Please exercise caution when reading the following. Mention of sexual violence and drugging. 

“I am about to dose her.” 

“We have to wait at least one hour to abuse her.”

“She doesn’t suspect anything?” 

Ten years—2011 to 2021. That is how long Frenchwoman Gisèle Pelicot was regularly drugged and prostituted to dozens of men by her own husband, Dominique Pelicot. Comatose, G. Pelicot was filmed and violated over two hundred times by more than seventy men for a decade.

Above are real, translated clips of messages between D. Pelicot and his clients over the now-terminated chatroom in the platform Coco.fr, which he used to recruit men willing to harm his wife. For years, he lured them with photos and videos of G. Pelicot fully unconscious, filling his online Coco forum titled “without her knowledge” with these images. In this forum, the men used pseudonyms to organize, glorifying and romanticizing sexual abuse as they shared their aspirations of following D. Pelicot’s footsteps by soliciting their own wives someday. 

Over the course of a decade, D. Pelicot managed to arrange an elaborate network of men that routinely visited the Pelicot homestead to rape Gisèle Pelicot. For these ten years, she never suspected that her husband was inviting abusers into her house to assault her—she was thoroughly sedated each time, afterall. She did, however, face the physical consequences of his vile actions for the time that she was in the dark. Regular sedation and sexual abuse brought her severe memory loss and pelvic pain. She frequented the doctor in the company of her husband, never quite knowing the cause of her suffering.

Until 2021, when she finally uncovered her husband’s horrific crime and rightfully took him to court, along with fifty of the seventy men, and all his appalling videos. The case finally closed last month on December 19, 2024. 

Dominique and Giséle Pelicot were strolling through the supermarket, perhaps preparing that night’s meal. G. Pelicot was completely unaware that, the entire time they had been at the store, her husband had been filming up the skirts of young women. He was arrested almost immediately after and jailed for an eight-month period. 

When arrested, the police proceeded to confiscate all his devices and harddrives, accidentally uncovering hundreds of photos and videos of Gisèle Pelicot being violated by dozens of strangers. In these videos, the faces of the men were recognizable and fifty were identified. They, too, were taken to trial. All lived within thirty-one miles of the Pelicot home in the village of Mazan. They hailed from various regions with a variety of backgrounds as firefighters, construction workers, and nurses. Most had children, half were married, and a quarter had unfortunately been abused or assaulted in some form as a child. These men were not necessarily ordinary, as put by CNN in an article detailing the trial—they had committed atrocities. Yet, at the same time, they were not quite monsters. The fact that these men were so outwardly normal may be one of the more terrifying truths of this case. 

Some of the men confessed to their crime, others appealed, and multiple attempted to pin the blame on D. Pelicot alone by claiming that he manipulated them. D. Pelicot did not attempt to appeal and admitted to aggravated rape, earning him France’s maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. At present, he is seventy-two years old and will likely pass in prison. The remaining men received varying degrees of reprisal and rebuke, and their punishments ranged from fifteen years in prison to suspended charges. 

Gisèle made a unique decision in this case that has won her the hearts and support of women across France—she chose to make the trial a public one. She faced her abusers in person and relived her horrors, everything on display for the world. Her unusual, heroic choice has galvanized French women to take a stand against gender-based violence in their country. Many have taken to criticizing of the French government for its lax laws regarding sexual assault, calling for an explicit clause on consent and more severe sentences for abusers.

Others point blame at the lack of legal scrutiny on websites such as Coco.fr, which often walk scotch-free from these kinds of cases. In fact, Coco alone has been cited in over twenty-three thousand cases of sexual abuse, murder, and drug trafficking within the last three years. Similar chat rooms continue to operate globally, and CNN found that these legal issues are found at large across them all. Today, Coco’s founder Issac Steidel has fled to Bulgaria, renounced his French nationality, and revived the website in a new domain. 

Pelicot's case reveals the deep-rooted misogyny and gender-based violence that remains prevalent in modern society. It speaks to the dangers the digital age poses on the bodily autonomy of women across the world. Cases such as these are, unfortunately, not uncommon. At the same time, Gisèle Pelicot’s courage to lay her story out for the world and face her abusers triumphantly offers a glimmer of hope in a, perhaps, disturbing present. 

Throughout the case, G. Pelicot has defended her decision to go public with the proceedings of the trial. She reports that she has no regrets, that the support from women who identified with her struggle propelled her to the finish line. “I wanted all woman victims of rape—not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels—I want those women to say: Mrs. Pelicot did it, we can do it too. When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame—it’s for them.” 

I want to leave you with this message, after reading Pelicot’s story of valor in the face of absolute horror:  

You are not a crime; your voice is your own; your story matters; and your body belongs to you. 

Information retrieved from BBC and CNN.