‘I am the enemy of death’: Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir is a remarkable tale of survival
· Scroll
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.
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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.
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 journalist 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...