Gisèle Pelicot’s Memoir is the Ultimate Act of Defiance

Gisèle Pelicot had resigned herself to a life of quiet victimhood. In France, all victims of sexual violence have the right to anonymity, and she had clung to it for years, her mind made up that she wanted the trial to be behind closed doors. After all, nobody needed to know what had happened to her; that her husband of nearly fifty years had routinely drugged her with a cocktail of narcotics and muscle relaxants to subsequently rape her. That he had recruited at least 72 men on the internet and invited them into their marital bedroom to rape her too. That the abuse had been going on for almost ten years. In her memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, which was published on February 17, she writes that she just wanted to get the trial over with, out of sight from the public and the press. “I intend to be as inconspicuous as possible,” she had said to the examining magistrate in January 2023.

In May 2024, a couple of months before the trial began, Gisèle Pelicot changed her mind. While on a walk through the woods and on the beach, on the small island Île the Ré, where she had moved after discovering the abuse, doubt began to creep up on her. A closed trial meant nobody would know her name, but it also meant nobody would ever know the names of the 51 men arrested, and what they had done to her. “Perhaps most importantly of all,” she wrote, “no woman would be able to enter the courtroom and feel a little less alone.” On that spring day, Gisèle Pelicot decided to waive her right to anonymity.

The case gripped not just France, but sent shockwaves around the whole world. International journalists filled the courtroom in ever-growing numbers; outside the courthouse, a small army of women cheered Pelicot’s name, applauding her when she entered the building on the daily. Over the span of the several months the trial lasted, Gisèle Pelicot turned from a woman living a quiet, private life into a feminist symbol of courage and strength.

Justice was achieved here not because of some large-scale cultural awakening; a shift in the way society considers violence against women. The reason there are 51 men in jail is, rather, because of the wholly unprecedented scale and clarity of the evidence.

The case ultimately resulted in a legal victory. Not only were all the accused men convicted—Dominique Pelicot received the highest sentence of 20 years in prison, with all 50 other men receiving various jail sentences—the trial resulted in a change of French criminal law. The matter of consent had previously been left out of the legal definition of rape, instead being defined as an act requiring “violence, coercing, threat or surprise.” Eight weeks into the trial, French law enshrined the need for consent into the law, following in the footsteps of sixteen European countries who had done so already.

A Hymn to Life is steeped in the same thesis that led to her decision to forgo anonymity during the trial: that the burden of shame should lie with the perpetrator, rather than the victim of sexual violence. The memoir is extraordinary—a deeply moving, oddly beautiful account of her life, her marriage, and, ultimately, the events that forced her to reconsider it all. This book is not a story of victimhood—it is one of triumph. Picking up the pieces of the life she thought she had lived shattered, Pelicot attempts to move on with the pain of the knowledge what has happened to her, determined to hold onto her penchant for joie de vivre.

In A Hymn to Life, she reclaims her own voice, resisting the patriarchal system that allows abuse to exist in the first place. Apart from her ex-husband, she never mentions her tormentors by name. “Not out of any consideration for them—their identities are easy enough to find online of in the court records—but so that they will be remembered only for what they are; parrots, deplorable mouthpieces, violent, cowardly little people,” she writes. “I want all that remains of them to be the words they used to trample over me, to reduce one woman—and therefore all women—to absolute submission in the name of male domination.” A Hymn to Life is the ultimate act of defiance.

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It must be noted that justice was achieved here not because of some large-scale cultural awakening; a shift in the way society considers violence against women. The reason there are 51 men in jail is, rather, because of the wholly unprecedented scale and clarity of the evidence. Dominique Pelicot had filmed the rapes, keeping a meticulously documented archive of horrors, with the file name “abuse.” Still, Gisèle Pelicot was not universally believed. Inside the courtroom, with every video submitted as evidence making one more clichéd instance of he said, she said going up in smoke, the depressingly large majority of the men on trial maintained innocence, denying they had ever raped Pelicot.

Some assumed she must have been in on it, never mind the fact that they had met Dominique Pelicot in a chatroom named “Without Her Knowledge.” Others said it had not been rape, because they had received permission from her husband. At one point during the trial one of the defense lawyers had said “there’s rape and there’s rape,” Pelicot writes in the book. “I said it felt as if I were the one being accused in this courtroom, with fifty-one victims facing me.” Another lawyer, a woman, sparked outrage when, during the trial, she posted a video on social media dancing to the Wham! song Wake Me up Before You Go-Go.

There was skepticism outside the courtroom too, one question central in the disbelief: How could she not have known? Perhaps the facts of this case were just too mind-boggling to wrap your head around. It is, however, at the end of the day, still easier to dismiss a woman than it is to believe men are capable of such brutality, carried out so casually. “I told the court that now I understand why many rape victims don’t press charges,” she wrote, “since so often they end up feeling as if they are the ones being accused.”

Many of the men she faced in court were accompanied by women—wives, girlfriends, even mothers, all in denial their loved one could ever commit rape. And perhaps there lies the most telling tragedy of all.

Is there any knowing what would have happened, had these crimes not been captured in all their barbaric glory? There are at least 20, potentially 30, perhaps even more, who have raped Pelicot and have not been identified. A persistent cultural script remains in place around abuse—one in desperate need of rewriting. Take, for example, their daughter, Caroline. Among the visual evidence collected from Dominique Pelicot’s computer were two images of his daughter, apparently asleep, wearing underwear she doesn’t recognize. Caroline accuses her father of drugging and raping her too, a claim that has been eating away at the family since the photos were found over five years ago. But without the same video evidence to support her claim, there is no proving her allegations, leaving Caroline with nothing but a sentence to life spent in doubt.

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Few women knowingly marry a monster. But many divorce one. In A Hymn to Life, Gisèle Pelicot also tries to make sense of her life, of the marriage that she had always thought of as a happy one. They had met when they were teenagers, seeking refuge in one another after a childhood shaped by pain. Over the next five decades, they shared a life, raising children in the suburbs of Paris, until they retired in the South of France in a yellow house with blue shutters and a swimming pool. She had also been happy, right? Without any memory of the abuse that took place, every memory she does have has been called into question. “If I erased everything,” she writes, “it would mean I was dead.”

Looking back at her marriage, there were little clues scattered throughout it, becoming crystal clear in hindsight. Her husband once served her a pint of beer that had an odd green hue to it, which he quickly poured into the sink when she pointed out its color. When she found a bizarre bleach-like stain on a pair of new trousers, she had jokingly asked her husband if he had perhaps drugged her. He burst into tears, seemingly horrified she could accuse him of such a thing. She apologized. And then there were the myriad health complaints; the memory lapses that left her thinking she was dying. And her husband, sitting by her side at every consultation.

The small town of Mazan, where they lived when the abuse took place, counts a little over six thousand residents. Yet Dominique Pelicot appeared to have little trouble recruiting at least 72 rapists, who all presumably lived close by, all of them active on chatrooms on the dark web. The case exposed the depressing banality of it all—the man smiling politely at you at the bakery, only to rape your comatose body at night. The men ranged from 22 to 70 years old, coming from all sorts of backgrounds, occupations, and social classes. On paper, they appear to have nothing in common, except for the fact that they would rape someone. Gisèle Pelicot divorced her tormentor when the abuse came to light in 2020. Many of the men she faced in court, however, were accompanied by women—wives, girlfriends, even mothers, all in denial their loved one could ever commit rape. And perhaps there lies the most telling tragedy of all.

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Gisèle Pelicot ignited a rousing among feminists, acquired the status of something of an icon. She received thousands of letters from women worldwide, including one from Queen Camilla of England. In the summer of 2025, she received the Légion d’honneur, the highest civil honor in France. A petition circulated to nominate her for the Nobel Peace Prize. Her decision to go public with the trial was not only a personal victory. It offered the gift of courage to women to report sexual crimes, perhaps even letting the trial be public, too, burdening the abuser with shame instead of herself.

In the span of the trial, Gisèle Pelicot ended up miles ahead of the culture around her. A Hymn to Life is a proclamation to change the cultural language around abuse, a necessary shift that does not only reconsider the way we consider survivors, but the abusers themselves. What’s left to do is for society to catch up with her.