Gisèle Pelicot has said she intends to visit her ex-husband in prison, describing the meeting as “part of my path to rebuilding” and, in principle, “a farewell”.
Her remarks come in a series of interviews before the publication next week of her memoir, A Hymn to Life. In the book she recounts her “family saga” and the ordeal of discovering her husband had drugged her for years and invited dozens of men to rape her in their home in Provence.
At a trial in Avignon last year, Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison for aggravated rape. Fifty co-accused were also convicted.
Pelicot had waived her right to anonymity, insisting the trial be held in public so that, as she put it at the time, shame would “change sides”.
Now, she has said, there is unfinished business.
“It’s been six years since the facts came to light, and I’ve never been able to talk to him,” she told Ouest-France. “At the trial, I always addressed the presiding judge, not him.
“So I want to go and meet him. To ask him questions face to face, because he owes me an explanation for the suffering he caused our family and our children. It’s part of my healing process to talk to him, look him in the eye, and ask him, ‘Why?’”
Will it be their last encounter? “In principle, yes. It will be a farewell. But I can’t predict the future. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive him, but I can’t live with hatred.”
That refusal to be consumed by hatred runs through her book and the interviews surrounding its release. Anyone expecting a vendetta against her husband, or men in general, will find something quite different.
“Obviously, I feel indignant and betrayed,” she said, “but I have never felt anger or hatred.”
Instead, she has given herself, as she told Vogue, “permission to be happy”.
“In all that mud, I wanted to put colour back into my life,” she told Ouest-France.
How does one put colour into mud?
“With time. But also with music, walking, chocolate and friends.”
In Vogue, she spoke of “the little everyday joys that make a day like today: c’est magnifique.”
Looking in the mirror, she said she tells herself: “We’re Okay, you and me. It’s not that bad, after all.”
The memoir does not erase the decades before the crimes were uncovered. “We had a nice life, after all,” she told Vogue. For 40 years of their 50-year marriage, she believed she was married to “a good man”.
“Friends would ask me: ‘Doesn’t he have a brother?’ He cooked, he did DIY, he was athletic, he was tidy – he had many good qualities.”
Was she under his influence? “Never. Chemically, yes, but psychologically no. That’s what’s so terrible. I’d prefer it if he’d been a b-----d so I could say to myself: ‘You knew. You knew he was a horrible man.’”
She has defended her decision not to erase those memories. “If I erase those memories, I die.”
Yet darker questions remain. Investigators have reopened cold cases from the 1990s, including the 1991 rape and murder of estate agent Sophie Narme, whose body is to be exhumed as authorities seek new DNA evidence. Her husband has been questioned by police over her death.
If the investigation were to prove her ex-husband’s involvement, Pelicot said, it would be “another descent into the abyss”. “I really hope he’s not capable of that,” she added.
Despite everything, she refuses to tarnish men with the same brush. “The fact that this happened to me and that there were 51 degenerates in the courtroom – plus at least 20 more – doesn’t mean we have to put all men in the same basket,” she told Vogue. “I have faith in humanity. Society will change for the better.”
Her personal life has changed too. In June 2023 she met Jean-Loup, a retired Air France steward, on the Ile de Re. They share a French bulldog, a love of music and long walks. “If anyone had told me that I’d find love at this age, I’d never have believed it,” she told Vogue. She said she tells women: “We still have a right to happiness. I am proof that anything is possible.”
The family, however, remains fragile. It is “false to believe that tragedy brings a family together”, she has said. The revelation of the crimes was “a detonation that swept everything away”.
Lingering uncertainty over whether her daughter Caroline was also abused “condemns her to a perpetual hell”, she told Ouest-France. “She is waiting for answers from her father. Today, I will try to support her as best I can.”
“Being positive, for me, means fighting against suffering and anger,” she told Vogue. “It doesn’t mean forgetting or forgiving. It means fighting so they don’t win.”
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