Mme Pelicot’s innate dignity shines through, as she explains why she waived her anonymity – after her husband drugged her so that dozens of men could sexually assault her
I
t’s hard to judge an interview with Gisèle Pelicot in the normal terms. Let’s start with the easy bit: Victoria Derbyshire is the ideal interlocutor. The co-presenter of Newsnight has a kind of steely warmth that meshes well with the innate dignity of Mme Pelicot – as she is called throughout – while they walk unflinchingly through her terrible story.
Her “descent into hell” began on 2 November 2020 when the local police called her and her husband, Dominique Pelicot, to the station. They believed it was to do with his recent arrest for covertly taking pictures underneath the skirts of three women in the supermarket. It was not. In the course of that investigation they had found on his laptop thousands upon thousands of videos and photographs accumulated over a decade of his wife unconscious and being raped by strangers.
They showed Mme Pelicot a handful of images. She barely recognised herself, dressed in underwear she didn’t own, and she didn’t recognise the men. “Something exploded inside me,” she tells Derbyshire. She didn’t put a name to what she had seen until many hours later, when she was at home and told a friend: “Dominique raped me and had me raped.” He had her raped by at least 70 men. They were drawn – notes Derbyshire in a piece to camera at the top of the programme, as the names of the convicted fill the screen – from within a 30-mile radius of their home in Mazan, the tiny, beautiful little Provencal town to which they had retired some years before. Fifty-two – plus Mme Pelicot’s husband – were identified by the police, and after a three-month trial most were convicted of aggravated rape, two of sexual assault and two of attempted rape. Dominique received the maximum sentence of 20 years.
