Gisele’s moving and compelling memoir starts with the moment she discovered that she and her husband Dominique had raped each other over the past nine years while they were both drugged.
She was just a few weeks shy of her 68th birthday on the first day she knew, which happened in November 2020.
The memoir not only explores what happened after that first day of knowing but also takes us back to the courtship of her parents, childhood, and her youth, as well as each phase of her adulthood. The book reveals that her husband’s criminal activities forced her to completely re-evaluate her adult life and her relationship with her childhood.
Review: Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life (Bodley head)
As I read Gisele’s chapters, daily Epstein reports were also presented.
While I was reading, charges had been filed against German and Greater Manchester men who drugged and sexually abused their wives over the past decade.
What are the consequences of the revelations of the secret lives of the rich, famous and seemingly normal men? Zoe Williams, a philosopher who specializes in social analysis, described Gisele’s assailants as “a randomised sample of the society”.
What is the public account of thousands of images, documents, video and testimony to be processed by both survivors and non-survivors, and how will it work?
When will the power structures that allow for such abuses to continue give way, and when does rage take over?
Gisele realized that facing 51 men (including her husband), whom the police were able to identify, in an open court was going to rob her support and take away the chance to transfer the shame of the victim onto the perpetrators.
She made the decision to go public as a sign of support for other survivors, and also a statement of her own self-worth that became more audible with the progress of the trial. Has her action nudged the world closer to tipping point?
In a review of Caroline Darian’s memoir, I posed the question: Is sexual abuse in chemically-induced submission a frontier for our understanding of violence against intimate partners?
This case was a collision of more traditional understandings about drink-spiking, date-rape and other forms of violence. This sustained injury, which was committed in the last decade of a marriage of 49 years, and made worse by online predator communities, revealed a new hellscape of understandings about gendered violence.
In a terrible irony, Gisele writes:
Internet and social media were not of interest to me, nor did I know how much they have changed human relations.
Since November 2020, Gisele and her two oldest children, David, have been estranged. The two are tentatively reconciled. Caroline’s book I’ll Never Call Him Father Again in 2025, argues for activism to be a way of surviving.
Caroline created #MendorsPas, a campaign to increase awareness about sexual abuse under chemical subjection.
The new memoir of her mother is not a rehash, but a unique story about survival.
Gisele’s latest memoir is a very different tale of survival than her daughter Caroline’s published in the past year. Guillaume Horcajuelo/AAP
The Legacy of Trauma
Gisele was born 1952 in West Germany where “history was all around” and her father served in the French Army. They moved from the city to the countryside when she was only five years old to be near her mother’s extended family. Gisele, then nine years old, was in the kitchen of her family when she lost her mother.
She had been plagued with brain tumors for many years.
She decided to follow in the footsteps of her mother and pursue happiness, just as she had. Gisele, despite her limited education and the jealousy and cruelty of Gisele’s father’s second wife who was grieving over his death, remained a “steadfast soldier of joy”. When she met Dominique, at age 19, it was “love on first sight”.
Dominique was raised in an abusive family.
He failed to protect his mother against his “all-powerful” father, who abused her domestically. The patriarch also humiliated him.
He had an incestuous affair with Dominique, a foster daughter who was adopted into the family at age five. The relationship became “official”, when Dominique turned 25, following her mother’s death.
Dominique once described his life before Gisele as a “nightmare”. He felt secure with her.
This sense of safety heightened their attraction. They made a pact to heal by building a family.
Caroline, born 1979 to this marriage as the daughter of the couple’s only child and second-born out of their three children. The Pelicots were able to move up the social ladder thanks to her mother’s successful career at France’s largest electricity company. Dominique was a full-time electrician who also worked as a realty agent. The couple was sometimes on the verge of ruin due to his financial mismanagement, but Gisele’s job stability kept them from going bankrupt.
The Pelicots children, on the whole, had a happy, secure childhood that was centered around their potential to flourish.
They all had successful careers as adults, got married and raised children. Caroline and Gisele both portray the comfort and security of Gisele’s children and grandchildren as they grow up.
Inside an immense shredder
Gisele is able to convey the uniqueness of her situation in this book with nuance and coherence. It is her own needs that must be prioritized over her children’s if she wants to live.
The older children are described by the mother:
Both wanted to stand by me and protect me.
They seemed to want my life. That was too much for me.
Gisele’s determination to find happiness, which led her to marry and have a relationship with the man she married at the time, has now transformed into an intense determination to live as she looks over the destruction caused by the abuses of the husband. She is looking for a way to escape. Gisele was sick for years while she was being drugged.
She inherited her mother’s fear and trepidation of death from her memory loss, blackouts, and fatigue.
She writes, “I am an enemy of death” as she begins to understand the real cause of her struggles. She has to chart her course and does it instinctively.
Gisele is horrified by the thought of Caroline, David, and Florian claiming ‘possession of her life’.
Guillaume Horcajuelo/AAP
Many will understand that in the aftermath of these revelations the children are furious and want to wipe out all evidence of Dominique. They also plan to take Gisele away from the site of Dominique’s latest crimes. Its effect on Gisele, however, was that it returned her to the state of despair she knew from childhood.
After spending her last night with Dominique, she describes her arrival at Paris’ Gare de Lyon with her family.
Most of the time I felt like being in a huge shredder.
I had nothing to do. My children had lives to go back to. […] The old faultline was under my feet. It had always been there and was now opening again to swallow everything I loved.
Gisele’s efforts to slow down her response to Dominique’s betrayals have caused a gap between her and her sons and daughters. She writes that her children “could not distinguish between their father and the poisoner or rapist”, while she struggled to keep her memory of her husband from what she now knows about the man who violated her.
She holds back the tsunami of deep knowing by splitting up, quarantining, and dismembering images of Dominique and her understanding of her in her marriage.
To integrate her entire new story, she takes as much time as necessary, refusing to be with her family and seeking comfort in old friends, new, or both, rather than them. It is obvious that these choices are crucial to her survival. The impact of these decisions on her family is a reminder of how heavy the burden of motherhood can be.
“Unbearable, incestuous glance”
Caroline’s memoir vividly describes the shock she felt when, just days after her father was arrested, it became known that he had taken photos of her sleeping in her underwear. Caroline is currently prosecuting him for chemical submission as well as rape, both crimes that he denies. Caroline has had to endure the insecurity of not knowing the exact nature of the abuse she suffered.
Gisele’s response to Caroline’s pain, as she processed Dominique’s list of abuses for which the evidence was abundant, left the possibility that her daughter hadn’t been raped. Gisele was trying to comfort Caroline and give her a way to remember her father’s love.
This is an extension of the dismemberment and splitting of Dominique for Gisele’s own safety. Gisele wrote: “I was trying to avoid the worst case scenario while my daughter headed straight towards it.”
Caroline felt dismissed.
Gisele was more direct in her description of tensions between Caroline and Dominique than Caroline in her memoir. Caroline is frustrated by her mother’s initial reluctance in letting go of all her feelings for Dominique. Gisele, on the other hand, conveys a feeling of being unable to respond as readily to a child whose emotions were always more voluble.
Rachel Aviv, in a New Yorker article published recently quotes Caroline as describing Gisele’s failure to fulfill her contract of motherhood. Caroline said that Gisele had not fulfilled the terms set forth by Caroline. Aviv questions if there was ever a real agreement on the terms and says that the disagreement gained new significance as both women dealt with Dominique’s crimes.
Aviv interprets these two versions as two opposing versions of feminist ideology: the daughter’s expectations that she receive maternal love to affirm and comfort her versus the mother’s decision to prioritize her emotional integrity and autonomy in order to represent values from a broader feminist movement.
This oversimplifies the feminism, and we cannot assemble a narrative from all the different accounts that are available. Dominique has also undermined the relationships that were based on love and protection between his victims.
Their feminism is shaped by their injuries. The monumental challenges each woman has had to overcome in order to rise from the wreckage of her husband’s life have weakened their solidarity.
Caroline’s book is more explicit in its description of Caroline and Gisele. Caroline does not mention the tensions between the two. Michel Euler/AAP
Aviv uses Dorothy Dussy’s observations on the incest taboo in this case. Court evidence forced the court to confront countless taboos, but “the order not to speak about incest,” remained.
The incest was revealed to be a part of many of the criminals’ pasts and the violent family history of one of them.
Dominique is unable to admit sexualising himself, despite being confronted directly by his kids in court.
Caroline’s mother was unable to recognize incest due to her emotional and psychological incompetence. This helped explain their estrangement.
It’s impossible to know whether the daughter views this as the main reason for their estrangement or just one way she tries to explain it.
The spectre that Gisele is still haunted by her ex’s abusive treatment of Caroline, and others in the family. She refers at one point to her ex-husband’s “unbearable, incestuous stare”.
Tragic and unexpected Joy
Each woman is aware of how these battles can overwhelm all else. We can digest their published accounts to understand the full extent of Dominique’s harm. This splintering of the once close family compounded the initial injury.
Gisele’s autobiography reveals, at the same time that she fell in love (through a close friend) with Jean-Loup – a widower whom she describes as a “very lovely person” – in the run-up to her trial. The description of the relationship that developed will bring joy to those who are awed and inspired by her story.
Gisele describes the ex-husbands desire to possess her in a sexual way as a part of their shared relationship.
Before that fateful day in the police station it had been annoying but normal.
Coverturepuissance marital In French law, a legal doctrine dating back to the Middle Ages that makes a wife her husband’s legal property after marriage has been a part of laws regarding marriage for a very long time. It seems that coverture has been re-introduced in online communities where men exchange images, techniques and sexual information. As more cases of rape and drugging of wives are reported, the doctrine of legal property, which was abolished in 19th century marriage law, is now a thing of the past.
The Epstein Files are perhaps the most vivid example of how girls and women can still be commodified and sold outside of marriage.
