Gisèle Pelicot: The Newsnight Interview review – you can only gaze admiringly at her strength and grace

Mme Pelicot’s innate dignity shines through, as she explains why she waived her anonymity – after her husband drugged her so that dozens of men could sexually assault her

It’s hard to judge an interview with Gisèle Pelicot in the normal terms. Let’s start with the easy bit: Victoria Derbyshire is the ideal interlocutor. The co-presenter of Newsnight has a kind of steely warmth that meshes well with the innate dignity of Mme Pelicot – as she is called throughout – while they walk unflinchingly through her terrible story.

Her “descent into hell” began on 2 November 2020 when the local police called her and her husband, Dominique Pelicot, to the station. They believed it was to do with his recent arrest for covertly taking pictures underneath the skirts of three women in the supermarket. It was not. In the course of that investigation they had found on his laptop thousands upon thousands of videos and photographs accumulated over a decade of his wife unconscious and being raped by strangers.

They showed Mme Pelicot a handful of images. She barely recognised herself, dressed in underwear she didn’t own, and she didn’t recognise the men. “Something exploded inside me,” she tells Derbyshire. She didn’t put a name to what she had seen until many hours later, when she was at home and told a friend: “Dominique raped me and had me raped.” He had her raped by at least 70 men. They were drawn – notes Derbyshire in a piece to camera at the top of the programme, as the names of the convicted fill the screen – from within a 30-mile radius of their home in Mazan, the tiny, beautiful little Provencal town to which they had retired some years before. Fifty-two – plus Mme Pelicot’s husband – were identified by the police, and after a three-month trial most were convicted of aggravated rape, two of sexual assault and two of attempted rape. Dominique received the maximum sentence of 20 years.

Derbyshire’s questioning is not blunt, but it is straightforward. It would be an insult to Mme Pelicot and her proven ability to survive unthinkable traumas to be anything else. She famously waived her right to anonymity on the grounds that “shame must change sides”; it belongs not to the rape victim but to the rapists. It is usually said that she has become a feminist icon as a result, but really it is more specific than that. She has become a repository of hope and – though it has become a devalued word in the age of Instagram – an inspiration to all women across the globe, including rape victims who have not (yet) brought charges, or who belong to the estimated 30% of the female population who have experienced physical and/or sexual violence, overwhelmingly at male hands (in March 2025, the ONS said that 98% of victims stated that their attacker was male).

It is, perhaps counterintuitively, good to hear Mme Pelicot tell Derbyshire how her reactions and her thinking evolved regarding the question of anonymity. Initially, she wanted the usual closed hearing. “I certainly didn’t want to be seen,” she says, feeling that “the filthy stain stays with you for life”. But the four years “I carried that shame” between the discovery of her abuse and the trial gave her time to think and come to the conclusion that such “self-inflicted pain … meant that victims were being punished twice. And I thought that if I could overcome it, all victims could do it too. I’m sure of it. They must not lose confidence.”

Sitting, perfectly calm, effortlessly poised, even when occasionally moved to tears, even when explaining how and why her husband had to mix muscle relaxants in with the sedatives he gave her so that she would “slacken and dilate” enough not to be in pain the next day from what the men did to her unconsenting body (and realise something was wrong), Mme Pelicot cuts an extraordinary figure. You can only gaze in admiration at her strength and grace, and hope beyond measure that she can sustain the rapprochement with her daughter, Caroline – another suspected victim of Dominique, who is also under investigation for the attempted rape of a woman in 1999 (which he has admitted) and the murder of another in 1991, which he denies.

But behind every examination of the Pelicot case a question lurks. How many people out there are reading or watching or listening not in abject horror but in thrall? How many men are out there thinking: “I wish, I wish …” or “I could, I could …”? Is that a morbid or a realistic question to be asking? Last month former Tory councillor Philip Young pleaded guilty to nearly 50 counts of drugging, raping and sexually assaulting his former wife, Joanne, who has also waived her anonymity. Another man has pleaded guilty to raping her, too. It’s hard not to think of the 30-mile radius around you and wonder.

• Gisèle Pelicot: The Newsnight Interview aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer