Gisèle Pelicot has revealed the person who gave her strength in the historic rape battle against husband and dozens of other men.
According to The Telegraph, Pelicot says her new boyfriend helped her find the strength to face her ex-husband and dozens of other abusers in court.
In her forthcoming memoirs, Pelicot, 73, describes how she waived her anonymity in the 2024 trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men who raped her while she was unconscious.
They were all convicted and her ex-husband was sentenced to 20 years behind bars, while she became a global symbol in the fight against sexual violence.
In Et la joie de vivre, whose English title is A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, Pelicot recalls how Jean-Loup, the partner she met in the summer of 2023 on the Île de Ré in western France, became her anchor as the trial approached.
When her lawyers asked her to read the entire 400-page indictment, she writes in the memoir that Jean-Loup printed everything so she would not have to read it on a screen.
“I wanted to be able to isolate myself, curl up in an armchair, inside or outside, with my loose sheets,” she says in extracts published by Le Monde.
The documents, she notes, began with the list of the accused: names, jobs, addresses, and dates of birth. She underlined them, “1997… 1988…” and adds: “I was born in 1952. Their youth was an enigma. An additional suffering.”
Then came the “facts”, “chilling, of cruelty without limits”, set down in language that was “both crude and administrative” that centred on “that inert woman they manipulate and dare to call consenting”.
Jean-Loup read alongside her and sometimes asked, “How could your body have endured all that?”
She said the question was “unanswerable” and plunged her back into the horror, “but also made it move away” when she heard herself say she had survived it.
It was in that period, Pelicot suggests, that she became ready to confront the courtroom, crediting her confidence to her relationship as well as her age.
