Gisele Pellicot removes all traces of husband during French rape trial

It was November 2011 and Giselle Pellicot was sleeping too much.

She spent most of the weekend sleeping. She was annoyed because she had been working hard as a supply chain manager during the week and her time off was precious.

However, she couldn’t seem to stay awake, often waking up without even realizing it and waking up hours later with no memory of going to bed.

Despite this, 58-year-old Giselle was happy. She considered herself lucky to have her husband of 38 years, Dominic, by her side. Now that their three children, Caroline, David and Florian, were grown, the couple planned to retire soon and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in the idyllic southern French region of Provence, where Mr. Pellicot could ride his bike and she could wear Lancôme, their French bulldog, on long walks.

She had loved Dominic since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw this young man in a blue jumper, it was love at first sight,” Giselle reflects much later. They both had complicated family histories marked by loss and trauma and found peace with each other. Their four decades together had their share of rough patches – frequent financial problems and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they got through it.

Years later, when asked by a lawyer to sum up their relationship, she said, “Our friends said we were a perfect couple. And I thought we would live out our days together.’

At that moment, Giselle and Dominique sat on opposite sides of the courtroom in Avignon, near Mazan, she surrounded by her children and lawyers, and he, dressed in gray prison clothes, in a glass dock. .

He was faces the maximum term of imprisonment for aggravated rape and quickly 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 felt that she was sleeping too much, she could not have guessed that events would develop this way.

She had no idea that her husband, Dominic Pellico, who was in his 50s and nearing retirement, spent a lot of time online, often talking to users on open forums and chat rooms where sexually explicit material – often extreme or illegal – was available for free.

He later identified this phase in court as the trigger for his “perversion” following the childhood trauma of rape and violence: “We become perverts when we find something that gives us the means: the Internet.”

Sometime between 2010 and 2011, a man posing as a nurse sent Mr Pellicott photographs of his wife drugged into unconsciousness with sleeping pills. He also shared the exact instructions with Mr. Pellico so that he could do the same to Giselle.

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 would wake her up. They were legitimately prescribed by his doctor, who believed Mr Pellicott was suffering from anxiety due to financial problems.

He would then be able to dress her in underwear that she refused to wear, or force her to engage in sexual practices that she would never consciously consent to. He could shoot scenes which she would not allow during her waking hours.

Initially, only he raped her. But by the time the couple settled in Mazan in 2014, he had perfected and expanded his operations.

He kept tranquilizers in a shoebox in the garage and switched brands because the first ones were “too salty” to secretly add to his wife’s food and drinks, he later said.

In a chat called “without her knowledge”, he recruited men of all ages to come and rape his wife.

He would also shoot them.

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

As the years went by, the effects of the nightly abuse Mrs. Pellicote was subjected to began to seep into her waking hours more and more often. She lost weight, her hair fell out, blackouts became more frequent. She was filled with anxiety, sure that she was approaching death.

Her family was worried. She looked healthy and active when she visited them.

“We called her, but most of the time Dominic picked up the phone. He told us that Giselle was sleeping, even in the middle of the day,” said her son-in-law Pierre. “But it seemed likely because she was doing so much (when she was with us), especially running after the grandkids.”

Sometimes Giselle was close to suspicion. One day she noticed the green color of the beer that her husband handed her, and hastily poured it into the sink. Another time, she noticed a bleach stain on a pair of new pants that she couldn’t remember. “You’re not going to drug me by any chance, are you?” – she remembered, she asked him. He burst into tears, “How can you blame me for that?”

Mostly, though, she felt happy to have him around as she worked through her health issues. She developed gynecological problems and underwent several neurological tests to determine whether she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or a brain tumor, as she feared, but the results did not explain the increasing fatigue and blackouts.

Several years later, during the trial, Dominique Joel’s brother, a doctor, was asked how it was possible that medical professionals never collected the evidence and did not realize that Giselle was a victim of the little-known phenomenon of chemical subjugation – rape that was facilitated by drug use. . “In medicine we only find what we look for, and we look for what we know,” he replied.

Giselle only felt better when she was away from Mazan, a quirk she barely noticed.

Returning from one of those trips in September 2020, Dominique told her through tears: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothes in a supermarket,” she recalled during the trial.

According to her, she was very surprised, because “in 50 years he has never behaved inappropriately or spoken obscenely to women.”

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

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

But Dominika should have known the end was near.

Shortly after he was arrested at the supermarket, police seized his two phones and a laptop, where they inevitably found more than 20,000 videos and photos of him and others raping his wife.

“I watched these videos for hours. This was alarming. Of course it affected me,” Jeremy Boss Plattier, head of the investigation, told the court.

“In 33 years of police work, I have never seen anything like this,” said his colleague Stefan Gall. “It was horrible, it was shocking.”

His team was tasked with tracking down the men on the video. They cross-checked the men’s faces and names carefully recorded by Dominic with facial recognition technology.

In the end, they managed to identify 54 of them, while another 21 remained unnamed.

Some of the unidentified men said in conversations with Dominique that they also drugged their partners. “For me, this is the most painful part of the case,” said Mr Boss Plattier. “To know that there are some women who may still be victimized by their husbands.”

On November 2, 2020, Dominique and Giselle had breakfast together before heading to the police station where Mr. Pellico had been called in connection with the drive-in incident. The policeman asked her to follow him to another room. She confirmed that Dominque was her husband – “a great guy, a good person” – but denied ever having a swing or a threesome with him.

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

At first she didn’t recognize either of the two people.

When she did, “I told him to stop. . . . Everything came crashing down, everything I’d been building for 50 years.”

In a state of shock, she was sent home accompanied by a friend. She had to tell the children what had happened.

Recalling that moment, Giselle said that “her daughter’s screams are forever etched in my memory.” Caroline, David and Florian went down to Mazan and cleaned the house. Photos of Caroline, apparently drugged, were also later found on Dominic’s laptop, although he denied abusing her.

David, the oldest child, said they no longer have family photos because they “got rid of everything related to my dad right there.” After a few days, Giselle’s life was reduced to a suitcase and her dog.

Meanwhile, Dominic confessed to his crimes and was officially arrested. He thanked the police for “relieving his burden”.

He and Giselle did not meet again until they sat opposite each other in a courtroom in Avignon in September 2024.

By then, the story of a husband who drugged his wife for ten years and invited strangers to rape her began to circulate around the world with the help of Gisele’s unusual and excellent decision to give up anonymity and open the court to the public and the media.

“I want any woman who wakes up one morning with no memory of last night to remember what I said,” she declared. “So that no other woman could become a victim of chemical subjugation. I have been sacrificed on the altar of vice, and we must talk about it.’

Her legal team also successfully pushed for the videos to be shown in court, arguing that they “nullify the accidental rape thesis” – pushing back against the defense’s line that the men did not intend to rape Giselle because they had no idea she was unconscious.

“She wanted the shame to change sides, and it happened,” a woman who came to watch the trial in Avignon said in November. “Giselle turned everything upside down. We did not expect such a woman.”

Forensic examiner Anne Martine Sainte-Beuve said Giselle was clearly traumatized after her husband’s arrest but was calm and distant – a coping mechanism often used by survivors of terrorist attacks.

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

Ms Sainte-Beuve said she found Giselle “extremely resilient”: “She turned something that could have destroyed her into a strength.”

Days before trial, the Pelicots’ divorce was finalized.

Giselle reverted to her maiden name. In court, she gave her name as Pellicote so that her grandchildren could be “proud” to be related to her, and was not ashamed to be related to Dominic.

Since then, she moved to a village far from Mazan. She sees a psychiatrist but does not take any medication because she no longer wants to ingest any substances. She continues to go for long walks, but she doesn’t get tired anymore.

In the first days of the trial, Caroline’s husband Pierre appeared in court.

The lawyer asked him about the Mazan years, when Giselle suffered from memory loss and her husband dutifully accompanied her to useless medical appointments. How could the family not understand what was happening?

Pierre shook his head.

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