New name, no photo: Gisele Pellicot erases all trace of her husband

It was November 2011, and Gisele Pellicotte was sleeping a lot.

She spent most of her weekends sleeping. She was angry, because she worked hard during the week as a supply chain manager, and her vacation time was precious.

Yet she seemed unable to stay awake, often drifting off without realizing it and waking up hours later with no memory of going to bed.

Despite this, 58 year old Gisele was happy. She considered herself lucky to have her husband, Dominic, 38, by her side. Now that their three children, Caroline, David and Florian, were grown, the couple were planning to retire soon and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in France’s delightful southern region of Provence, where Mr. Pellicot could go on bike rides. And she could carry Lancôme. , his French Bulldog, on long walks.

She had been in love with Dominic since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw that young man in the blue jumper it was love at first sight,” Gisele reflected much later. Both of their family histories were complicated by loss and trauma, and they found peace with each other. Their four decades together went through difficult times – repeated financial troubles and an affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they overcame them.

Years later, when a lawyer asked him to summarize their relationship, he said: “Our friends used to say we were the perfect coupleAnd I thought we’d spend our days together.”

By that time, Gisele and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom in Avignon, not far from Mazan: she surrounded by her children and her lawyers, and he in the defendants’ glass case with brown, prison-issue Was wearing clothes. ,

it was Facing a maximum prison sentence for aggravated rape and rapidly became known in France and beyond as – in the words of his own daughter – “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”.

But in 2011, when Gisele realized she was sleeping too much, she had no idea things would turn out this way.

She had no idea that her husband Dominique Pellicot, in his late 50s and nearing retirement, was spending a lot of time on the Internet, often talking to users on open forums and chatrooms, where sexual content – ​​often extreme. or illegal – was freely available. ,

Later in court, he pointed to that phase following the trauma of childhood rape and abuse as the trigger of his “distortion”: “We become distorted when we find something that gives us means: the Internet. “

Between 2010 and 2011, a man claiming to be a nurse sent Mr Pellicott photographs of his wife, unconscious after taking sleeping pills. He also shared the exact instructions with Mr. Pellicote so that he could do the same with Gisele.

At first he hesitated – but not for long.

Through trial and error he realized that with the right dosage of pills he could put his wife into such a deep sleep that nothing could wake her. They were legally prescribed by his doctor, who thought that Mr. Pellicott was suffering from anxiety due to financial troubles.

He would then be able to make her wear lingerie that she refused to wear, or put her through sexual practices that she would never have accepted had she been conscious. He could film scenes, Which she does not allow to happen while she is awake.

Initially, it was he who raped her. But by the time the couple settled in Mazan in 2014, they had improved and expanded their operation.

He kept tranquilizers in a shoebox in the garage, and changed brands because at first they tasted “too salty” to be sneakily incorporated into his wife’s food and drinks, he later said.

In a chat room called “Without Her Knowledge” he recruited men of all ages and abused his wife.

He will also film them.

He told the court that his wife’s state of unconsciousness was obvious 71 men who came to his house Over the course of a decade. “You’re just like me, you like rape mode,” he told one of them in the chat.

As the years passed, the effects of Ms. Pellicott’s abuse at night began to spill over into her waking life. She lost weight, clumps of hair fell out and her blackouts became more frequent. She was overcome with anxiety, convinced that she was close to death.

His family became worried. When she visited him she seemed healthy and active.

Her son-in-law Pierre said, “We would call her but most of the time it was Dominique who would answer the phone. He would tell us that Giselle was sleeping, even in the middle of the day.” “But it seemed likely because she was doing a lot of that (when she was with us), especially running around after the grandchildren.”

At times, Giselle came close to suspicion. Once, she noticed that the beer her husband had given her had a green color, and she quickly poured it into the sink. Another time, she noticed a bleach stain on a new pair of pants that she couldn’t remember. “There’s no way you’re drugging me, right?” He remembered asking her. He burst into tears: “How can you accuse me of such a thing?”

However, mostly she felt lucky to have him by her side while she was dealing with her health issues. She developed gynecological problems and underwent several neurological tests to determine whether she was suffering from Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor, as she feared, but the results did not explain the increasing fatigue and blackouts.

Many years later, during the trial, Dominic’s brother Joel, a doctor, was asked how it was possible that medical professionals never gathered clues and did not understand that Giselle was in the little-known incident of chemical decapitation – drug-facilitated. Wale was a victim of rape. , He replied, “In the field of medicine we find only what we are looking for, and we find only what we know.”

Giselle only felt better when she was away from Mazan – a strange thing she barely noticed.

In September 2020, upon returning from one of these trips, Dominic told her in floods of tears: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothing in a supermarket,” he told her during the trial. Remembered.

She was very surprised, she said, because “in 50 years he had never behaved inappropriately or used obscene words towards women”.

She said she forgave him but asked him to promise that she would seek help.

He agreed, “and we left it at that”, she said.

But Dominic must have known the end was near.

Shortly after he was arrested at the supermarket, police confiscated his two phones and his laptop, where they essentially found over 20,000 videos and photos of him and other men raping his wife.

Director of investigations Jeremy Bos Platier told the court, “I watched those videos for hours. It was disturbing. It definitely had an impact on me.”

His colleague Stephen Gall said, “In 33 years in the police, I had never really seen anything like that.” “It was disgusting, it was shocking.”

His team was assigned the task of locating the people seen in the video. They cross-checked the faces and names of the men with facial recognition technology as well as those carefully logged by Dominic.

They were eventually able to identify 54 of them, while the other 21 remained unidentified.

Some of the unidentified people, while talking to Dominic, said that they were also giving drugs to their companions. “For me this is the most painful part of the case,” Mr Bosse Platier said. “To know that there are some women out there who may still be victims of their husbands.”

On 2 November 2020, Dominic and Gisele had breakfast together before going to the police station, where Mr Pellicott was called in relation to an upskirting incident. A policeman asked him to accompany him to another room. She confirmed that Dominic is her husband – “a great guy, a good man” – but she denied ever swinging with him, or engaging in a threesome.

“I’m going to show you something you won’t like,” the police chief warned before showing her a photo of a sex act.

At first she could not recognize either of them.

When he did so, “I told him to stop… everything collapsed, everything I had built over 50 years”.

In a state of shock, he was sent home with a friend. She had to tell her children what had happened.

Recalling that moment, Gisele said that her “daughter’s screams are forever imprinted in my mind”. Caroline, David and Florian approach Mazan and exit the house. Later, photos of a drunk Caroline are also found on Dominic’s laptop, although he denies abusing her.

David, the eldest child, said he no longer has any family photos because he “got rid of everything related to my father right there”. Within a few days, Giselle’s life was limited to a suitcase and her dog.

Meanwhile, Dominic confesses to his crimes and is formally arrested. He thanked the police for “relieving him of the burden”.

He and Gisele would not meet again until they sat across from each other in an Avignon courtroom in September 2024.

By then, the story of the husband who drugged his wife for a decade and invited strangers to rape her had begun to spread around the world. Gisele’s unusual and remarkable decision to waive her anonymity And open the trial to the public and media.

She said, “I want any woman who wakes up one morning and has no memory of the night before to remember what I said.” “So that no woman can become a victim of chemical subjugation. I was sacrificed on the altar of evil, and we need to talk about it.”

Her legal team also successfully insisted on the videos being shown in court, arguing that they would “undo the thesis of accidental rape” – pushing back against the defense’s line that the men had no intention of raping Gisele. Didn’t mean to because she didn’t realize she was unconscious.

A woman who came to watch the trial in Avignon in November said, “She wanted the parties to change out of shame and that happened.” “Gisele turned everything upside down. We weren’t expecting this kind of woman.”

Medical examiner Anne Martinet Sainte-Beuve said that in the wake of her husband’s arrest, Giselle was clearly in shock, but remained calm and distant – a coping mechanism often employed by survivors of terrorist attacks.

Giselle herself has said that she is “a field of ruins” and fears that the rest of her life will not be enough to rebuild herself.

Ms. Sainte-Beuve said she found Giselle to be “extraordinarily resilient”: “She transformed him into a force that could have destroyed him.”

A few days before the trial began, the Pellicotes’ divorce was finalized.

Giselle has gone back to her maiden name. She went to trial under the name Pellicote so that her grandchildren would be “proud” to be related to her and not ashamed of being related to Dominic.

She has since moved to a village away from Mazan. She goes to a psychiatrist but does not take any medication, as she no longer wants to consume any substances. She continues to go on long walks, but doesn’t get tired anymore.

Caroline’s husband Pierre took the stand in the early days of the trial.

A defense attorney asked her about the Mazan years, when Giselle suffered from memory loss and her husband dutifully accompanied her to fruitless medical appointments. How did the family not know what was happening?

Pierre nodded.

“You are forgetting one thing,” he said. “You cannot imagine the unimaginable.”