Gaslight

When Gisèle Pelicot first pressed charges against her husband and fifty other men for drugging and raping her repeatedly over the course of a decade, she wanted a closed trial. “It was so clear to me that I hadn’t even discussed it with my lawyers,” she writes in her memoir, A Hymn to Life. “I did not want to be in the spotlight, forever the victim, ‘that poor woman.’” Closed trials keep the press and the public out of the courtroom and have been the norm for rape trials in France even in lower-profile cases, ostensibly to shield the accuser. But a few months before the trial was set to begin, Pelicot, seventy-one at the time, was surprised to find herself

worrying more and more about the closed door of the courtroom, which was supposed to protect me from the prying eyes of the public and the media. I was beginning to realise that a closed hearing meant I would be alone with them…. I kept imagining myself hostage to their gaze, their lies, their cowardice and their contempt…. There would be fifty-one men gathered in the courtroom. Their voices would be louder than mine.

The privacy of the closed courtroom would only isolate her, she realized. Just as the privacy of her house and the privacy of her fifty-year marriage had isolated her and facilitated more than a decade of rape by her husband and the strangers he recruited online. On a long ramble through the woods of Île de Ré, where she had eventually moved after her husband’s arrest, she made up her mind that the trial should be open. “I had the physical sensation that I needed the rest of the world,” she writes. “I didn’t want to be alone any more.”

That trial, which began in September 2024 in Avignon and lasted almost four months, drew journalists from around the world as well as local spectators who applauded her each day as she walked into the courthouse. She became a hero for having revealed her name and identity and opened the trial to the public, unbowed by the shame that is the presumed lot of every victim. The case led to national discussions about drug-facilitated rape and criminal activity in chat rooms. It fed debates about rape law already underway in France’s version of the Me Too movement. The scale and duration of Pelicot’s abuse posed alarming social questions: How could so many men have participated over so many years without any apparent qualms? And how could she not have known?

Of all these subjects, Pelicot is most interested in the last: her memoir is primarily the story of her fifty-year marriage. Or it is the story of what she thought was her marriage to the person she thought was her husband. By the time of the trial, after four years attempting to square his crimes with her mostly happy memories of their life together, she finally had to ask, “Had that man ever really existed?”

In October 2020 Pelicot thought she was accompanying her husband, Dominique, to the police station for a relatively minor sex offense. Two months earlier he had tearfully confessed to her that a security guard at their local supermarket caught him filming up the skirts of three shoppers and that they were pressing charges. Pelicot had told him he must apologize to the women and start seeing a therapist, and that if he did it again she would leave him.

When an officer asked to meet with her alone, she was confident that she knew what they’d be discussing. She apologized immediately for what her husband had done. She was not surprised that the officer asked some questions about their relationship. She was surprised, and thinks she may have burst into tears, when he told her that her husband had been taken into custody for aggravated rape and administering toxic substances. Then the officer showed her three photographs; in each one a different man was performing sex acts in her bedroom with an apparently unconscious woman whose body seemed preternaturally slack. “I did not recognise those men. Nor that woman,” Pelicot writes. “Her cheek was so floppy, her mouth so limp.”

She could barely take in what the officer was telling her: over the previous seven years at least, her husband had been slipping incapacitating drugs into her food or drinks so that he could abuse her body. The police had found thousands of videos and photos of the rapes on his laptop and phone. Did she want to press charges? She did, though such was her state of shock that “if he hadn’t asked the question, it never would have occurred to me.” Mechanically she signed paperwork, got a ride home, and told a friend and her three children what she had learned. Within two days the children helped her pack her things and leave Mazan, the Provençal village to which she and Dominique had moved in 2013 to enjoy their retirement.

Her children were quick to renounce their father, but Pelicot, though she never denied his crimes, couldn’t immediately turn her back on the fifty years of marriage that encompassed her entire adult life. It couldn’t all have been a lie: they had fallen in love at age nineteen, of that she is sure. For years afterward their happiness was real—she is sure of that too. Together, she had thought, she and Dominique had overcome the grief of her childhood and the violence of his. They had made it to the middle class. They had created what they each most longed for but never had as children: a happy family. Pelicot had imagined that she and her husband shared the same deep satisfaction at these accomplishments, but Dominique had profaned them. At what point did things go wrong? She faced an ordeal of trying to integrate horrifying facts with ordinary domestic memories.

Her memoir, written with the journalist Judith Perrignon and translated into sharp, plainspoken English by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, is itself a work of sophisticated integration: Pelicot shifts between the ongoing investigation and her memories of childhood, youth, and married life. The two tracks regularly converge as she pauses to consider a distant memory in light of her new knowledge. Pelicot’s account of the marriage must inevitably be a story about her own misjudgment. She takes possession of this devastating central fact with calm authority, her narrative voice a fitting counterpart to her much-noted composure at the trial. “Beyond the pain of the revelations and the shame of my body being turned into a sack,” she writes, “there was also the shame of having understood nothing.”

Her struggle to make sense of her husband’s crimes is regularly thrown off by new, worse information turned up in the investigation. The rapes began not in 2013 but in 2011. They involved not fifty-one but seventy-some men. (Not all of them could be identified by the police.) One of the men was HIV positive. (Pelicot tests negative.) A doctor examining the evidence concludes that she easily could have died from the dosage of drugs. Investigators find pictures of the Pelicots’ daughter, Caroline, apparently sleeping in a bed, wearing underwear that’s not her own. (Dominique claims that he never abused her.) They discover that he shared photos online of his daughters-in-law in states of undress, taken by cameras that he had hidden in his sons’ homes and in his own. They unearth a previous arrest for upskirting in 2010, which resulted in a fine of €100, that he hid from his wife. And they learn that Dominique taught another man, Jean Pierre Marechal, how to drug his own wife and then joined him in raping her.

Nearly two years into the investigation, Pelicot gets yet another call from a police officer. “It’s about your husband,” he says. “It’s always about my husband when the police call,” writes Pelicot mordantly. But this one was calling about something new: Dominique has admitted to the attempted rape of a young woman in Paris in 1999, a case that had gone cold until the victim saw his photo in the news and called the police, leading to an incriminating DNA test. He is also being investigated for the rape and murder of a young woman in 1991. (He denies having committed the earliest crimes.)

Pelicot reels. On some evening in 1999, when their daughter was nineteen or twenty, Dominique had come home and “sat down to dinner as if nothing had happened, hours after he had tried to rape a twenty-year-old woman.” For nearly half of their seemingly contented marriage, he had been hiding at least one sex crime.

Gisèle met Dominique in 1971, while she was visiting her maternal aunt in the Loire Valley. She had spent part of her childhood there, the home of her mother’s family, who proudly identified as peasants. Her father, a soldier, was the son of a factory worker from Brittany.

Her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor when Pelicot was two and died when she was nine. Her father got a job at the Ministry of War and moved with Pelicot and her older brother to Paris, where he remarried three years later to a cold woman who liked to tell Pelicot that she “was fat and looked like a carthorse.” One summer not long after the remarriage, when the family was in a cramped rented room on holiday in Brittany, her stepmother mused, “Life’s a shit sandwich, and you take a little bite of it every day.” The family met this philosophy in silence, but Pelicot, who was about twelve at the time, remembers bridling inwardly. “Earlier that day I had been filled with joy as I ran along the beach in Névez in my bathing suit,” she writes. In a world of such beauty and possibility, how could her stepmother possibly be right?

She left school at sixteen and found work as a secretary at a printing company that produced bank checks. It was 1968, and she knew that

women were coming together so they could fight to break free from a life mapped out for them, to fight for the right to abortion, for their liberation. I heard them, admired them, but was far removed from them…. I dreamed of love, of marriage, of having a family of my own that would make everything right, that would give me back what had been taken away.

Dominique was an apprentice electrician at her aunt’s electrical business. “His shyness reassured me,” she writes. “He blushed a lot. He was not one of those self-assured young men. I knew nothing of love, I had never even had a flirtation, but I just knew that he was going to love me.”

He too lived with his parents. On her regular visits to his family home, Pelicot “sensed how bleak their world was, their sad lives behind all those closed doors.” Dominique’s mother, Juliette, a house cleaner, “wept uncontrollably.” His father, Denis, a repairman, raged at everyone in the household. Dominique was close with his mother; he feared and hated his father. Beginning at age fourteen, when he got his first job, he repeatedly begged his mother to leave Denis. She never did. Pelicot remembers being groped once by Dominique’s older brother and stared at licentiously by her father-in-law. But Dominique, she thought, was different from the other Pelicot men: mild-mannered rather than bullying, self-effacing rather than arrogant. Some years into their marriage, Pelicot notes, Dominique lost his diffident manner and became confident, even a bit swaggering, but that didn’t seem like a bad thing. “He had grown up,” she thought.

The two of them moved to an apartment in a newly built suburb of Paris, had three children, and “joined the ranks of the growing middle classes” via a Carrefour credit card and a home loan. Dominique continued to work as an electrician while Pelicot, after taking time off to care for her first two children, did secretarial temp work.

Pelicot’s short-term gig at Électricité de France, the national electrical supplier, turned into an offer of a full-time job. She wasn’t sure she wanted it, but Dominique hoped to quit working as an electrician and go into real estate, which would have been too risky without a stable income from his wife. Pelicot discovered that she loved the job and was soon promoted out of secretarial work into budget forecasting, then into the human resources department, and finally into logistics, as an executive. She was offered a large company-owned rental house in a pleasant Paris suburb. “I had become part of the bourgeoisie,” she writes.

I wasn’t aware of it—there were still so many tiny humiliations, old wounds and lingering insecurities festering inside me—but on the outside and in other people’s eyes, both at work and at home, that’s how it seemed.

Significantly, Pelicot uses the first-person singular to describe her class ascent. Dominique’s real estate ventures brought in money only sporadically; other business schemes came to nothing. He was often unemployed. Despite her good job, the couple never made enough money to be able to get out from under their debts. At one point all their furniture was repossessed. In 1999 they divorced in order to shield their assets from Dominique’s creditors; they remarried in 2007. Pelicot recalls a moment of levity from 2017, when they tried to buy chrysanthemums to place on his parents’ graves and their credit card was declined. They went to the cemetery anyway:

We borrowed the bouquet from the neighbouring tombstone, just for a moment, long enough to share some quiet thoughts, and to laugh. We laughed so much as we moved the flowers from one gravestone to the other, laughed as we thanked the gentleman next door, laughed at our bank for forbidding us this small gesture for his parents, laughed at them, and at ourselves as well.

She ends this story with a sober acknowledgment: “I now know that in 2017 the frequency of the rapes began to accelerate.”

A court-appointed psychologist questioning her about her marriage told her, “You are a subjugated woman, under your husband’s control,” and “his little slave girl.” Pelicot was furious: he seemed unable to understand that it was the opposite. She had felt a confident authority in the relationship, which was essential to its survival: “I would never have stayed with a tyrant.” Dominique himself later corroborated this at his trial, stating in his final cross-examination that he had wanted to “force an insubmissive woman into submission.”

Pelicot had been suffering from strange memory lapses for almost a decade before Dominique’s arrest, starting in her late fifties. Her children and friends expressed concern when she had no recollection of recent conversations or events from the preceding day. She consulted doctors many times over the years and submitted to blood tests, neurological tests, and brain scans. She worried that, like her mother, she would die of a brain tumor. Her children worried about dementia. But once the most serious pathologies were ruled out, doctors weren’t inclined to pursue a diagnosis—they “looked at me as if to say that at my age, a woman can’t expect much any more, she ought to just relax and let time continue its demolition work.” None of the doctors connected her neurological symptoms to the gynecological symptoms that she was also investigating over the same years, including a mysterious, copious vaginal fluid that turned out to be the result of her husband’s post-rape douche applications.

In retrospect there were some signs she had missed. Once Dominique had made her a cocktail and then hurriedly grabbed it and poured it in the sink when she said it tasted strange. Once he gave her a beer that turned green. He “somehow ensured that I brought up my health concerns as rarely as possible with my daughter and sons. ‘You don’t want to worry them,’ he would say.”

In the months or perhaps even a year or two before his arrest, she writes, “our sex life had become less tender. He always preferred to penetrate me from behind, not to meet my eyes.” Going back further, she remembers occasional brief shadows falling over their sex life. When she was pregnant with their second child, he mused that “pregnant women aren’t pretty,” and she remembers feeling “the sting, or rather the chill, of a male gaze concerned only with his own desire.” She had had an affair with a married colleague when she was in her thirties, which had angered and upset him but which she thought they had worked through. (He had two affairs of his own not long afterward, and he briefly moved in with one of the women.) Years later she was taken aback when he called her “my bitch” during sex. At various times she had declined some of his requests: to wear lingerie she didn’t like, to have anal sex, to allow him to photograph them having sex. He sometimes bitterly called her “a saint,” which “annoyed me but I wasn’t worried.”

“I wasn’t worried” is a refrain in Pelicot’s memoir. Money problems, health problems, marital problems, school problems—Pelicot sorted and triaged them in a way that allowed her to maintain good cheer, support her children, do her work, and enjoy her life. “It wasn’t as if I’d ever been led to believe that life was going to be easy,” she writes of her upbringing, but she had the one thing she had always wanted: a warm and close family. The death of her mother had contorted her childhood, but Pelicot believed that it left her with a kind of strength: from a young age she had felt that the hardest part of her life was already behind her; she had survived it. A pretrial medical examiner found her to be “exceptionally resilient.” A close friend was surprised when Pelicot told her that she hoped to fall in love again. (She did: by the time of the trial she had a new partner.)

Did her even-keeled temperament, her sanguinity, and her gift for getting on with things also lead her to push aside what may have been clues to her husband’s crimes? The occasional moments of acrimony stand out in Pelicot’s recollection precisely because most of her time with Dominique was amiable, but the question torments her nonetheless: Should she have inferred violence from these scattered incidents and impressions?

Even her children, quick to estrange themselves from their father, struggled to reconcile the facts with their positive experience of growing up in the Pelicot family. In her own memoir, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again (2025), their daughter, Caroline Darian, writes of the anguish of not being able to know for sure what she strongly suspects based on the seized photos: that her father drugged and abused not only her mother but also herself. Yet as she sifts through decades of memories from early childhood to the day she learned of her father’s arrest, she can’t pinpoint any early sign of trouble. The rented house her parents had retired to in Mazan had been for a decade “the scene of our barbecues, our endless discussions, our playful laughter, our sunset drinks, our noisy games of Trivial Pursuit and Money Drop, and our al fresco dinners, where the food often gave way to evenings of music and dance.”

It simply seems that Dominique had succeeded in baffling his family. While his professional life was disorganized and unsuccessful, most of his criminal activity was carried out with great care to avoid detection. If the supermarket security guard hadn’t caught him upskirting, if the three women hadn’t filed police reports, and if the local police hadn’t taken the complaints seriously enough to investigate his phone and laptop, he might have gone on abusing his wife indefinitely.

He also benefited from the fact that no one was looking for—or was even versed in—the signs of chemical incapacitation. In her memoir, Darian writes that after her father was charged, her younger brother, Florian, recalled a disturbing episode from the previous summer, when he and his wife and children were visiting their parents. A few minutes after the family sat down to dinner, his mother abruptly “seemed to disconnect from her body. Her elbow suddenly slid off the table, and she nearly fell off her chair, as if she were dead drunk. Drained of energy in an instant, she collapsed like a rag doll.” In retrospect it was clear that their father had miscalculated her dose of sedatives, but at the time, Florian had accepted his reassurances that his mother was simply tired from playing with her grandchildren.

Dominique admitted to all the crimes against his wife. Some fifteen other men pleaded guilty. The rest denied that they had committed rape, even though there was video evidence incriminating them. All fifty-one of them were tried together, with the court considering six or seven defendants per week.

Pelicot stops short of explicitly describing her evolving political consciousness, but it’s clear that over the four years between Dominique’s arrest and trial an evolution did take place. Pelicot fired her first lawyer, a feminist who spoke widely to the press, in part because she was wary of “the great battle between women and men she claimed to be waging.” She found a new team of lawyers who shared her instinctive reserve with the press; she didn’t want to be a public example or symbol of anything, she thought. But by the time of the trial, she had stopped shying away from the broader implications of her situation and embraced them, using words in her testimony that “I would never have uttered before,” telling the court that she had waived her anonymity out of “a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.”

Pelicot was prescient in dreading the accused men’s confederacy. If the defendants had not realized that she was incapable of consent at the time of the rapes, if they had not realized that what they were doing was rape, as many of them claimed, the belated knowledge did not create any apparent air of gravity among them. They chatted and laughed together during breaks between the proceedings. “I saw them high-fiving each other, going to the café across the street at lunchtime,” Pelicot writes. A reporter for New Lines Magazine spoke to a waitress at a bistro near the courthouse who said that “the accused keep cracking inappropriate jokes” when they come to lunch.

On the stand, some of the accused acknowledged and regretted having committed rape; some apologized; others insisted that what they had done was not rape because Dominique had told them his wife was in on the game; one described having only belatedly learned what consent was. (Until 2025 French rape law did not mention consent; rape had been defined as penetration or oral sex using “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” leaving a loophole for drug-facilitated sex crime.) They were diverse in age, race, occupation, class, and household configuration. At least a quarter of them, including Dominique, described having been victims of sexual violence themselves, most as children or teenagers.

The court heard about men trading notes on the abuse of women with a casualness that would seem to confirm Andrea Dworkin’s most dire visions. Dominique received advice on pharmaceuticals from a nurse online who showed him photos of drugged women. Dominique invited other men to join him with such solicitations as “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife who’s been put to sleep.” Of the eighty-three men Dominique invited on Skype and in a chat room called “À Son Insu” (Without Her Knowledge), seventy-two agreed. One defendant testified that Dominique asked him if there were women in his family he would like to rape or see raped, and gave him instructions for sedation. Another testified that he procured from Dominique a cocktail of sedatives to use on his own girlfriend.

Dominique was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum twenty years in prison. All the other defendants were convicted of rape or of attempted rape and sexual assault; they received sentences ranging from three to fifteen years. “I felt neither joy nor pain,” Pelicot writes. “I still had some way to go before understanding what had happened, or accepting that I never would understand it.”

Ayear after the conclusion of the Pelicot trial, a German man who worked as a school janitor was convicted in Aachen of drugging and raping his wife repeatedly over six years, between 2018 and 2024, during which he also shared videos of the abuse online. Last month a former Tory borough councilor from Wiltshire, Philip Young, pleaded guilty to repeatedly drugging and raping his wife as well as publishing nonconsensual videos and photos of her between 2010 and 2023. The volume of illicit online discussion suggests that many more cases of drug-faciliated rape between intimate partners go undetected. Such violations are hard to identify, sometimes coming to light only “due to chance discoveries of video footage,” as The Guardian reported in 2024.

Caroline Darian started a campaign, #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under), in 2023 to draw attention to drug-facilitated spousal rape. As she writes in her memoir, “The general public must be made aware that the practice goes far beyond date-rape cocktails in night clubs.” It can happen at home with “the contents of the family medicine cabinet.” This is a common formulation in reporting and education campaigns: drug-facilitated rape does not just happen “to young people, in clubs, at parties, ‘on the apps,’” as The Guardian put it.

Every time the point is made, the speaker charts the territory we must give up for lost. Bars, clubs, parties—in these places, people can’t be too surprised if they find themselves drugged and raped. But in one’s own home, with one’s long-term partner, one should be able to feel safe. Yet this has it oddly backward. Much of what we know about intimate partner violence suggests that holing up with only one other person is an at-your-own-risk proposition. For women married to men, the marital home was not so long ago precisely the place where one wasn’t safe from rape, because a wife didn’t have the legal right to refuse her husband sex. Though the law now recognizes marital rape (in the US, legal reform began in the 1970s; in France, a judge recognized marital rape as a crime for the first time in 1990), older customs and habits of thought regarding heterosexual marriage linger. More than one of the defendants in Pelicot’s case said that he had accepted the husband’s permission as all the consent he needed.

The parties and bars and clubs, meanwhile—these are the spaces that liberal society has made and remade for sociability. Here we might anticipate a general spirit of community, express our dismay when we find it missing. People speaking of drug-facilitated rape in marriage make free use of rhetorical attitudes of surprise and indignation, despite the institution’s well-known violent history. But you rarely hear that tone in discussions of communal social life. We speak as if we took for granted that where straight people are concerned, sites of social freedom must also be sites of brutality against women.

When you look at American news coverage of the newly emergent “date rape drugs” of the 1990s, it’s hard to find evidence of either the public or the punditry wrestling with the particular significance of these incapacitating drugs: they simply became absorbed into collective consciousness as one of the hazards of nightlife. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times first reported on GHB and Rohypnol as potentially deadly recreational drugs used by club kids and, as a side note, “sexual predators,” in the mid-1990s. By 1996 rape crisis counselors in the Bay Area were familiar with Rohypnol as a rape drug, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1997, the Los Angeles Times reported that a rape treatment center in Santa Monica was producing fliers that read “Watch your drink. It’s your best defense.”

By the late 1990s the drugs’ recreational use had fallen out of the headlines, and roofies (the nickname for Rohypnol that became a generic term for incapacitating agents in drinks) had become a widely publicized danger to young party-going women, particularly college students. In a 1999 article about a workshop for parents of incoming freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The New York Times describes a parent asking, “The date-rape drug, is it a problem?” A campus police officer reassures parents that there have been only three suspected instances of the drug’s use in three years, and also directs them to a campus self-defense program where “your daughter will learn verbal, physical and psychological techniques to protect and defend herself on and off campus.”

While alcohol and other recreational drugs create the conditions of plausible deniability, rape drugs should, in theory, cut through the haze: drugging someone’s drink is necessarily calculated. Even without knowing who did it, we can know that each instance of drug-facilitated assault at a party indicates that at least one person planned to commit rape. In the 1990s it would have been no surprise to people who work with assault victims and perpetrators, or to many people with experience of sexual assault, that most rape is deliberate, with or without drugs. But everyone else might have done a double take to see repeated signs that premeditated rape was a fact of social life. Yet police, journalists, counselors, and parents in the 1990s seem to have gone directly from learning about the drugs to cautioning young women not to leave their drinks unattended, without apparently balking at the implications of their advice. What kind of event is a party, that some revelers plan to subdue and rape others? What sort of place is college, that one must be on guard against poisoning and rape by one’s fellow students?

Online pornography and the misogyny of the manosphere are often cited as major factors in the antagonism between heterosexual men and women, but it’s notable that in the 1990s, before streaming and before most people knew what a chat room was, the public seems to have accepted an extraordinary degree of malice on the part of young men against young women. Men of course have also been drugged and raped, including, as it happens, one of the defendants in Pelicot’s case, who was assaulted as a teenager by a serial rapist. But in the media coverage in the 1990s, as is still the case today, it was almost exclusively women who were imagined to be the targets of sexual violence, and it was to them that a new set of precautions was issued. A generation of girls grew up with not only an ambient threat of spiked drinks, but an adult population eerily unsurprised by this cold-blooded, violent expression of contempt in settings where one might have hoped for camaraderie.

But even those of us prepared to give long lists of warnings to young women heading to parties know that we can’t reasonably tell a newlywed bride never to let the groom mix her drinks. The regime of personal safety warnings meets its end, or at least a logical impasse. For this reason, if no other, perhaps more people than ever will agree with Gisèle Pelicot that it’s now “up to society as a whole to address these issues, and to change.”