“What woman can go through this?” asks Gisèle Pélicot about the hundred rapes she suffered over the course of a decade. What woman can have this strength, dignity and courage, asks in response all those who have just heard the testimony that the septuagenarian – “72 years old in December”, she specifies from the outset – gave this Thursday, September 5 before the departmental criminal court of Vaucluse. The answer comes from the main person concerned: she sees herself as “a boxer who falls and gets up every time”.
For the first time in four years and her husband’s police custody on November 2, 2020, Gisèle Pélicot, with her auburn bobbed hair, speaks out. She wanted this trial, during which 51 men are accused of raping her while she had previously been drugged by her husband, to be public. A decision taken last May. It is “not to create publicity, but to denounce chemical submission.”
“I do it on behalf of all those women who may never be recognized as victims,” continues the septuagenarian, in her orange dress covered with a white shirt, repeatedly saluting her daughter’s association that created the #M’endorsPas association. “For me, the damage is done.”
“Obstacle course”
In a firm voice, for nearly 1h30, Gisèle Pélicot will deliver a detailed account of these four years when her “world collapsed”. “I lived through a tsunami”, she sighs when the police show her “one then two, then three” photos of her, “inert, asleep and I am being raped”. 92 rapes committed by strangers and a hundred by her husband have been recorded.
“For me, the obstacle course begins, that of a woman who has lost everything,” she confides. “At that moment, I no longer have an identity.”
She has to warn her three children – she recalls her daughter’s “cry” of pain “engraved in her (my) memory”. She has to move out of the house she rented with her husband for their retirement in Mazan. “I find myself like a 20-year-old girl who ends up living with her children”, she laments. She sells her furniture, the ones she bought with her husband, she keeps the ones she bought for herself.
“I needed to lock this house and tell myself that I would never come back to Mazan,” she explains, referring to this symbolic gesture of reconstruction. She was only able to view the videos of the “rape scenes” last May.
“No mercy”
Psychologically, Gisèle Pélicot is being monitored – she also praises the work of her practitioners. Medically, she will have to be monitored for the rest of her life. The first tests carried out in 2020 revealed that she has four sexually transmitted diseases. She has been exposed to HIV six times. “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she denounces.
Regarding the accused, she has “no pity” for those who “defiled” her, for those who treated her like a “garbage bag, a rag doll”. “Why didn’t they go to the police station, even an anonymous phone call could have saved my life. Not one, not one.” She calls on them today “to recognize responsibility for their actions” while 35 of them have denied any intention of rape, others mentioning the trap set by the husband.
Despite the suffering and the “barbarity” she has undergone, Gisèle Pélicot will not have a single word of anger. Even towards Dominique Pélicot, her former husband, the one who ruined their happiness when “we had everything to be happy, everything”. While his ex-wife is speaking, the man lowers his head, looks at the ground.
In September 2020, he admitted to her a “stupidity” when he had just been arrested for filming up the skirts of three women in a supermarket. “For this time I will forgive you, but there will be no next time,” she remembers telling him at the time, claiming to have always been “supportive”. If he had been warned in 2010, when Dominique Pélicot was fined for having already filmed up the skirts of women, she would have supported him, she says. But today, she deplores having “lost 10 years of (her) life”.
“Not once did Mr. Pélicot think that I was in danger,” she complains indignantly, only when he is accused of having administered to her without her knowledge for nine years a cocktail of drugs to put her to sleep before inviting these strangers, causing her absences, making her take risks in her everyday life like when she took to the road.
“A field of ruins”
The septuagenarian has since distanced herself. She calls herself Pélicot for the trial, in support of her children and grandchildren who bear that name. She has taken back her maiden name. During her testimony, she names “Monsieur Pélicot”, the man with whom she fell “madly in love”, her “first love”, the man with whom she shared her life for half a century. “I don’t understand how he could have gotten to this point”, she wonders, still without anger. “I’m starting from scratch. I sold my furniture on Le Bon Coin, I only have my pension to live on. I’m starting from scratch”, she sums up. The strength she shows, Gisèle Pélicot believes she gets from her personal history, from her past. She lost her mother at a young age and had to take charge of the house. And what about her future? “I don’t really have any visibility”, admits Gisèle Pélicot. Besides, she admits that she doesn’t know “how long she will last.”
“The facade is solid, but inside I am a field of ruins,” concludes Gisèle Pélicot.
- BFMTV.com
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