“For 40 years, I was married to a good man,” she continues, subtracting the final 10 of her 50-year marriage. “Friends would ask me: ‘Doesn’t he have a brother?’ He cooked, he did DIY, he was athletic, he was tidy—he had many good qualities.” When the truth was unveiled people would say to her: “Madame Pelicot, you were under his influence.” But she tells me that was not the case. “Never. Chemically, yes, but psychologically no. That’s what’s so terrible. I’d prefer it if he’d been a bastard so I could say to myself: ‘You knew. You knew he was a horrible man.’”
During the trial, the psychiatrist who had first examined Dominique Pelicot argued that he had a split personality: that he was “cleaved in two.” Though not every expert agreed, this makes sense to Gisèle. “There was an A side and a B side,” she explains. “I never saw the B side. I only discovered it during the trial.”
In December 2024, Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum for rape in France. In her book, Gisèle lists the questions she would ask her husband if she were to visit him there—which many people have advised her against. The questions include: “Did you abuse our daughter?” “The night you came home crying, was that the night you tried to rape that young woman?” “Did you kill?.”
“I haven’t been to see him in prison,” she says now. “There was the trial, and… actually, I do need some time before meeting him again. But I am trying to understand. I tell myself: He had the key. He could have said: ‘I’m going to seek help, something’s not right, why am I like this?’”
“Do you think your ex-husband is capable of murder?” I ask.
“I really hope he’s not capable of that,” she says. “I don’t have the answer. Because yes, there is this business of suspicion—people think it’s him, but I hope he’s not guilty. First of all, my thoughts are with the family—I think only the mother is still alive, the young woman died 30 years ago. I know her body might be exhumed. There is one thing I hope: that they find the DNA of the guy who did it.”
If that turns out to be her ex-husband, it will be “another descent into the abyss.” But for now, Gisèle says, “My memories will remain. At a certain point you rise from the ashes, but you can’t erase the past. It’s part of us.”
The Mazan crimes might be seen as two cases intertwined: one domestic, the other societal. In the first, the perpetrator is a man who could be construed as a monster. In the second, the rapists are so numerous that any attempt to pathologize them becomes fruitless. The scale and range of Dominique Pelicot’s partners in crime showed the terrible banality of their acts, and how easily society had allowed them. “Every day people thank me for my courage,” Gisèle said in court. “I want to tell them that this is not courage, but a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.”
