When Gisèle Pelicot was called to talk to police in November 2020, she believed it was to discuss the upskirting allegations made against her husband of 50 years.
Referring to him as a “super guy”, she had no awareness that detectives were about to blow apart her seemingly idyllic life with Dominique Pelicot, who she had met at the age of 19.
When he was arrested at a shopping centre two months previously for covertly trying to take pictures up women’s skirts, police had decided to seize his phones and computer.
They discovered a meticulously organised library of 20,000 images and videos of 71 men having sex with an unconscious woman. The woman was his wife, the mother of his children and his lifelong partner.
Police would go on to show her countless photographs of unknown men raping her, in the place where she should have been safest: her own bedroom in her own home.
“I asked him to stop. It was unbearable. I was inert in my bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart,” Gisele later told the jury.
Describing the images as “a horror scene”, she said her abusers had treated her like a “garbage bag”.
It emerged that her husband had drugged and raped her for almost a decade, as well as arranging for dozens of men to have sex with her while he filmed them for his own sexual gratification.
He might never have been caught, had it not been for the attentive eye and instinct of a security guard, Thibaut Rey, who confronted Pelicot over his actions in the LeClerc shopping centre.
“Pelicot didn’t resist. He froze with terror. I saw the fear in his eyes,” he told the Daily Mail.
Not only was Gisèle unaware that her husband had previously been caught upskirting in 2010, she was also left horrified when his DNA matched that of a man who had lured a young estate agent to a Paris apartment, in 1999, then knocked her out with chloroform and attempted to rape her.
As the extent of his abuse became apparent, which included taking covert naked images of his pregnant daughter-in-law, Gisèle decided to waive her anonymity in a message that “shame must change sides”.
At the time the abuse was uncovered, she had been living with her husband in the village of Mazan, where they had retired after moving from Paris in 2013.
Part of his “perfect husband” act, was to always offer to cook dinner and to make Gisèle his raspberry and mango sorbet before she went to bed.
She would wake in the morning in her pyjamas, feeling tired but suspecting it was due to walking too much the previous day.
Meanwhile, her husband had been meeting men on a French swingers website, with the planning taking place on a chat room called “Without her knowledge”.
Men would park their cars down the street before entering their marital bedroom, with Pelicot insisting that they avoid smoking or wearing any fragrance to avoid detection.
Gisèle told the jury: “I feel betrayed and raped. I’m betrayed by this man who I thought I’d spend the rest of my days with.”
He has now been jailed for 20 years – the maximum sentence – after admitting to his horrific crimes, while another 50 men have been jailed alongside him.
