French woman whose rape case became a global symbol of strength and survival. Her ordeal began when police discovered that her husband of nearly 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had for at least nine years been drugging and raping her while she was unconscious—and finding strangers on the internet to do so, too. He kept recordings on a hard drive in a folder called "abuse".
The granddaughter of peasants, she grew up amid poverty and heartache, losing her mother to a brain tumour when she was only nine years old. She and Dominique met when they were young, married, and moved in together near Paris. Their childhoods were, their children later remarked, "straight out of a Zola novel."
In 2024 Mr Pelicot and 50 other men stood trial and were found guilty of rape and assault; an additional 30 men could not be identified or brought to justice. Ms Pelicot chose to make the case public and not insist on her right to privacy, arguing that "shame has to change sides" from victims to the accused. The case led to a change in the law in France, expanding the definition of rape from penetration using violence and coercion to sexual acts committed without consent.
Her abusers were everymen—a firefighter, a nurse, lorry drivers; most lived within a 50km radius. "They did share one thing: a sense of entitlement," she later wrote. "An attitude of complete indifference to whatever anyone said or thought, because power had always been on their side."
Ms Pelicot was awarded France's highest honour, the Legion d'honneur, and named one of Time magazine's most influential people. She has been described as a feminist Joan of Arc.
Her memoir, "A Hymn to Life" (written with Judith Perrignon), was published in 22 languages. In it she portrays herself as an accidental heroine. Women's issues were never her priority: "I listened to the talk of the times, the fight for birth control, for legal abortion; I understood, but these were not my battles. My victory was building the kind of family life I had never had." Since the trial ended in December 2024, similar cases have emerged in Germany and Britain of men charged with drugging and raping their wives.
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