The Trial of Gisle Pelicot's Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family

[Nevilledog]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/02/the-trial-of-gisele-pelicots-rapists-united-france-and-fractured-her-family

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https://archive.li/fv1nL

Gisèle Pelicot was sitting by a tennis court in October, 2020, watching her granddaughter hit forehands, when she saw that she’d missed a call. When she called back, a police officer named Laurent Perret asked if she was aware that a few weeks earlier her husband, Dominique, had been questioned by the police. A security worker at a supermarket had caught him filming under three women’s skirts with his cellphone. Gisèle, feeling a small sense of victory, explained to Perret that she already knew. She had told Dominique, “What you did was ridiculous,” and urged him to see a therapist and apologize to the women. “I forgave him, because I know it’s not like him,” she later told Perret. “I told him that we had to face this situation together.”

The Pelicots lived in a one-story yellow house with pale-blue shutters and a swimming pool, in Mazan, a village in Provence. They had moved there from Paris, seven years before, when Gisèle retired. A few weeks after Perret’s phone call, they drove to the police station for an appointment with him. Dominique wore dark-green corduroy trousers and a pink polo shirt that Gisèle had picked out the night before. “Don’t worry, it’s only a formality,” she reassured him.

Gisèle, who was sixty-seven, was taken into a private room, where Perret asked her about their marriage. “It was love at first sight,” she responded. She and Dominique had met when they were eighteen. They’d been together for forty-nine years. “He is kind and thoughtful,” she told Perret, according to the interview transcript. “He’s a great guy, we get along well, which is why we’re still together. He’s not perfect, but those are his main qualities.” When Perret asked about her social life, she said that she and Dominique were close with a couple whom they’d known for more than twenty years. “We share the same values: family, grandchildren,” she said.

Perret asked if she and her husband had ever been interested in swinging.

“No, how awful,” she responded. “I need feelings. I’m not an open woman.”

Gisèle sensed Perret’s embarrassment. He told her that he’d found evidence that Dominique had been giving her sleeping pills, mixed into her drinks, so that men could rape her. “Do you think this is plausible?” he asked.

She began crying. “It’s not possible,” she said.

*snip*