A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes.
“The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname.
Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious health problems and a fateful meeting with police.
Photo: EPA-EFE
For years, she had had strange memory lapses and other health problems, and thought she might have had Alzheimer’s, she said.
She was invited in November 2020 to speak to investigators, who showed her the images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband, and her world fell apart, she said in court.
“For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years,” Gisele Pelicot said.
She had told police offciers that Dominique Pelicot, her husband of 50 years, was a “super guy,” she recounted as her daughter and two sons watched the testimony.
At that meeting, the woman was shown “barbaric” pictures where “I’m lying motionless on the bed, being raped,” she said.
“Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me,” she said.
“They treat me like a rag doll,” she told five judges, adding she had only plucked up the courage to watch the video footage in May.
She said that none of her abusers alerted the police.
“Even an anonymous phone call could have saved my life,” the woman said as her husband kept his head down.
Lawyers for some of the defendants had questioned on Wednesday whether the couple had had a libertine relationship, or whether it was credible that Gisele Pelicot had noticed nothing for the entire decade of the abuse.
“Don’t talk to me about sex scenes. These are rape scenes,” she said on Thursday, emphasizing that she had never practiced swinging or any other form of libertine sex.
Gisele Pelicot reiterated that she was “never complicit” and had never “pretended to be asleep” when asked by Judge Roger Arata.
She has insisted that the trial take place in public so the full facts of the case can emerge.
Gisele Pelicot said she wanted to draw attention to the dangers of sexual crimes through so-called chemical submission, or drugging someone with malicious intent.
“I’m speaking for every woman who’s been drugged without knowing it,” she said. “I’m taking back control of my life, to denounce chemical submission. Many women don’t have the proof. I have the proof of what I’ve been through.”
She also told the accused to “for once in your lives at least, take responsibility for your actions.”
“I feel disgusted,” she added.
“I’ve lost 10 years of my life,” she said.
Gisele Pelicot is in the process of divorcing her husband, who has admitted to the charges against him.
He was exposed by chance when he was caught filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket.
The 71-year-old documented his actions with meticulous precision on a hard drive in a folder labeled “abuse,” lead investigator Jeremie Bosse Platiere has said, adding that this led police to track down 50 suspects beside the husband.
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