Gisèle Pelicot Breaks Silence in New Memoir, Recasting a Private Nightmare as Public Reckoning
Gisèle Pelicot has stepped forward with a frank, searching memoir that maps how a retired life in southeastern France was shattered when evidence emerged that her husband had drugged and raped her and invited dozens of men to assault her while she was unconscious. The book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, will be published on Feb. 17 (ET) and follows a judicial process and public reaction that have reshaped debates about consent and shame in France.
A memoir that confronts an unspeakable crime
Pelicot’s account tracks the discovery, in 2020, that her husband had been secretly filming upskirting at a supermarket near their home, an investigation that then exposed a cache of images and videos in which she was shown being assaulted while heavily sedated. Investigators found evidence of assaults by at least 70 men; the abuse began in 2011 but only came to light after that supermarket arrest. A high-profile trial followed, drawing national attention and placing Pelicot in the rare position of a survivor who abandoned anonymity to make the process public.
The memoir does not read as a simple chronology of crimes. Pelicot frames the work as a practical and moral project: a book she wanted to be useful, one that would allow her to take stock of her life and attempt to rebuild. She writes not just about what was done to her but about the years that preceded the discovery — a retirement in a village near Mont Ventoux, a household friends called the house of happiness, grandchildren who leapt into the pool — and the shattering realization that the man she loved had been orchestrating her violation.
From private life to public symbol
By choosing to forgo anonymity and to speak openly, Pelicot became an emblem for women demanding legal and cultural change. Her visibility helped galvanize calls for reforms to consent law and provoked nationwide conversations about shame, culpability and how communities respond when long-term intimate partners are exposed as perpetrators. The trial in 2024 intensified those debates and also revealed how the case fractured Pelicot’s family, redirecting pain and anger in ways the memoir itself seeks to explain.
In the book Pelicot describes the toll of the trial and its aftermath: the strain on relatives, the misdirected hostility she sometimes faced, and the complex process of piecing together memories and clues. She retained her married name in part so that grandchildren who share it might be able to wear it with pride rather than secrecy. After the public exposure of the crimes she moved away from Mazan and later settled on the Île de Ré, where she has tried to rebuild a life and, she says, has found love and a measure of peace again.
Memory, shame and the work of rebuilding
One of the book’s striking ambitions is to interrogate why Pelicot did not know what was happening in her own home. She treats the memoir as a detective story, revisiting decades of marriage — its intimate dynamics, the husband’s background and temperament, and the small signs she missed — in a search for explanations that neither excuse the perpetrators nor leave her bereft of agency. She also confronts the visceral shame she felt for having understood nothing and for having been judged by others.
Throughout, Pelicot aims to convert personal catastrophe into testimony with practical effects: a demand that shame be moved away from the survivor and onto the perpetrators, and a hope that the legal and cultural shifts prompted by her case will protect others. Her narrative is at once an intimate reckoning and a public intervention — a survivor’s attempt to make sense of destruction while insisting that the conversation about consent and complicity must change.
