* * *

  • • •

  By the time I had to go back to court on October 6th 2025, to the Court of Appeal in Nîmes, the banners were back up and the feminist anthems were being sung once more. But returning, revisiting the case, re-entering the courtroom, hearing it all repeated over and over, tied me up in terrible knots. I could not bear to relive it. And yet I had to. Of the seventeen defendants who had begun the appeal process against the original verdicts, only one had ultimately gone through with it. The fact that even one of them was still prepared to demand that he be acquitted, that a single night of my torture, June 28th 2019, might escape being classified as rape, was unbearable. I had to be there. Florian was by my side; he did not want me to be alone. There was no longer a horde of men facing me – just one man hunched in his seat who refused to admit that he had raped me, who kept repeating that he had been set up and had never intended to hurt me.

  ‘What is rape?’ the judge asked him.

  ‘It’s when someone is tied up and forced to have sex,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t use any violence.’

  His answer was steeped in grotesque male entitlement. The year that had gone by since the first trial had not forced him to reflect on what had happened, just as it had not stifled the sniggers and comments that can still be heard in the outside world; even among supposedly thoughtful people, apparently there are still those who don’t entirely believe me. We should ask all these idiots with their millennia-old misogyny the question that the judge enunciated slowly and clearly, the way one would to a child:

  ‘Did she act in the way that a woman does when she agrees to it?’

  ‘No,’ the defendant conceded.

  Once again, the fourteen videos in which he appears had to be shown. At my request, Florian left the courtroom. Morgane, Stéphane’s younger colleague, slipped me a medallion to squeeze, and I lowered my gaze, but it was easy to tell who my attacker was: the man craning his neck up towards the screen, fascinated by the spectacle of his sexual vigour, so fascinated that he didn’t seem to understand that his behaviour was likely to increase the sentence he was appealing. Stéphane and Antoine both gave him several opportunities to acknowledge his crime, bearing in mind that, as Stéphane so aptly put it, I had not come to seek his downfall. I was not insensitive to the relatives of the accused, who were all suffering anew. ‘Gisèle Pelicot is simply asking that you do not dispute what she went through, a rape that has made such an impression, a rape that is striking because of its total absence of humanity, like all rape,’ said Stéphane. ‘Did you rape her?’

  ‘No,’ insisted the rapist. We began to wonder what we were all doing there.

  One afternoon Dominique was called as a witness. He said that the defendant had not been coerced and that he had ‘enjoyed it’. Those were the words he used. He remained seated while he spoke, because his hip was still causing him pain. Not once did Florian, beside me, take his eyes off him; he glared unflinchingly at the father whom he said he had always feared. Dominique’s authoritarian presence had not waned, even after a year in solitary confinement. ‘I have the kind of personality that people either like or loathe,’ he admitted, and everyone understood what he meant from the way he took control of the proceedings in the courtroom. ‘We lived together for fifty years. For forty years, my behaviour was impeccable – for ten years, it was despicable. After forty years, she trusted me – she couldn’t see the devil right in front of her. I did everything I could to make sure she saw nothing,’ he said.

  Later Florian observed that it was he who had first used the word ‘devil’ to describe his father and that Dominique now used it. This was clearly not a coincidence. He was talking to us. But his peculiar accounting of our life together is false. Forty years of impeccable behaviour, when he had confessed to attempted rape in 1999? And remains a suspect in the still-unsolved 1991 murder case? His lawyer’s request that the body be exhumed was initially rejected by the court on the grounds that after so many years a sample would reveal nothing, as the victim’s bones would now only yield her own DNA. But it was later ordered by the Court of Appeal. So it will happen – and it will be a dreadful ordeal for the young woman’s family. I hope that a DNA test will provide a definitive answer, perhaps even prove his innocence; yes, I hope so, because if he was capable of murder, the void threatens once more, vast and gaping and ready to be flooded with innumerable new questions. Once again, it will be up to the law to decide. I am not fighting the truth, but the fall.

  It’s dizzying.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’ll have to go and see him in prison, even though so many people have warned me not to. I need to. I haven’t been alone with him since we walked into the police station together five years ago.

  When you looked at me in the morning, was there not a single moment when you felt pity for me?

  Did you never think, ‘I must stop’?

  Did you abuse our daughter? Did you commit the most abject crime of all?

  Do you have any idea of the hell we’re living in? I will never forgive you for dragging our children and grandchildren into this suffering.

  The night you came home crying, was that the night you tried to rape that young woman?

  Why did you not talk about it?

  Did you kill? Were you capable of killing?

  I’ll ask him all these questions. I need answers; he owes me that much. I will talk to the man I used to think I was married to. If he is still there, he will answer me. What does he have to lose, given that he is going to spend the rest of his life in prison? And if, in fact, that man vanished a long time ago, if all that remains of him is his pathological need for power and manipulation, I will sense that too. Either way, it will help me move on. This visit will not be an act of kindness nor a show of weakness, it will be a farewell and an essential stage in my recovery.

  * * *

  • • •

  During a break in proceedings in the course of the Nîmes appeal, the Avignon police chief, Jérémie Bosse-Platière, who oversaw the investigation after Dominique’s arrest, came to see me. ‘I wanted to tell you how happy I am that you are doing okay.’ He shook my hand for a long time; he didn’t let go, as if my palm in his might finally cleanse his mind of my unconscious body, of the atrocities he had been forced to watch. I know this experience still haunts those who were tasked with gathering evidence for the investigation, and I owe them my life. And I know it still haunts the journalists who had the gruelling task of reporting on the lengthy trial. I owe it to them that I did not have to face my tormentors alone. When my lawyers announced my decision to hold the trial in public, journalists from all over the world turned up in huge numbers to report on what was unfolding. And it was so much more than a procession of monsters: it was a deep dive into all of us, ordinary men and women, into our bedrooms, our relationships, our families, our sewers. This story stirs up our violence, our barely concealed sordidness, our dormant traumas, our silences, our equivocations. It is the grubby reflection of the domination and predatory activity that still structure our world.

  Now it’s over. The case is closed. The rapists are all in prison. The man who appealed was sentenced to ten years instead of the original nine. The legal process is complete. It helped me and it tested me. It dissected fifty years of my life – half a century taken apart, undermined, and now receding into the past. It gave me allies for life, my lawyers Stéphane and Antoine. The daily phone calls over the last few years, all our questions, all their advice and encouragement – I cannot imagine our conversation ending with the closure of the case. All these aspects of the trial helped create an extended family around me, and I feel deeply connected to those who supported me when I had nothing left.

  I love that word, family. It is the realm of my suffering and my healing. And at its heart, at the very heart of what I expected from life when I was young, there will always be my children and grandchildren, whom I love and miss so much. This story is theirs too. One day they will realise that our lives begin long before we do. I hope I’ll be there to answer their questions in person. I will tell them that I kept the name Pelicot so that they need not be ashamed of it. I will tell them how much I loved taking the train to go and stay with them during the school holidays. I even believe that they saved me. Whenever I boarded the high-speed train to Paris, I was not the person who, only a few years earlier, had gone to work every weekday morning in EDF’s nuclear department. I felt as if I was declining, at constant risk of a relapse. I was afraid of the blackouts I kept having, afraid that I had a brain tumour and was going to die. The truth is, the chemical submission didn’t last ten or twelve hours: it affected every minute of my life.

  I had no idea then, but I was only safe when I went away to take care of them. I was leaving the house of horrors. I embraced their lightness and also their concerns – tiny for us adults but so important to them. I gave my grandchildren the time and patience that we had not always had for our own children, and through them I savoured the delight of being six, seven, eight years old, the ages at which all I had done was wait for my mother to die. I thought I was watching over them. I realise now that it was they, albeit unawares, who were watching over me. Childhood, their childhood, became my refuge. My own, I realise, as I write these pages, is a strange little sanctuary I carry within me – holding both my solace and my sorrow. That is why my tears fall inward. With this book, I want to etch into that hidden place what happened to me afterwards. And to say that I am no longer afraid of being alone, that now I am able to fall asleep in the dark, a great victory. To say that we are reborn from our ashes, that I am alive, that I have rediscovered my joie de vivre, that I love Jean-Loup and that I regularly go to place flowers on his wife’s grave, for the present does not erase the past.

  I still need to believe in love. I received it intensely and too briefly from my parents, and for a long time I believed that it protected me from everything. I even believed that I knew how to give it.

  I now know that it comes from a deep wound within me that makes me vulnerable. But I accept that fragility, that risk, still. To fight the emptiness, I need to love.

  Gisèle Pelicot was named as the most noteworthy person of 2024 in an opinion poll in France, eclipsing world leaders, and was honoured by Time. To mark International Women’s Day, the Independent named her the most influential woman of 2025.

  Her case contributed to the national debate on sexual violence in France, which led to a change in the legal definition of rape.

  She has been awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest civic honour.

  Judith Perrignon is an award-winning novelist, journalist and essayist. She has helped several prominent French figures tell their stories, including Holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens.

  Natasha Lehrer is a prize-winning writer, translator and editor. Her journalism and book reviews have appeared in the Guardian, Observer, Times Literary Supplement, Nation and Fantastic Man, among others. She has contributed to several books, including a chapter on France in Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism, edited by Jo Glanville.

  The writers she has translated include Neige Sinno, Nathalie Léger, Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos and Georges Bataille. Her translations have been shortlisted and longlisted for several translation prizes, and she won the 2016 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Suite for Barbara Loden.

  Ruth Diver is an award-winning literary translator and the former head of comparative literature at the University of Auckland, where she also taught French and Russian. She holds a PhD in French language and literature from the University of Paris 8, is the author of Enfants russes, écrivains français: Nathalie Sarraute, Romain Gary, and has published research on translingual authors in Roman 20-50, Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle and Revue des lettres modernes.

  She won the Asymptote Close Approximations Fiction Prize in 2016 for her translation of Maraudes by Sophie Pujas and has since published over a dozen full-length translations, including The Little Girl on the Ice Floe by Adélaïde Bon and A History of the Big House by Charif Majdalani. Extracts from her translations have appeared in Granta, Tripwire and Guernica. She lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

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  Gisèle Pelicot, A Hymn to Life

 

 

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