When the World Split Open
While the case that resulted in the conviction of fifty-one men for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot last year was extraordinary, it is continuous with other forms of sexual violence.
In October 2020, Gisèle Pelicot went to the local police station with her husband, Dominique, believing they would be discussing a humiliating but relatively minor offense: he had been caught filming up women’s skirts at their local supermarket. Ten years earlier, she would learn, Dominique had done the same thing and escaped with a fine of a hundred euros. She had never been told. “Even then I would no doubt have been inclined to forgive him,” she later wrote. This time, however, the arrest led somewhere else. An officer asked to speak with her alone and showed her some photographs: men she did not know, a bedroom she recognized, and a woman whose body she could not immediately claim as her own. A police officer would later tell her that upwards of seventy men, including her own husband, “had come to my house to rape me.” That news would eventually make headlines across the world, making the Pelicot case one of the more sensational trials in recent history.
Caroline Darian—a pseudonym adopted by the Pelicots’ middle child—was the first member of her family to publish a book-length account; her 2022 memoir I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again recorded, in detailed, diaristic form, the immediate aftermath of her father’s terrible transgressions and her effort to reckon with them in real time. Gisèle’s own book, A Hymn to Life, which was released in February in an English translation by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, revisits those same years along with the period preceding the assaults. The book emphasizes endurance, tracing her efforts to rebuild a sense of self in the wake of her husband’s crimes. It recounts, too, her growing attachment to a new partner during the trial, even as it leaves certain questions—especially those raised by her daughter—unresolved. In 2024, the feminist philosopher Manon Garcia took a semester off from teaching to attend the trial; her book, Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial, attempts to mediate between Caroline’s and Gisèle’s accounts, tracing how legal procedures and finite resources determined not only what could be established in court but also what remained unexamined.
Most recently, in March of this year, theater director Milo Rau and dramaturg Servane Dècle staged a condensed version of the months-long trial. A current of activism runs through both Caroline’s book and the “scenic oratorio” (a print version of the French original has been published by Flammarion). In the preface to her book, Caroline writes about her efforts to raise awareness of drug-facilitated abuse. She has launched a movement called Stop Chemical Submission (#MendorsPas)—“Don’t Put Me Under”—“to go beyond the case of my mother and give a voice to all the invisible victims,” she writes. Rau and Dècle’s oratorio pursues a more oblique but no less insistent form of engagement. Drawing on reported testimony, the production places nonprofessional performers alongside trained actors and brings them into close contact with the material, inviting the audience into a charged proximity that dissolves the boundary between observer and participant.
The absence of memory is one of the most astonishing facts of Gisèle’s memoir—and becomes, eventually, one of its strange mercies. The woman in the photographs appears inert, completely emptied of volition. “If I had any memories of the ordeal, I’m sure that is what I would have been reduced to, and it probably would have killed me,” Gisèle writes. Her first reaction is not to reconstruct what happened but to refuse recognition. In the days that follow, she moves through a blur of instructions and suggestions. A lawyer her daughter contacts asks whether she plans to divorce Dominique; until that moment, the idea has not occurred to her. A deputy sergeant asks whether she intends to press charges, and only then does she say yes. (French law has recognized marital rape as a criminal offense since 1992.) When a lawyer suggests that she seek substantial financial compensation, Gisèle hesitates and ultimately agrees to “a request for a symbolic payment of one euro.” Her own desires are simpler: “I just wanted this to stop. To go home. To get back to my normal life.”
That “normal life” had been built over decades. Gisèle and Dominique met young, married, and raised three children. They moved to the village of Mazan, in southeastern France, on March 1, 2013, both sixty, expecting to settle into a quieter phase of life. By then, it would become clear, Dominique had already begun planning the rapes. Gisèle’s account of their marriage does not read as a long premonition of the awful things to come. She writes about working for the French national electricity company EDF, about raising children, about her professional promotions. She became the family’s primary earner, advancing within her company and eventually securing company housing in Gournay-sur-Marne. Dominique, on the other hand, had an uneven history of employment. He tried his hand at different ventures, accumulated debts, and relied on her financial steadiness. In 1999, on the advice of a tax attorney, they even divorced to protect her assets from seizure, remarrying years later. These are not the details of a life she experienced as fragile or coerced. They are the scaffolding of a life she believed she understood.
Looking back, Gisèle does not pretend that everything was seamless. She recalls an affair with a colleague after returning from maternity leave, a period when she felt she “had more in common with him than with my husband.” She remembers tensions, disappointments, small fractures that did not, at the time, seem decisive. Dominique could be volatile, occasionally aggressive, sometimes belittling. He drifted professionally. Still, she did not read these traits as harbingers of what he would later do.
Her body, meanwhile, was registering something she could not interpret. There were blackouts, lost hours, entire days she could not recall. She worried about having a brain tumor, like her mother. There were medical tests, inconclusive results, a growing unease that settled without forming into suspicion. Other moments hovered at the edge of comprehension: a new pair of trousers marked with bleach; a drink that tasted funny; a glass of beer that appeared green; a near accident when she veered close to a ditch while driving behind her husband. When she raised concerns, he softened them. “You don’t want to worry [the children],” he would say. He accompanied her to medical appointments, reinforcing the impression of care.
As the investigation continues, the scale of what had been done to her comes into terrible focus. Analysis of her hair reveals “traces of drugs” indicating “extremely high levels of intoxication.” Medical testing uncovers “the presence of countless bacteria and of a papillomavirus that would need to be monitored, because it could develop into cancer.” She learns that the rapes, which lasted between thirty minutes and several hours, had been repeated over years, that they had grown more frequent in 2017, and that they continued even after police had seized Dominique’s devices and he knew what they would find.
Prosecutors ultimately identified fifty-one defendants in total: forty-nine would eventually be charged with aggravated rape, one with attempted rape, and one with sexual assault. Some of the men ventured only once to the Pelicot home while a smaller number returned multiple times. They ranged in age from their early twenties to their early seventies; most lived within roughly a fifty- to sixty-kilometer radius of Mazan. Their occupations, backgrounds, and family situations varied; many were described as living with partners or having children, and at least thirty-seven were fathers. A number of the defendants had prior criminal records, including convictions for domestic violence and sexual assault, while others had no known criminal history. Thirteen, including Dominique, reported having experienced sexual abuse as children; two claimed to be victims of incest.
It would also emerge during police investigations that Dominique had provided several of the men with the sedative lorazepam, encouraging them to use the same method of chemical submission on women in their own lives. One of these men, Jean-Pierre Maréchal, went on to rape his wife repeatedly, with Dominique involved.
Gisèle tries to understand the man at the center of these crimes without reducing his actions to a single explanation. As she recounts in her memoir, Dominique’s childhood was striated with violence. His father, Denis Pelicot, ruled the household harshly. A young woman with learning disabilities, Nicole, lived with them; Gisèle and her husband later suspected Denis may have abused her. When Dominique’s mother died, Denis “made his relationship with Nicole official.” She was twenty-five; he was fifty-eight. Dominique’s brother, who would go on to become a doctor and a mayor, dismissed concerns about the household; Gisèle remarks that for him it seemed “incest was unremarkable.” A magistrate recounts that Dominique, at thirteen, witnessed the gang rape of a young woman on a building site. Investigators later connected him, via DNA evidence, to an attempted rape of an estate agent in 1999, and are considering his involvement in another rape and murder case from 1991.
At the trial, a psychologist describes Dominique as having a split personality. There was the man who could coldly tell other men to wait in the car for the drugs to take effect on Gisèle and not to wear condoms while raping her (even though one man was HIV positive), and there was another man who presented himself as a loving father and husband. The question of how to confront this dual identity shapes Gisèle’s decisions about the trial itself. When her first lawyer proposes an open hearing, suggesting it could become a public reckoning with violence against women, Gisèle refuses. “I did not want to be in the spotlight, forever the victim, ‘that poor woman,’” she writes. The idea changes gradually. During a walk, she imagines facing the men in a closed courtroom and realizes that she would be alone with them. She begins to feel the need for other eyes in the room to fend off isolation. The trial, once opened, becomes something else: a space in which she is not the only witness.
The subtitle of Gisèle’s memoir is “Shame Has to Change Sides.” It is a declaration that emerged publicly during the trial, but resonates more quietly in the book, threading through her attempts to situate what happened. Reading her account, one is struck by how often shame attaches itself elsewhere: to her own sense of having “understood nothing,” to her husband’s professional failures, to the humiliations of debt, to the silence that governed their private life. She writes, revealingly, about her belief as a married woman that “suffering must not show; it should stay hidden, like our grief at the loss of those we have loved.” The acts Dominique committed might also have been an attempt to displace or expiate a sense of shame—over his inability to sustain steady work, his dependence on his wife’s income, and his exposure to sexual violence at a young age. He wished, in the words of his lawyer, to become a kind of “sublimating entity.”
Among the 20,000 incriminating photos and videos found on Dominique’s hard drive and computer are two photographs of his middle child, Caroline, asleep and scantily dressed. Investigators also identified file remnants and titles referring to her, including references to images of her naked, collages comparing her body with her mother’s, and edited images incorporating her into pornographic compositions. The discovery destabilized the family. Caroline became convinced that she must also have been drugged and assaulted. Dominique denies it, but his brother tells her that her father had “almost certainly raped her too.”
Caroline’s own book, published in English last year, leaves little doubt about how she understands her place in the story: she is his “second victim.” She concedes that she cannot produce definitive evidence that her father drugged or assaulted her, yet she describes a period marked by unexplained physical suffering—months of persistent vaginal pain following a tear that would not heal despite multiple surgeries and no clear medical explanation. During that time, she writes, she felt both physically incapacitated and unable to articulate what was happening to her. In retrospect, she is haunted by the possibility that the images her father took, along with the actions she cannot fully reconstruct, may be connected to that ordeal. Unlike her mother, who elects to keep her husband’s last name, Caroline changes the middle name of her child from Dominique to David a month after her father’s transgressions come to light. (“Darian” is also a pseudonym, a portmanteau of the first names of her brothers David and Florian.)
I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again also complicates her mother’s assertion that her children “fail[ed] to locate a red flag that might have alerted them” and found “only fragments of a happy childhood.” Caroline writes of witnessing domestic violence as early as nine, recalling an episode in which her father seized her mother by the collar and slammed her against a wall; similar incidents recurred in the years that followed. At fourteen, Caroline came home from school to find a bailiff, a police officer, and movers clearing out the family’s living room, carrying away furniture and personal belongings, including pieces that held deep sentimental value. She recalls her father shouting at the movers as they hauled everything away, while she stood there crying. “As we grew older, my brothers and I learned to live with my father’s ever-shifting personality,” she writes. “He couldn’t hide his frustration and his jealous nature. When reality didn’t suit him, he would try to disguise it.” Even happier childhood memories—attending a concert together, introducing him to the man who would become her husband—leave her feeling “waterboarded by the past.”
Garcia was present in Avignon for the trial, which was in progress when Donald Trump secured his second presidential victory. In her book, she notes that “when a father takes sexual photographs of his daughter, that already constitutes an incestuous relationship.” What follows in Living with Men is an effort to describe what the trial itself often left hovering at the edge of articulation. Some of the photographs of Caroline discovered among Dominique’s files were treated with a kind of procedural caution in court, never fully integrated into the central narrative of the crimes against Gisèle. At the start of her slim work, Garcia lingers on what she describes as this “awkward silence” surrounding incest that permits the continuation of sexual violence.
As Garcia goes on to observe, the case of Gisèle and her daughter makes for a study in contrasts. Gisèle, whose abuse was documented in hundreds of videos, became a figure of public solidarity; women gathered outside the courthouse, applauding her refusal of anonymity. Caroline, by contrast, occupied a more ambiguous position. There was no equivalent archive of incontrovertible evidence, only implication, nagging suspicion, and the unbearable proximity of possibility. Garcia attends to the way this difference in evidentiary clarity organizes sympathy. One woman could be celebrated because her victimization was undeniable; the other elicited something closer to unease, as though the uncertainty itself made her harder to accommodate within the available scripts of recognition.
Garcia’s analysis of consent turns on a related problem of legibility within the law. French law defines rape as sexual penetration or oral sex obtained through “violence, constraint, threat, or surprise.” Garcia notes that Dominique appeared to operate with a notion of consent borrowed from civil law—an assumption that agreement can be inferred from the context of an ongoing relationship or private arrangement. But in criminal law, she makes clear, consent cannot be presumed or pieced together from circumstance; it must be actively, knowingly given, and it is void the moment coercion, incapacity, or manipulation enters the scene. That slippage may explain how he could have recruited dozens of strangers via a chat room bearing the insidious name “Without Her Knowledge,” presenting his wife’s unconsciousness as a kind of standing permission.
The law, meanwhile, must translate such distortions back into prosecutable terms, a process that reveals its own constraints. For Garcia, the Pelicot trial “marks the end of the idea that [women] can place our hopes exclusively in the legal system.” “When so many of the accused, faced with the most explicit and damning videos imaginable, still try to deny the facts or any criminal intent,” she asks, “what can judges or juries hope to do in cases that do not involve a meticulous collector obsessed with capturing everything on video?” Garcia has a point: more than a dozen of the men who assaulted her remain unidentified and Dominique is apparently looking to publish his own version of events.
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” the poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked. “The world would split open.” One wants to let those lines settle over the pages of both Caroline’s and her mother’s books like a quiet epigraph. But how quickly the fissure seems to narrow, the surface to seal.
In her book, Garcia notes that the layout of the courtroom sometimes gave Dominique an unintended aura of authority. Because of a chronic back condition, he was permitted to remain seated while others stood to address the court. One of the more intriguing elements of Milo Rau and Servane Dècle’s stage version of The Pelicot Trial, performed in late March at New York’s Judson Memorial Church after a run at the Festival d’Avignon, is the way it works against that visual hierarchy. Dominique, played by multiple actors, is initially impossible to pick out from the rows of dark-clad defendants. The staging denies him any fixed physical identity or privileged position, while sending a shiver down the spine: he could be any man. When he is called to deliver his testimonies, he rises to a lectern like everyone else who has appeared before the court: lawyers, journalists, police officers, court psychiatrists, expert witnesses, his co-defendants, his wife, his daughter Caroline.
To its credit, the play resists the temptation to supply a neat or coherent psychology for him. I thought more than once of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of Iago’s self-justifications in Othello as the “motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.” Dominique claims the videos he made of Gisèle being violated were “for my selfish pleasure, with no desire to humiliate. It was only for me. ‘Slut’ is a compliment to me, for women.” I thought, inevitably, just as often of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. At one point, a defense attorney asks Gisèle whether she thinks her ex-husband’s actions were driven, at least in part, by a desire to punish her for an earlier affair. The idea had crossed her mind, she replies, but the timing makes no sense: why would such revenge arrive decades later? She cannot account for it.
The play offers no resolution. Instead, it accumulates voices—legal, journalistic, achingly personal—as it weaves through the sixteen-week trial. We hear from many of the defendants, their testimony painstakingly reconstructed from the indictment, press coverage, opinion articles, and books. Because court proceedings in France are not typically preserved in official transcripts, the script’s reliance on journalists’ notes, emails, and interviews becomes especially significant, offering a rare, composite account of what was said and how it was heard.
Dominique’s own words return repeatedly to the language of submission. He describes Gisèle as “a reed that doesn’t break,” someone who, over time, became more capable of refusing his sexual wishes. He wanted, he says, to “make her submissive,” to “make her pay the price for her freedom,” to subdue “a rebellious woman.” He avers that “people are not born perverted; they become that way”—a distortion of Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born, but becomes a woman.”
The refrain that “shame must change sides” recurs throughout the performance—spoken by lawyers and echoed by feminist demonstrators beyond the courtroom’s walls. The slogan is directed outward; at a social level, shame must shift from the victims to the perpetrators of sexual violence. Yet in moments, particularly when Caroline takes the stand, the play puts pressure on a different question: Can shame “change sides” within the intimate structures of a family it has already torn apart? Can it move within a household, from a daughter sentenced to live the rest of her days in doubt to her mother, who has been called a “saint” and “the ultimate victim”? These questions are sidestepped by Gisèle’s memoir. On the forty-eighth day of the trial, she states: “I don’t think we are putting our family issues on trial today. The whole family is a victim in this trial, but right now, Monsieur Pelicot and the fifty individuals behind me are on trial.”
The soft-spoken grandmother rarely presents as a polemicist, so it’s no less striking to hear her say, in her final statement, that “cowardice is on trial here.” On one level, it’s clear enough what she means: “cowardice” is the refusal of the rapists to own up to the truth of their acts of sexual violence. Yet watching the performance, which gives considerably more space and time to the views of the defendants than either of Gisèle’s or Caroline’s books, I was also struck by the ways that male entitlement winds its way into the courtroom. On the first day of the trial, the presiding judge asks each defendant whether they acknowledge engaging in sexual acts involving penetration with Gisèle under conditions involving force, coercion, threats, or surprise. A significant number answer in the affirmative, or with a qualified “yes”—“Yes, even if there was no intent on my part.” It’s entitlement that we hear in the voice of Jean T., a roofer who believed Dominique had consented on behalf of his wife because “it’s men who do the talking because they are kind of the protector.” Or Christian L., a firefighter who noted in court that “the whole meeting is based on what you’ve discussed with the husband so that it’s an enjoyable experience for everyone.” There are, unfortunately, several more rebarbative examples.
It has become banal to invoke Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Her suggestion was that what is most disturbing is not exceptional monstrosity—a monster, after all, is a creature beyond understanding—but the ordinariness of those who participate in violence. Yet the point seems more than apt in the case of the Pelicot trial. Garcia describes the pack of accused men she saw in the courtroom as exhibiting a “banal yet terrifying lack of introspection.” For her, the accused men form a cross section of French society, and their very lack of distinction points to a pervasive complicity with patriarchal norms. The Pelicot case may be extraordinary, yet Garcia rightly treats it as continuous with more ordinary forms of sexual violence, differing in degree rather than kind.
It’s estimated that 230,000 women in France between the ages of eighteen and seventy-four experience rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault every year. As a member of the activist group NousToutes declares in The Pelicot Trial, a rape or attempted rape occurs in France every two-and-a-half minutes. Beyond France, a recent CNN investigation uncovered vast online networks circulating videos of drugged or unconscious women, with tens of thousands of participants exchanging advice on how to sedate partners and evade detection. One such ecosystem included a pornographic platform hosting tens of thousands of these videos with some users selling access to livestreams of abuse. In Germany, a separate prosecution uncovered a Telegram-based network in which men used coded language to discuss drugging women—often partners or acquaintances—and shared recordings of the assaults.
When the actors of The Pelicot Trial finally lined up to take their bows, I felt completely wrung out, with no small sense of outrage. Outrage on behalf of women who do not share Gisèle’s relative social and economic security—those living without legal status, in economic precarity, women of color, trans women, sex workers, women with disabilities. Rau and Dècle gesture to them through the voices of activists who insist on widening the aperture of atrocity. But beyond them, who is left to speak, and who is still not being heard?
Rhoda Feng is a freelance critic living in Washington, DC. Her writing has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, frieze, Foreign Policy, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review.