Paris: Gisele Pelicot, the 72-year-old woman who was allegedly drugged by her husband and raped by over 80 men for nearly a decade, narrated her harrowing ordeal in court, saying she was "sacrificed on the altar of vice" and treated like a "garbage bag". Her husband Dominique Pelicot is currently standing trial for drugging his wife and inviting dozens of strangers to sexually assault her, along with 50 others accused of participating in the heinous act.
Gisele said the police saved her life when they investigated her husband's computer in November 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket in southern France, reported The Guardian. Police said they found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times, which shocked the country due to the mass scale of the crime.
Gisele was drugged “almost to a state of coma” and unaware of what was happening to her. She was under the impression that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease as she suffered from a growing abundance of gynaecological problems and some reports suggested that her tests revealed that she had been infected with several sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
'My world fell apart': Woman describes 'scenes of horror'
Recounting the moment in November 2020 when police first showed her images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated by her husband, Gisele said, "My world fell apart. For me, everything was falling apart. Everything I had built up over 50 years." She said she had barely recognised herself in the images, saying she was motionless.
"I was sacrificed on the altar of vice. They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag... When you see that woman drugged, mistreated, a dead person on a bed – of course the body is not cold, it’s warm, but it’s as if I’m dead," she further said, adding that rape was not a strong enough word, it was torture. Gisele waived her right to anonymity in order for the trial to be held in public, with the support of her three adult children.
Gisele also told the court how she and her husband had married when they were 21, had three children and seven grandchildren, and had been very close. “We weren’t rich but we were happy. Even our friends said we were the ideal couple,” she said. While being regularly drugged, she experienced difficulty in remembering things, lost weight and had difficulty controlling her arm at one point.
Victim sexually abused by HIV-positive individual
"I no longer have an identity … I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself," she said. Lawyers praised her strength and calm at the trial, but she said she appeared solid but was “in ruins” and did not know how her body had withstood the abuse and now the trial.
Gisele also testified that she was raped six times by a person who tested positive for HIV, according to New York Post. “Luckily I didn’t catch it. But not once did Mr Pelicot say to himself, ‘I’ve gone too far,'” she said, referring to her husband only by his surname. “He showed no pity, no pity at all.”
Her husband had already answered “yes” in court when asked if he was guilty of the drugging and attacks. His lawyer said that after his arrest he “always declared himself guilty”, saying: “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.” Police said that between 2011 and 2020, Dominique Pélicot crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication and mixed them into his wife’s evening meal.
According to The Telegraph, at least 35 of the defendants have pleaded not guilty, saying they had no idea that Gisele was not a willing partner, while 14 others, including Dominique, have pleaded guilty. The accused men recruited by her husband were instructed to avoid smelling of any kind of fragrance or cigarette smoke to avoid alerting his wife and to leave if she moved so much as an arm, investigators said.
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