rebuild herself.
Ms. Sainte-Beuve praised Gisèle as “exceptionally resilient,” stating, “She transformed what could have destroyed her into strength.”
Days before the trial began, the Pelicots’ divorce was finalized.
Gisèle reverted to her maiden name, though she retained the Pelicot name during the trial so her grandchildren could be “proud” to be associated with her rather than ashamed of the connection to Dominique.
She has since relocated to a village far from Mazan. She consults a psychiatrist but avoids medication, determined not to ingest any substances. She continues her long walks, now free from fatigue.
In the early days of the trial, Caroline’s husband Pierre took the stand.
A defense lawyer questioned him about the years in Mazan when Gisèle suffered from memory loss while her husband diligently accompanied her to futile medical appointments. How could the family have missed what was happening?
Pierre shook his head.
“You’re forgetting one thing,” he said. “You cannot imagine the unimaginable.”
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