Gisèle Pelicot reduced to tears watching video messages of support from women in France | News World

‘Thanks for the courage you’ve got given victims.’

‘Thanks for this battle on behalf of all girls, including mine.’

‘Bravo on your bravery and tenacity. As women, we’re happy with you.’

Tears rolled down Gisele Pelicot’s face as she listened to the words of girls from across France who shared how much she meant to them.

‘It touches me enormously because these are the faces I met through the trial. I saw them putting up posters, I saw their collages, I saw the banners,’ she said, watching the clips.

In a candid interview with BBC Newsnight, Gisele sat down and told her side of the story after becoming a feminist icon.

Gisele insisted that her trial be public, together with her name published within the press and videos of her husband’s crimes exhibited in court, sparking widespread support, which saw women march in support of her during her court dates.

‘It’s not for us to have shame; it’s for them,’ she has declared defiantly, extending a hand out to fellow survivors as a method of encouraging them to not necessarily stand on a pedestal and develop into advocates, but simply to alter their perceptions of their abuse.

Gisele’s ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, was found guilty in 2024 of repeatedly drugging and raping his wife for nearly a decade, and welcoming dozens of strangers to rape her.

Gisele, who’s releasing her memoirs soon, remembers the moments she made three separate phone calls to every of her children, which she described as the toughest thing she has ever needed to do.

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‘I used to be well aware that for my children it was going to be immensely difficult,’ she told BBC Newsnight.

Speaking of her children’s response, she recalls the moment her daughter, Caroline, screamed in shock at her father’s actions toward her mother.

‘I heard my daughter scream. It was almost inhuman, that scream,’ she said.

She described her eldest child, David, as being in a state of shock, while Florian, the youngest, immediately checked in on his mother’s wellbeing asking her how she was.

Despite not talking to her husband in court, Pelicot says she has one thing she still desires to do for closure.

She said: ‘I need to look him directly in the attention and ask him, ‘Why did you try this?’’

‘I don’t recognise myself in those photos. I said, ‘That’s not me.’ Then I placed on my glasses, and there I discovered this lifeless woman with a person she didn’t know on her bed.

‘I feel my brain disassociated.’

Until police knocked on her door 4 years ago, exposing the crimes, she lived a standard life as a wife, mother, and grandmother.

Under French law, the names of victims are normally kept out of the press, but she insisted on a public trial in an try to expose her ex and the 50 men that he’s accused of inviting to rape her.

She allowed journalists to publish her full name and the court to exhibit explicit videos recorded by her husband showing men engaging in sexual activity together with her while unconscious.

Gisele has said her decisions were in solidarity with all the opposite women who go unrecognised as victims of sexual crimes.

She recalled talking to her ex-husband while on the stand in court, telling him: ‘I all the time tried to guide you towards the sunshine, but you selected the depths of the human soul. You mostly need to select, to determine which path to follow. There’s the great and the bad.

‘As for me, I even have all the time chosen to walk toward the great.’

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