French woman whose husband got strangers to rape her describes ‘scenes of horror’
Gisele Pelicot says she is speaking for ‘every woman who’s been drugged without knowing it’
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged told his trial on Thursday that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes.
“The police saved my life by investigating Mr Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband – one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial – by only his last name.
Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious health problems and a fateful meeting with police.
For years, she said, she had had strange memory lapses and other health problems and thought she might have had Alzheimer’s.
In November 2020, she was invited to speak to investigators, who showed her the images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband and her world fell apart, she said in court.
“For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years,” Gisele Pelicot said.
