Gisele Pelicot spoke to the New York Post about the nightmare she endured, falling victim to rape approximately 200 times with her husband orchestrating the horror. Her case shocked everyone in France and beyond, as she described in an interview how she learned about what she had experienced.
Gisele Pelicot: How she discovered she had repeatedly fallen victim to rape
“I went to meet the police officer and he had a stack of folders on his desk. He told me ‘Mrs. Pelicot, what I’m about to tell you won’t please you.’ I started to worry and my heart began beating loudly,” Pelicot described.
She continued describing the dramatic moments. “I asked him ‘what’s happening?’ and he said ‘look at this stack’ as he began opening one of the folders and showing me a photograph. He asked me ‘do you recognize yourself in this photograph?’ and I didn’t recognize myself because I was with a man I didn’t know, who was raping me. I said ‘I don’t know this man’ and thought it wasn’t me. I thought he might be making a mistake because I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Without them I can’t see well, and then he showed me a second photograph, which was roughly the same. He showed it to me and said ‘this is you.’ I answered ‘no’ and began to have doubts. Then he told me again ‘this is your room Mrs. Pelicot, these are the lights on your nightstand, we searched your house. These belong to you.’ I went numb and my mind went blank. He wanted to show me the videos too but I told him ‘no, no I can’t take it anymore.'”
“He told me I had been raped approximately 200 times”
As expected, Gisele Pelicot was frozen when she learned that her husband was “hiding” behind the horror she experienced. “‘Your husband has been arrested, he won’t be returning home with you. You need to know that you have been raped several times, we have arrested 53 people’ they told me. Later I learned there are another 20 or 30 who haven’t been arrested. And he told me I had been raped approximately 200 times.”
I sat down with Gisele Pelicot for almost 3 hours in Paris. This Saturday, the first American interview @nytimes . An astonishing and deeply moving conversation. pic.twitter.com/7oB2VjQ7lz
— Lulu NYT (@LuluGNavarro) February 10, 2026
Pelicot described to the journalist how she reacted when she learned the full truth. “I told him ‘this is impossible,’ I asked for a glass of water because I couldn’t speak anymore. A psychologist was also present, they had everything planned and all I wanted was to go to my house because everything they had told me was unbelievable, it wasn’t real.” What Gisele Pelicot described will be published next Saturday, coinciding with the release of her book titled “The Joy of Life.”
