Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Kevin, Associate Professor in Australian History, Flinders University
Gisèle Pelicot’s compelling and moving memoir begins with the day she learned that over the course of at least nine years, she had been raped by her husband Dominique and around 80 other men, while she was drugged and unconscious.
On that first day of knowing, in November 2020, she was a few months shy of 68. Her memoir explores the aftermath of that knowing, but also rewinds to her parents’ courtship, her childhood and youth and each stage of her adult life. It reveals how her husband’s crimes forced her to recast her entire adult life to-date – and its relationship to her childhood.
Review: A Hymn to Life – Gisèle Pelicot (Bodley Head)
I moved between reading Gisèle’s chapters and daily reports of the Epstein files. As I read, recent charges were laid against men in Germany and Greater Manchester who also drugged and raped their wives for over a decade.
I wondered: what are the effects of this avalanche of revelations about the shadow lives of men – the wealthy, the famous and the seemingly ordinary? (Gisèle’s rapists were described by philosopher Zoe Williams as “a perfect randomised cross-section of society”.)How is this public accounting of the thousands of documents, images, videos and testimonials to be processed, by survivors and non-survivors? When does the status quo, the structures of power that enable such abuses, give way to rage and its transformative potential?
The Pelicot case became an international story when Gisèle realised facing the 51 men police had been able to identify and charge (including her husband) in a closed court would rob her of support – and the opportunity to shift the burden of shame from victim to perpetrators.
Her decision to make the case public was an act of solidarity with other survivors – and a declaration of self worth that became increasingly audible as the trial proceeded. Have her actions nudged us closer to a tipping point?
When I reviewed the memoir of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, a year ago, I asked: is sexual abuse under chemical submission a new frontier in our understandings of intimate partner violence?
The Pelicot case intersected with more established understandings of drink spiking and date rape. But this sustained injury – perpetrated in the final decade of a 49-year marriage, worsened by access to online communities of predators – revealed a distinct new hellscape in understandings of gendered violence, particularly domestic abuse.
In a terrible irony, Gisèle writes:
I had no interest in the internet and social media, and I had no idea of the extent to which they had altered human relationships.
Gisèle has been intermittently estranged from her two eldest children, David and Caroline, since November 2020. They are now tentatively reconciled. Caroline’s 2025 book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in part makes a case for activism as a form of survival. In the aftermath of the revelations about her father, Caroline established #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under), a movement to raise awareness of sexual assault under chemical submission.
Her mother’s new memoir, far from going over familiar ground, offers a different story of survival.
A legacy of trauma
Gisèle Pelicot was born in 1952 in West Germany, where her father was serving in the French army and “history’s open wounds and bitterness were all around us”. When she was five, they moved to rural France to be close to her mother’s family. Gisèle was nine when her adored mother died in their family kitchen, after years of being plagued by brain tumours.
Her brother and father never recovered from this death, but she resolved to pursue happiness as her mother had done in life. “I was a steadfast tin soldier of joy.” Gisèle did this with determination, in the face of limited schooling and her grief-stricken father’s jealous and cruel second wife. She described meeting Dominique at the age of 19 as “love at first sight”.
Dominique grew up within an oppressive family, where his efforts to protect his mother from his, domestically “all-powerful”, father’s violence failed. He suffered his own humiliations at the hands of the patriarch, too. The man had an incestuous relationship with a foster child taken into the family aged five, which became “official” when she was 25, after Dominique’s mother died.
Dominique once described his life before Gisele as a “nightmare”. But he felt safe with her. Their instant attraction was fortified by this sense of refuge. Building a family was how they would heal; at least this was the pact they made.
Caroline was born in 1979 into this marriage, the second of three children and the only daughter. Her mother’s career trajectory with France’s main electricity company had afforded the Pelicots’ upward class mobility. Dominique, an electrician and a real estate agent, was in and out of work. Occasionally he brought the couple to the brink of financial ruin, but they were buffered just enough by the stability of Gisèle’s employment.
On the whole, the Pelicot children enjoyed secure, loving childhoods focused on their opportunities to thrive. Each forged meaningful careers in adulthood, married and had children. Both Caroline’s and Gisèle’s memoirs depict comfort and security in the lives of Gisèle’s adult children and grandchildren, even as the shock of Dominique’s brutal betrayal begins to reverberate.
‘Inside an enormous shredder’
One of the great achievements of this book is Gisèle’s capacity to describe – with coherence and nuance – the singularity of her position. This includes her needs, which she finds must take precedence over those of her children if she is to survive.
She writes of her older two children:
They both wanted to be there for me, to protect me in their own way. But I felt as if they wanted to take possession of my life. I couldn’t bear that.
The determination to be happy that took Gisèle into the relationship with her then-husband is transformed into a determination to survive as she surveys the wreckage inflicted by his abuses and seeks a way out. During the years she was drugged, Gisèle felt like she was losing her mind.
Her memory failures, blackouts and exhaustion instilled in her a deep fear of brain tumours and the inheritance of her mother’s fate. As she comes to terms with the true source of these struggles, she writes “I am the enemy of death”. She must chart her own course, and she does so instinctively.
In the immediate aftermath of the revelations, the children’s fury and desire to destroy all traces of their father as they prepare to remove Gisèle from the scene of Dominique’s most recent crimes will make sense to many. But its effect on Gisèle was to return her to a state of desolation, familiar from childhood.
She describes arriving at the Gare de Lyon in Paris with her children after her final night in the home she had shared with Dominique in Provence:
mostly I had the feeling of being inside an enormous shredder. My children had lives to go back to. I had nothing […] It was the old fault line beneath my feet; it had been there all along and now it was opening up again, swallowing everything that I held dear.
Through her efforts to control the pace of her confrontation with Dominique’s countless betrayals, a chasm opens between Gisèle and her eldest son and daughter. Her children, she writes, were “unable to distinguish their father from the poisoner and rapist”, whereas she tried to separate her memories of the husband she’d loved from her new knowledge of the one who had violated her.
Through processes of splitting apart, quarantining and dismembering her images and understandings of who Dominique was in their marriage, she holds at bay the full tsunami of deeply knowing what has been done to her.
She takes the time she needs, insisting on being alone, seeking solace in friends old and new rather than her children, to integrate the full force of her new history. That these decisions are integral to her survival is clear. Their impact on her family reminds us of the weight of the mother-load.
‘Unbearable incestuous gaze’
In her own memoir, Caroline vividly evokes the horror of learning, within days of her father being detained, that he took photographs of her asleep in her underwear. She is currently pursuing a separate case of chemical submission and rape against him, crimes he has repeatedly denied. Enduring the uncertainty around the nature of her victimisation has been a feature of Caroline’s experience.
As Gisèle processed the catalogue of Dominique’s abuses, for which there was clear evidence, her response to her daughter’s distress left open the possibility her daughter had not been raped by her father. This attempt at offering solace and some way for Caroline to hold onto memories of her father’s love was an extension of Gisèle’s splitting and dismembering of him for her own protection. “I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it,” Gisèle writes.
For Caroline, this felt like dismissal.
I found Gisèle’s account of the tensions in the relationship with her daughter more explicit than in Caroline’s memoir. Where Caroline expresses frustration with her mother’s early reluctance to give up all feelings of care for Dominique, Gisèle conveys a sense of the limits of her own ability to readily respond to a child whose emotional expression had always been more voluble than her own.
In a recent New Yorker essay, Rachel Aviv quotes Caroline’s August 2025 description of Gisèle as failing to fulfil her maternal contract. Aviv wonders if the terms of the contract had ever really been settled and suggests this disagreement took on new weight as the two women grappled with Dominique’s crimes.
Aviv reads this as two clashing versions of feminism: a daughter’s expectation she should have maternal love that affirms and consoles her, versus a mother’s choice to prioritise her own emotional integrity and agency in order to express the values of a wider feminist movement.
But this oversimplifies feminism and the narrative we can assemble from the various accounts of daughter and mother. Dominique’s harm has extended to undermining relationships between his victims, the origins of which were love and protection.
The feminism of the two women is varied by the impacts of the injury. Their solidarity is marred by the monumental and distinct tasks each has faced in rising from his wreckage.
Aviv draws on French anthropologist Dorothy Dussy’s observations about the taboo of incest in this case. The court evidence demanded confrontation with countless taboos but still “the injunction to remain silent about incest” remained. It surfaced in the back stories of a number of the perpetrators, though – and was part of the violence of the chief perpetrator’s family of origin.
Yet, while he admits to the crimes committed against Gisèle, Dominique cannot admit to sexualising his own offspring, even when directly confronted by his children in the court.
Last year, Caroline referred to her mother’s psychological and emotional incapacity to recognise incest to help explain the mother–daughter rift. We can’t know if the daughter sees this as the central driver of their estrangement, or as one of many ways she has to understand it.
A Hymn to Life suggests a more complicated relationship between Gisèle and the spectre of her ex-husband’s abuse of Caroline and other members of the family. At one point she refers to his “unbearable incestuous gaze”.
Tragedy and unexpected joy
One senses the awareness each woman has of the potential for these struggles to overwhelm everything else. Their published accounts give us a means to digest the extent and complexity of the harm Dominique has caused. The fracturing of this once-close family is the tragic collateral damage that compounds the original injury.
At the same time, Gisèle’s memoir reveals that in the lead-up to the trial, she met (through a friend) and fell in love with Jean-Loup, a widower she calls a “very beautiful person”. Her description of this burgeoning relationship will give joy to the many awed by the story of her endurance and survival.
Gisèle repeatedly describes her ex-husband’s quest to possess her sexually: expressed as an element of desire within their shared sex life. It had annoyed her but seemed normal enough – before that day at the police station, when it took on a far more devastating meaning.
Coverture (puissance marital in French law), a medieval legal doctrine making a woman the legal property of her husband after she marries, has a long history in laws governing marriage. As new cases of men drugging and raping wives emerge, with their long tentacles into online communities of men exchanging techniques, images and sexual access, it seems coverture, overturned in marriage laws in the 19th and 20th centuries, has gone underground.
Outside of marriage, the possession and commodification of girls’ and women’s bodies still turns them into currency: perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Epstein files.
– ref. ‘I am the enemy of death’: Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir is a remarkable tale of survival – https://theconversation.com/i-am-the-enemy-of-death-gisele-pelicots-memoir-is-a-remarkable-tale-of-survival-274628
