Gisèle Pelicot Shares Her Remarkable Story of Survival After Being Raped by 51 Men, Including Her Husband (Exclusive)

Pelicot, 73, who has a new memoir, opens up to PEOPLE about her horrific ordeal, her belief in hope and finding love again

NEED TO KNOW

• In November 2020, Gisèle Pelicot learned her husband of nearly 50 years had been drugging her at night for more than a decade — and invited more then 50 men into their home to rape her
• Pelicot waived her right to anonymity, becoming a hero to victims of sexual violence. All 51 men charged with raping her, including her husband, were convicted in 2024
• Pelicot, who has written a new memoir, A Hymn to Life, opens up to PEOPLE about her ordeal and her life today

A bicycle ride along the coast. A cheese omelet. An impromptu dance in the arms of a man who’s helped her love again. Gisèle Pelicot smiles as she describes, through a translator, the simple pleasures in her life today: “I haven’t lost that joie de vivre. It’s wonderful to allow yourself to be happy.”

Such moments of joy are something like a miracle for Pelicot, given the nightmare she has endured.

Five and a half years ago, she discovered that her husband of nearly 50 years had been drugging and raping her for a decade—and had brought men into their home in the south of France to sexually assault her, night after night.

Her decision to waive anonymity and publicly confront her husband, Dominique, and 50 strangers who had abused her made her a hero for sexual violence victims around the world.

Fourteen months after all 51 men were found guilty, Pelicot is sharing her story in a new memoir, Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides, and she tells PEOPLE that she’s come to peace with her past as she builds her future.

“You can't forget. The scar is there, and it may never fully heal,” says Pelicot, 73, who last year was named a knight of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest civilian award. “But I’ve always been a very optimistic woman. I wanted to take all of that mud and bring color back into my life.”

Looking back, Pelicot says there were few signs of her husband’s dark truth before her horrifying discovery in 2020. Both products of painful childhoods—his marked by sexual and physical abuse, hers by the early loss of her mother—the two met as teens and “fell madly in love.”

They’d faced financial woes and had weathered affairs on both sides, but raised three children in the Paris region and appeared to be living out their dreams of retirement in Mazan, a quiet village of about 5,000 in Provence.

At times, Dominique tried to push the couple’s boundaries uncomfortably, suggesting anal sex and provocative lingerie. When Gisèle refused, he called her a prude. She dismissed it as two partners with different drives.

But she was troubled by memory lapses that doctors couldn’t explain. Once, she jokingly asked her husband, a former electrician, if he was drugging her. “He started crying and said, ‘How can you say something like that?’” she recalls. “And I felt guilty. I blamed myself for having said such a thing. I didn’t believe a word of it. I was just so worried about my blackouts."

And yet, she says, “I shared truly wonderful moments with this man.”

Then, in the fall of 2020, Dominique was accused of taking photos up women’s skirts in a local store. Gisèle stood with him as he turned himself in, believing it to be an unsettling anomaly they could overcome. “I didn’t see Mr. Pelicot change when we went to the police station,” she says. “I didn’t see anxiety on his face."

But her world was about to crumble.

An investigator presented her with photos of a woman, limp and mostly naked, being raped by a series of men. “She looked like a rag doll,” Pelicot writes in her memoir.

For years, police told her, Dominique had been slipping medication—anti-anxiety and sleeping pills—into her food at night, and inviting men he’d met online to join him in raping her, not for money but for his sexual pleasure.

He filmed it all and instructed the men not to wear condoms. One man worked at a nearby supermarket. Another, a construction worker, visited their home, pretending to be a friend, to see Gisèle before he assaulted her. One rapist, an ex-soldier, was in his 20s. The oldest was in his 70s.

“My brain dissociated. I stopped hearing what [police] were saying,” Pelicot tells PEOPLE. Hours later, reality sunk in: those were her bedside tables in the photos, her bedroom, her body. “The descent into hell began.”

More horrors emerged, including pictures Dominique had taken of their daughter, Caroline, as she slept, in underwear that wasn’t hers.

At first, Gisèle wanted to hide and have the trial proceed as quickly as possible, behind closed doors. Then she reconsidered: “As a victim, you’re punished twice. We inflict a kind of suffering on ourselves. I told myself fighting against that shame was a way of helping everyone else.”

She sat, stoic, in court while videos of the rapes played as evidence, her abusers just yards away. Outside, hundreds held signs of support. Thousands of letters arrived at court, thanking her for her courage, but she says, “I never felt like an icon. I think I’m a point of reference for all those women who identified with my story and for whom it echoed their own suffering.”

Since her abusers’ convictions in December 2024 (Dominique, 73, whom she divorced two years ago, is serving 20 years; other sentences range from time served to 15 years), Gisèle has wrestled with her past: “We are made up of memories. In order to continue living, I needed to believe that those 50 years with Mr. Pelicot had not been only a lie. Otherwise, I no longer exist—I am dead."

Gisèle (who kept her ex-husband’s surname “for my children, and especially my grandchildren, who still bear the name… it was a way of restoring some balance”) says she intends to confront her ex-husband in prison one day to ask “why he made me endure everything he put me through.” And to find out the truth of what he may have done to their daughter: “I need answers.”

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For now, however, her “defense mechanism” is “to keep the good and throw everything negative in the trash.” Her children have had a harder time reconciling the father they knew with the monster now in prison.

"Monsieur Pelicot and I chose each other. My children did not choose their father and mother. So we are not at all in the same place," she says. "Each of us is trying to rebuild in our own way, at our own pace."

She and her youngest son, Florian, 39, remain close. At one point, her daughter Caroline, 47, publicly expressed anger toward her (rooted in what her daughter saw as her mother not acknowledging Caroline's own abuse). However Gisèle says that she and Caroline now talk or text daily. She is, however, still not in touch with her oldest son David, 51. “He needs more time, and I respect his silence," she says.

Their family's shared trauma, she explains, “is a shockwave that upends everything.”

When that wave first hit, “I never imagined falling in love again. That was something I ruled out.” But she says the circumstances of her abuse had an oddly protective side effect: “I lived through the rapes as if under general anesthesia. My body has no memory of them. That was a kind of blessing.”

Nearly three years after Dominique’s arrest, she met a widower named Jean-Loup—an "extraordinary person with a very beautiful soul” who lives on the Île de Ré, an island off France’s Atlantic coast where Gisèle had moved.

Their life together is full of everyday joys: Jean-Loup’s cooking (“He’s the king of the Comté omelet”), dancing to ABBA (“He says he’s a bad dancer, but that’s not true… I get him moving”) and bike rides on the island paths.

It gives her hope for her future, in spite of her past.

“I have such trust in him. It may seem paradoxical…but just because I lived through something sordid as I did with Monsieur Pelicot doesn’t mean it will happen again,” she says. “We’re living very, very happy moments. Life is worth living—that’s what’s so wonderful.” 
For more of Gisèle Pelicot's remarkable story of survival, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.