The trial of Dominique Pelicot, a sexual predator who invited dozens of men to rape his wife, Gisèle, while she was unconscious, attracted worldwide attention. Fifty other men appeared in court, accused of assaulting her after he drugged her. He filmed the rapes, admitting at the trial that watching the videos aroused him. He appeared in some of them himself, holding his wife’s unconscious head and encouraging the perpetrators. She is believed to have been raped two hundred times and more than a dozen of her assailants have yet to be identified.

We know all this because Gisèle Pelicot took an extraordinary decision, waiving her right to a closed hearing when the trial began in Avignon in 2024. She faced her husband and the other defendants in open court, arriving each day with her lawyers and family members. She had to sit through weeks of evidence, including videos of herself being raped, across the court from the men who did these terrible things to her.

Gisèle Pelicot became a heroine, cheered outside the court by dozens of women who turned up each day to offer their support. Her courage in the face of sustained violence was an inspiration to women around the world, who applauded her insistence that ‘shame has to change sides’. It would be easy to imagine that the extensive reporting of the trial said everything we need to know.

Yet her book, written with a French journalist, is a revelation. It is an extraordinary example of resilience in the face of unimaginable circumstances. Gisèle Pelicot is a woman of rare insight, able not just to withstand a series of shocks but to analyse her reaction to them. She does not rush into things, going for long solo walks to process yet more horrendous revelations, while trying to protect her adult children and their families.

Before her husband’s arrest, she had suffered years of ill health, including memory lapses and blackouts. She sought advice from doctors, fearing she was suffering from dementia and unaware that her ‘concerned’ husband, who accompanied her on those visits, was secretly feeding her large doses of sedatives and muscle relaxants. He was also giving her a vaginal douche after each rape, leaving her to wonder why she so often woke up soaking wet.

One anecdote stands out, so horrific that it’s almost unbearable to read. During the Covid pandemic, when it was difficult to see a dentist, Gisèle Pelicot had a loose crown. Her husband wrapped his fingers in gauze and gently removed it. ‘To think that I believed he was being kind and helpful!’ she reflects. The crown had come loose because she had been orally raped so often. According to expert evidence given at the trial, one of these rapes was so violent she could have died. The presiding judge was incredulous, challenging the perpetrator who appeared in the video: ‘You didn’t see her face even when you had your penis in her mouth and she was choking?’

He didn’t care. None of them did. ‘I’m not a rapist, but if I had wanted to rape someone, I’d hardly have gone for a 57-year-old woman, I would have picked a prettier one,’ another of the defendants said. Some even requested to view the victim first and were tipped off by Dominique Pelicot so they could follow his wife round the local supermarket. They were all found guilty of rape, or of attempted rape and aggravated sexual assault.

Dominique Pelicot is now the chief suspect in the murder of a young estate agent who was drugged and raped in Paris in 1991. Eight years later he tried to rape another estate agent who was showing him an apartment in the city, but she managed to escape. She later recognised him from photos published in the run-up to the trial. He initially denied the attempted rape, but a DNA test established his guilt and he confessed. Gisèle Pelicot describes being told about these attacks as ‘a leap into another dimension’. She has to live with the thought that ‘one evening Dominique had come back to the house in Gournay-sur-Marne that we loved so much and sat down to dinner as if nothing had happened, hours after he had tried to rape a twenty-year-old woman.’

Her book describes a happy childhood until her mother died of a brain tumour when she was nine. Her father’s second marriage to a chilly stepmother made her vulnerable to a manipulator like Dominique Pelicot, who offered the teenage Gisèle the ‘affection and confidence I lacked’. She gradually came to realise that his family background included extreme domestic abuse, including his father’s sexual relationship with an adopted daughter who had learning difficulties. None of this excuses Dominique Pelicot’s crimes, but it provided a template for his own violence against women.

That is the issue illuminated by this book. It’s common to hear that rape is a difficult crime to investigate because ‘it’s her word against his’, but this was a case in which there was abundant evidence. The videos showed an inert woman on a bed, her limbs flopping, clearly unconscious. Yet almost all her attackers insisted that Gisèle Pelicot consented, one defendant even claiming he had seen her make an ‘inviting’ gesture. These men were old, young, overweight, athletic, but what they had in common was a sense of entitlement. It is a terrifying insight into how many ordinary men are prepared to commit sexual violence if they think they can get away with it.

Gisèle Pelicot has now found a man she can trust. Relations with two of her three adult children are fraught, but it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise. Unlike pictures from the trial, when she had to be escorted through crowds of journalists and well-wishers, the cover photograph shows a woman who is calm and self-possessed. It’s one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read, but essential nonetheless.