Article #241533

Mme Pelicot’s innate dignity shines through, as she explains why she waived her anonymity – after her husband drugged her so that dozens of men could sexually assault her

It’s hard to judge an interview with Gisèle Pelicot in the normal terms. Let’s start with the easy bit: Victoria Derbyshire is the ideal interlocutor. The co-presenter of Newsnight has a kind of steely warmth that meshes well with the innate dignity of Mme Pelicot – as she is called throughout – while they walk unflinchingly through her terrible story.

Her “descent into hell” began on 2 November 2020 when the local police called her and her husband, Dominique Pelicot, to the station. They believed it was to do with his recent arrest for covertly taking pictures underneath the skirts of three women in the supermarket. It was not. In the course of that investigation they had found on his laptop thousands upon thousands of videos and photographs accumulated over a decade of his wife unconscious and being raped by strangers.