Meeting the extraordinary Gisele Pelicot

To meet Gisele Pelicot is to meet an icon.

Her image is renowned the world over: her trademark little round sunglasses, a petite woman in the scrum outside the trial of her ex-husband Dominique in Avignon, southern France; her face adorning murals emblazoned with her famous rallying cry "la honte doit changer de camp" (shame must change sides).

So when I greet her at Sky News' Westminster studio on a sweltering Bank Holiday Monday, her warmth and affability are almost disarming.

She speaks no English so I dredge up a smattering of schoolgirl French to put her at her ease. Inevitably, we talk about the weather (who can forget "Il fait chaud" from French GCSE roleplays after all?)

There is no awkwardness, no reserve. She appears entirely relaxed even as I embark on an interview where she will once again revisit the depravity of the man with whom she shared half a century of her life.

We begin with 2 November 2020, when, as she puts it to me, "my whole life collapsed".

Dominique Pelicot had drugged and raped her - and had her raped by men he recruited online, over a period of a decade. In the trial that stunned the world, 51 men - including her ex-husband - would be convicted of rape or sexual assault.

The story is so grotesque, so barbaric, it's little wonder Gisele Pelicot recalls "disassociating… in other words, my brain went on pause and I couldn't hear what I was being told".

In the six years since, she has had to rebuild her life from what she describes, in her quietly devastating manner, as "a field of ruins".

As she recounts the shattering of her life and family, I can't help but remark on her composure.

Watching her closely in the studio, her face betrays not a flicker of emotion.

She tells me: "I never in fact collapsed. I generally don't show my suffering or my tears. I share my laughter, but not my suffering. And that's possibly what also allowed me to save myself, not to show all this suffering to my children and to my friends."

Her children, including Caroline - who is also pressing charges against her father - responded very differently.

As Gisele Pelicot describes in her memoir, A Hymn To Life, they angrily destroyed their father's belongings in the family home, desperate to erase every trace of him.

She credits her emotional restraint, though, with her ability to become a standard bearer for abuse survivors, as she waived her anonymity to face her assailants in court. And above all, to face the orchestrator of her misery - her own ex-husband.

Justice for women still 'a very long path'

Extraordinarily, she still believes this man who carried out such monstrous acts is a human being. She wants to see him in jail, to try to understand why he did what he did.

The answer to that question - "why?" - is something she's clearly wrestling with now.

"Within this hearing, three quarters of these individuals had had a complicated childhood and had been raped as well. I know that Mr Pelicot had also lived through that. And, you know, in life you choose which path you want to choose," she says.

"You choose good or evil. I didn't have an easy childhood, but I didn't choose evil. I chose to go towards the light and he chose the opposite," she reflects.

Her refusal to feel shame was an act of defiance that empowered survivors in every corner of the globe. But she acknowledges that there is "a very long path" to ensure justice is done for women.

I ask her about the controversy over the case of three teenage boys convicted of the rape of two teenage girls, yet somehow managed to avoid a jail sentence.

She apportions blame to parents for failing to educate boys about sex, and she empathises with a victim whose life has been "totally destroyed".

But she reserves her most outspoken remarks for a male-dominated judiciary that allowed perpetrators to "go free just because they're minors... they already know precisely what they're doing and they are responsible".

It would be easy to despair. But Gisele Pelicot, who has endured untold horrors, has learnt to dream again, even to embark on a new romance.

"I was fortunate enough to meet a young man of 73," she jokes.

"We fell madly in love, we're just like a couple of teenagers, and he's a lovely man," she concludes.

A hymn to life? Amen to that.

You can watch the full interview on Sky News on The Cathy Newman Show from 7pm tonight

(c) Sky News 2026: Meeting the extraordinary Gisele Pelicot