WARNING: This story contains details of sexual abuse.
For years, the story of Gisèle Pelicot has been defined by horror — the woman at the centre of France's most infamous mass rape trial who chose to waive anonymity and became a global icon in the fight against sexual violence.
But in her new memoir, A Hymn to Life, the 73-year-old reveals a more unexpected story: a secret love that helped her reclaim her life and gave her the strength to confront her abusers.
The memoir also recounts the moment she grasped the full scale of her ex-husband's crimes and the devastating ripple effects on her children, particularly her daughter, who distanced herself from her mother.
In 2024, Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drugging and raping his wife over nearly a decade, inviting dozens of other men to assault her while he recorded the abuse. Fifty other men were convicted and sentenced to between three and 15 years in jail.
Yet beyond the brutality of these crimes, it is the deeply personal moments — the private reckonings and unexpected sources of strength — that shape the story Gisèle now chooses to tell.
A harrowing discovery
On the morning of November 2, 2020, Gisèle recalls driving with her husband from their home in Mazan, in south-eastern France, to a police station in a nearby town.
Two months earlier, Dominique had been arrested for allegedly taking photos up the skirts of women at a local supermarket. Police had seized his phone and laptop, and Gisèle believed she would be interviewed about the incident.
Instead, the officer preparing to question her began with a warning: "I am going to show you some photographs and videos that you are not going to like."
Gisèle describes being shown images of a woman she could not recognise as herself:
"That's you in the photograph."
"No, that's not me."
I got out my glasses; he got out another photograph. The same woman on her back, a tattooed man alongside her.
"That's you."
"No."
I did not recognize those men. Nor that woman. Her cheek was so floppy, her mouth so limp. She looked like a rag doll.
In a state of shock, Gisèle agreed to press charges. What followed, she says, was not a sudden awakening but a slow, devastating recalibration.
Gisèle describes retracing years of unexplained symptoms and linking them to the drugs she had been unknowingly given: memory lapses, exhaustion, mysterious pains and medical tests that went nowhere.
She even remembers calling her husband in fear, convinced she was dying, only to be reassured and dismissed.
"I must have laughed with him, laughed with my torturer," she writes.
As the extent of the abuse became clear and her then-husband was arrested, she left the family home and the couple separated.
It is against this backdrop that the memoir's most surprising thread emerges.
The private relationship behind a very public trial
Before the trial began in 2024, Gisèle's friends introduced her to a man who lived on Île de Ré, an island off France's west coast where she had moved after her husband's arrest.
She describes Jean-Loup, a retired Air France steward and widower, as "cheerful, good-humoured and discreet".
Their relationship unfolds not as a dramatic romance but as something softer, tentatively emerging in the aftermath of devastation.
"That first night was gentle, punctuated by stifled giggles and a few furtive tears," Gisèle writes.
"I was 70 years old and had slept with no-one but my husband and my erstwhile lover. Jean-Loup was the third man in my life."
In these passages, Gisèle redefines intimacy on her own terms.
"I was light-headed with happiness. I needed to love again. I wasn't afraid," she says.
"There was something amusing, even a bit thrilling, in the way we kept our relationship secret, as if we were teenagers and our lives were just beginning."
Gisèle suggests that private relationship helped shape one of the most consequential decisions of her life: waiving her right to anonymity and allowing her case to be heard in open court.
"I wasn't afraid of my wrinkles or my body," she says.
"I loved Jean-Loup and he loved me. Happiness was certainly a factor in my decision."
She also credits her age, saying that if she had been "20 years younger" she might not have dared, fearing "those damn looks" that women of her generation have always had to contend with.
"Looks that seem to tell you who you are or what you're worth, only to forsake you as you age," she writes.
Gisèle says Jean-Loup became her anchor as the trial approached and she had to confront the full truth of what was done to her when she was unconscious.
When her lawyers asked her to read the entire 400-page indictment, Jean-Loup printed everything so she would not have to read it on a screen.
"I wanted to be able to go through the big sheaf of pages alone, curled up inside or out in a comfortable chair," she says.
The documents, Gisèle notes, began with the list of the accused: names, jobs, addresses and dates of birth. She underlined them: "1997 … 1988 …" and adds: "I was born in 1952. Their youth was an enigma. An additional suffering."
Then came the "facts", which she says were "chilling, of cruelty without limits", yet set down in language that was "both crude and administrative" and centred on "that inert woman they manipulate and dare to call consenting".
Jean-Loup read alongside her and sometimes asked: "How did your body tolerate all this?"
She said the question was "unanswerable" and plunged her back into the horror, "but also made it drift away" when she heard herself say she had survived it.
Gisèle says it was a tactical decision to refuse anonymity, fearing being alone with her attackers in the courtroom and wanting to prevent what happened to her from happening to anyone else.
She says she also felt "nourished and warmed" by "that crowd outside, swelling and escorting me every day" near the court.
"That crowd saved me," she says.
"When we got home, Jean-Loup would open the envelopes with a letter opener, and together we would read the stories sent to me by women all over France."
A family broken by tragedy
While Gisèle says she has remained unbroken, despite all the men who wanted to see her break, that is less true of her family.
During the investigation into her case, two photos of her daughter, Caroline, were also found on her father's devices, showing her asleep in bed.
While Dominique was never convicted for abusing his daughter and denies the claims, Caroline believes she was probably drugged and raped as her mother had been.
In her memoir, Gisèle describes how this drove a wedge between her and her daughter. She says Caroline distanced herself, frustrated by what she saw as a lack of support from her mother and a sense that her own case was being "overlooked".
"Though I understood her suspicions … I couldn't let them become certainties. But to her my words sounded like denial," Gisèle writes.
"Without evidence, without a confession, I could not bring myself to say that the irreparable had taken place. Yes, I so hoped that it hadn't happened. For her sake, above all for her sake."
In one moment during the trial, Gisèle recalls when her daughter spoke about the key difference in their experiences:
"My mother was raped, yes, under the influence of drugs, yes. The only difference between my mother and me is that in her case there is proof. For me, it's an absolute tragedy," Caroline said in court.
That 'yes' she repeated felt like a blade to me; she was cutting her pain from mine, setting the two in opposition. I had no idea how to respond or how to reassure her, since reassuring her now meant betraying her.
Her eldest son, David, also withdrew and "barely spoke" to her afterwards.
"He had aligned himself with his sister and all her anger and suspicions that were gradually turning into certainties," she says.
Ultimately, Gisèle says her trial could not ease her daughter's pain, nor answer the questions "that were torturing us all".
'Faith in people … my revenge'
As she concludes her memoir, Gisèle writes about her intention to visit her ex-husband in prison in a bid to get answers to some of these questions.
Dominique is under investigation for the rape and murder of a woman in Paris in 1991 and an attempted rape in a suburb of the capital in 1999 — two cold cases that have been reopened.
"I'll have to go and see him in prison, even though so many people have warned me not to," Gisèle says, before asking: "Did you abuse our daughter? Did you commit the most abject crime of all?"
"Did you kill? Were you capable of killing?" she adds.
"Either way, it will help me move on. This visit will not be an act of kindness or a show of weakness. It will be a farewell and an essential stage in my recovery."
While Gisèle is aware of the tensions many readers may feel in hearing about the brutality she endured, she presents her new love as an act of resistance.
"I know only too well that my experience is proof that there are potentially violent rapists among us wherever we are. I know my story has fuelled disgust for men, but it has not done that for me," she writes.
"The feeling persists: love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge."
