She’s become a model of bravery in France, and elsewhere, for bringing attention to chemical submission and horrific sex crimes.
Gisèle Pelicot is a now-famous French grandmother who took her husband of 50 years to court for drugging and raping her, and soliciting dozens of other men to rape her. Gisèle chose to waive anonymity during the recent trial — which meant that her assaults, private life, family history, and emotional processing became public; in December her husband Dominique was sentenced to 20 years for aggravated rape, and 49 other men were sentenced to three to 15 years for raping or sexually assaulting her.
She’s become a model of bravery in France, and elsewhere, for bringing attention to chemical submission and horrific sex crimes. Dominique would administer anxiolytics to his wife before raping and allowing others who he met online to rape her. Although Gisèle had memory loss and gynecological problems during the ten-year period her husband abused her, doctors at the time were unable to identify signs that could point to sexual violence. Her case brought into the spotlight the complexities that surround accusing and convicting an individual of drug-induced sexual assault.
Dominique’s only daughter Caroline filed a complaint against her father this month alleging rape and sexual assault. During her father’s first trial, forensic investigators recovered deleted intimate photos of Caroline in one of his files titled “My naked daughter.” Dominique denied raping and drugging his daughter. Caroline, however, has accused her father of lying and says that she does not recognize her clothing in the photos, which show her partially naked. Dominique shared the photos with strangers online.
“These two photographs knocked me over. . . . I am sure [there] are others. I know that I was sedated and abused by my father, but I cannot prove it,” Caroline wrote in a book published after her father was revealed to be a sexual predator.
Others in the family have accused Dominique as well; he had a photo montage of his genitals on his daughter-in-law, and the sick man also allegedly abused his grandson. When asked during the trial if she believed her husband had raped and drugged their daughter, Gisèle declined to answer.
“Her silence says a lot,” Caroline said. “I thought we were a united and tight-knit clan . . . and I am hit by this implacable reality: my mother does not want to believe me or to hear me. The pain runs right through me. I have spent four years trying to be there for my mother, cherishing the bond that counted so much for me. I feel alone facing a wall of desolation and no one seems to understand.”
What the family has gone through is a horrible tragedy no one will understand. It’s very possible that Gisèle could stomach her own assault but not that of her daughter’s. It’s possible that doing so would have broken her. But it is odd that prosecutors did not, during the initial trial, exhaust the possibility that Dominique abused other family members.
He was, after all, caught on unrelated charges in 2020. After trying to film up women’s skirts in a market, police found his catalogue of sexual crimes on his electronic devices, including 3,800 photos of Gisèle being assaulted; police eventually recovered 20,000 such photos. He has now been connected with two cold cases, Sophie Narme’s murder in 1991, and an attempted rape in 1999 (Dominique denies knowing Narme or having anything to do with her murder. He has acknowledged, in the latter case, that he met and tried to undress the woman but claimed that his intentions were not to rape her). He’s earned himself the title of one of France’s most notorious sexual predators.
Yet Dominique has denied assaulting his daughter and claims that his sexual perversion has limits (despite telling a stranger who had admired the half-nude photos of Caroline that it had “been more than eight years I’ve been offering her up like this. Do you want to see her when she was 30?”). That he drugged and raped his wife and pimped out her limp body on the internet but would never do the same to his daughter. Lawyers in Gisèle’s case, heartbreakingly, said Caroline did not have enough “objective elements” to prosecute her father.
Although Caroline’s case has so far been less publicized than her mother’s, hopefully that changes, and the world rallies behind her in the same way it did Gisèle. Dominique deserves much worse than life in prison, and he didn’t even get that. The men who abused Gisèle (whose ages range from 20s to 60s) deserve much worse than three to 15 years in prison. Will the Pelicot women ever receive justice?