For a decade, Gisèle’s husband drugged and then raped her and invited 50 other men to assault her as well. In a powerful new memoir, ‘A Hymn to Life,’ she tells her side of the story

Giséle Pelicot and her new book ‘A Hymn to Life’.

In a trial that shocked the world, in 2024 French retiree Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity and publicly stood before 50 men accused of raping her after her own husband, Dominique Pelicot, had drugged her unconscious and invited the strangers into their home to commit sexual assaults.

“Shame must change sides,” Gisèle said at the opening of the trial in the French city of Avignon, and her words soon galvanized a movement to redefine public attitudes about sexual violence and crimes against women in France and beyond.

In the end, Dominique and the other men were all found guilty of rape and sentenced to terms in prison ranging from time served to 20 years—a total vindication for Gisèle, who last year was named a knight of the Legion of Honour, her country’s highest civilian award.

In her new memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides (out Feb. 17 from Penguin Press), Gisèle opens up about surviving her ordeal, finding a way to accept and ultimately make peace with the fact that the man she loved most in the world had betrayed her and so brutally and managing to move on to a new relationship with another man.

“The scar is there, and it may never fully heal,” she tells PEOPLE. “But I’ve always been a very optimistic woman. I wanted to take all of that mud and bring color back into my life… I believe in happiness.”

Read an exclusive excerpt from Gisele le Pelicot’s new memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, below.

A Hymn to Life by Giséle Pelicot.

On the morning of Nov. 2, 2020, Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot drove from their home in Mazan in southeastern France to the police station in the nearby town of Carpentras. Two months earlier Dominique had been arrested after allegedly taking photos up the skirts of women at a local supermarket. Police seized Dominique’s phone and laptop computer, and now a deputy sergeant wanted to interview Gisèle.

“I am going to show you some photographs and videos that you are not going to like.” I sensed something rising in his voice — not only embarrassment, but a curious mix of danger and protectiveness. He told me that Dominique had been taken into custody for aggravated rape and for administering toxic substances. I think I burst into tears. He picked up a photograph and held it out to me. A woman in a [garter] belt lying on her side. A man behind her, penetrating her.

“That’s you in the photograph.”

“No, that’s not me.”

I got out my glasses; he got out another photograph. The same woman on her back, a tattooed man alongside her.

“That’s you.”

“No.”

I did not recognize those men. Nor that woman. Her cheek was so floppy, her mouth so limp. She looked like a rag doll.

A third photograph. The man had kept his firefighter’s sweater on.

I couldn’t hear what the police officer was saying. Or rather, I could hear him but it had nothing to do with me. It was like the echo of a faraway voice. “This is your bedroom. Aren’t those your bedside lamps?”

So? That is not me lying lifeless on the bed. It’s a photoshopped picture. Made by someone trying to hurt Dominique.

Just last night while we were watching the news, there was a woman who had been intubated because of Covid, and he’d said how he would hate to see me like that.

The officer says a number. He tells me 53 men had come to my house to rape me. I ask for water. My mouth is paralyzed. A psychologist comes into the office. A young woman. I don’t need her. I am far away, even though we are in the same room. I am secure in my happiness, our happiness. Our 50th wedding anniversary is coming up, and the memory of how we met is still clear in my mind. His smile. His shy expression. His long, curly hair falling to his shoulders. He was going to love me. My brain shut down in Deputy Sergeant Perret’s office.

Giséle Pelicot in Avignon, France in October 2024.CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty

After her initial disbelief, Gisèle began the slow process of accepting that she had been sexually assaulted hundreds of times but had no memory of it because Dominique had also drugged her.

I needed to re-examine my life, to try and locate the moments, the signs that I had been unable to decipher. And why had my aches and pains, my memory lapses my health concerns not been enough to make him stop?

Why had he joked that morning I’d called him in a desperate panic? I had told him it felt like when my waters had broken. I was having gynecological problems on top of my memory lapses. And he quipped, “What have you been getting up to during the day!”The leaking body of an aging woman was suspect, and therefore the woman herself was suspect. I must have laughed with him, laughed with my torturer. Later he would tell the police and then the judge that he couldn’t have hurt me because I was asleep.

But whenever I called him, whenever I told him how exhausted I was, that I had a strange liquid leaking out of my vagina, there was something wrong; whenever I pinched the skin on the back of my hand to stop being engulfed by a blackout, to reassure myself that I could still feel — Yes, you’re still here, you’re alive — I was afraid, and he knew it.

“I’m doomed, Mino,” I used to tell him, convinced I was going to die like my mother. “Don’t be silly, it’s nothing,” he reassured me. I spent a decade having endless medical examinations. Blood tests. Scans. Multiple courses of vaginal pessaries. Neurological tests. Ten years of going to see doctors who looked at me as if to say that at my age, a woman can’t expect much any more, she ought to just relax and let time continue its demolition work. Never wondering what might be going on. Never attempting a diagnosis. And Dominique, always there by my side. He knew.

At the trail in Avignon, Gisèle listened as prosecutors described in detail dozens of sexual assaults against her and played graphic videos of them made by Dominique on screens in the courtroom.

I was hit with an avalanche of horrifying information. Dominique, in an act of sordid reciprocity, had raped the drugged wife of one of the rapists. He had forcefully instructed the men who raped me not to wear a condom. Some of the rapists had even stalked me: they wanted to see me in daylight, so Dominique told them when and where we did our shopping and they’d follow me around the supermarket. It was staggering to hear how his monstrous behavior had consumed everything, invaded even the most basic aspects of our life.

The magistrate showed me some photographs and asked if any of the faces were familiar. Of course they weren’t. I’d never had any suspicions as I walked up and down the supermarket aisles, keeping a careful eye on our budget, completely oblivious to the people brushing past me. Their names meant nothing to me either. All those faces of all those ordinary men repulsed me. I didn’t want to know anything about them. I wasn’t ready for that. But I also knew that the moment I would have to face them in court was drawing near.

How was I to stop the lie spreading that I had been aware of what was happening? How to describe my fear of dying, the 12 kilos I’d lost, the multiple gynecologists and neurologists I had consulted, the inconclusive brain scan? How to explain that I had no idea that someone could love another and yet cause them so much pain? How, simply, to explain who I was? For 50 years, I had tried to find myself in a man’s eyes. And he in mine — until he tried to extinguish them.

Before the trial began, friends of Gisèle’s introduced her to a man who lived on the island off France’s west coast where she had moved after Dominique’s arrest. She soon realized she was in love with him.

I was lightheaded with happiness. I needed to love again. I wasn’t afraid… I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.

Adapted from A HYMN TO LIFE: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot; translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver. To be published on February 17, 2026, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Gisèle Pelicot; Translation copyright © 2026 by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver