Emotional testimony of grandmother as she takes the stand to face dozens of men accused of violating her while she was drugged by her husband: DAVID JONES witnesses extraordinary courage of dignified 71-year-old at centre of rape case that stunned France

By her own description she had always been 'a prude' and had only allowed two men to touch her – one of whom was her husband, sitting, shamefaced, to her left in the dock.

Yesterday, however, Gisele Pelicot stood amid a sea of previously faceless men, all of whom had allegedly raped her while she slept, and calmly confronted them with the anguish they had caused her.

In a 90-minute testimony, praised by the chief prosecutor as 'dignified and courageous', the 71-year-old grandmother said: 'I was sacrificed on the altar of vice.'

'I was a dead woman and these men take advantage of me, they defile me, they treat me like a bin bag. It is unbearable and I don't know if I will ever be able to get up (off the floor) again.'

Dismissing the claim made by some of them – that she had really been conscious and aware of the degrading acts to which she was subjected – she said: 'My body might have been warm, but I was like a dead person.'

The court had heard how her husband Dominique Pelicot, 71, drugged her to be raped by 50 men who are now on trial with him.

'I was anaesthetised like when you go into the operating theatre – afterwards you don't remember the operation. That is exactly what happened to me.'

For the men to suggest she had been conscious and perhaps even complicit was 'an insult to my intelligence' she said. 'These people knew exactly what they were doing and how lethargic I was. They didn't rape me with a gun or knife to their heads – they raped me in full consciousness. They treated me like a rag-doll.'

When Judge Roger Arata gave her the opportunity to address her alleged defilers directly, she told them they had caused her 'unbearable' pain and feelings of 'disgust', calling on them to finally 'face the responsibility of their acts'.

Mme Pelicot's victim statement at the Avignon court hearing was the most electrifying moment so far in an already emotionally-charged trial that is scandalising France. Perhaps to enhance her show of indomitability, she chose to wear a vivid orange dress beneath her stylish white jacket.

Though she was driven to the brink after learning how her husband allowed dozens of men to abuse her over ten years, she spoke yesterday with great composure, in the mellifluous tones of provincial, middle-class France.

Her demeanour contrasted with that of her daughter, Caroline Darian, now in her 40s, who wept softly throughout her mother's long statement.

With her brother, Florian, and other relatives also moved to tears (and even the occasional wipe of a rheumy eye from Pelicot – deemed by psychologists to 'lack empathy') the family were a tableau of utter despair.

One needed only to glance across the packed courtroom to grasp how they had been destroyed by the vile, self-gratifying sex games orchestrated by their once-revered patriarch.

After commending the police officers who brought Pelicot to justice, his now-ex wife related the full background to this grisly story – a modern-day parable of perfidy and perversion facilitated by dark corners of the internet.

She began on September 19, 2020 – the day police phoned her at the couple's rented retirement home, a secluded chalet with a swimming pool in the Provencal town of Mazan, to break the news that her husband had been arrested for a sex offence.

The crime, to which he had immediately admitted, was using his mobile phone to take surreptitious photographs up the skirts of three women in a shopping centre. However, 'Monsieur Pelicot' (as she referred to him, with ill-deserved respect throughout her testimony) had explained to her that he had been having 'impulses' and apologised, saying it wouldn't happen again.

So, she said, she gave him a second chance – never imagining the 'magnitude' of the crimes that this relatively minor affair would soon uncover. More than a month passed before she learned the full extent of her husband's depravity, and that he had been unwittingly using her as a stooge in the depraved sex scenes he filmed.

On November 2, 2020, after returning from Paris, where she had been caring for their four grandchildren, she was summoned back to the police station.

'That day will be seared in my memory for ever,' she said. For the first hour of her interview, she had assumed it must be connected to the 'upskirting' episode.

Yet as she was plied with more searching questions about her family and marriage – which was totally fine, she assured officers – she suspected a far more serious investigation was under way.

She was asked if she and her husband spiced up their love life by 'swinging' with other couples. Certainly not, she replied, adding: 'I am a one-man woman. I don't want anyone else's hands on me.'

The police officer then took out a photograph from the files on his desk and handed it to her. It showed a woman lying on a bed, and he asked Mme Pelicot whether she recognised her. As she wasn't wearing her glasses, she couldn't.

It was only when he showed her a second, clearer picture that she realised the woman she was looking at was her – and that she was lying in an 'unusual' position with a strange man behind her.

'So, I am on the bed and this man is raping me,' she told the court, still burning with indignity. 'It was a scene of barbarism. I was in a state of shock. I remember asking for a glass of water, then a psychologist came into the room, they said my husband had been detained – and everything just collapsed for me.

'We were 50 years together, with three children and seven grandchildren, and our friends said we were the ideal couple. I just couldn't take it in.'

That day, Mme Pelicot was asked whether she wished to see the incriminating videos her husband had taken of her, which catalogued 92 of the rapes he assiduously choreographed after drugging her and showed her being assaulted by 72 men (22 of whom remain unidentified).

But she was in no state to view them. It would be many months before she accepted the advice of an investigating magistrate: that she had to steel herself and sit through the films, to confirm herself as the victim and vouch that she had been unconscious.

Reeling home from the police station, that November day, her first task was to tell her children that their father was a monster.

Screams echoed down the phone as she broke the news to her daughter Caroline at her home near Paris. Her sons managed to remain calm and urged her to 'not do anything silly'.

For three days, Mme Pelicot stayed alone in the house her daughter describes, in her memoir, as a 'chamber of horrors'.

In the garage, police found the anti-anxiety drugs Pelicot had crushed into her evening meals – in life-threatening doses, according to toxicology experts – to put her into a deep sleep. They were hidden in one of his tennis socks along with Viagra pills.

Examining his two phones, laptop and USB flash-drive, they also found some 20,000 lurid images and videos, many featuring his wife being violated in the marital bedroom. She knew she had to leave. Before moving to Paris to stay with her son, David, she instructed removal men to throw out everything that might remind her of happier times with her husband. 'I asked myself, 'How am I going to get over it?' she recalled. 'I arrived in Paris with just my suitcases and my dog.'

'I was suffering terribly, and the next day I had to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases because these individuals who had been sullying me might not be in good health.'

(It emerged that she was carrying an STD. Mercifully, though, she had not been infected by one of her attackers who was HIV positive.) Though she came perilously close to the edge, Mme Pelicot later found 'a pretty little house' and slowly began to rebuild her life. And, as she did so, everything that had happened to her in the past decade began to make sense.

First there were her memory lapses, which became so frequent that she thought she was losing her mind. Her GP suspected she might be in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, but the neurologist to whom she was referred diagnosed anxiety.

These 'absences', as she called them, were continuing as late as October 21, 2020, suggesting Pelicot continued drugging her for men's twisted pleasure even after his arrest for upskirting.

In court yesterday, she didn't elaborate on what happened that evening, but details are in the prosecution file. After she returned from grandparent duty in Paris, her husband prepared dinner for her, but she could remember nothing more until she woke up – two days later. 

By that time this was happening so often that she had stopped driving and using the train. Her hair was falling out, and she had lost more than two stone. She also had abdominal and gynaecological problems.

There were other clues, she says in the court file. When her husband left his phone lying on the car seat, she saw a strange message asking him about photos he was supposed to have sent.

While her daughter, whom he also secretly photographed in states of undress, was 'completely traumatised' by the revelations, Mme Peilcot said yesterday that her 'stalwart' upbringing helped her come through this ordeal.

By 14 she was working in a factory in Brittany, and four years later – while holidaying with her grandparents – she met the long-haired, 18-year-old Pelicot, who became her first love. Now walking with a stick, he held his grey head in his hands as she recalled how much she had adored him, and how they were married against her father's express wishes.

Extraordinarily, we might think, she expressed apparent empathy for the man who cruelly betrayed her. She contrasted Pelicot's miserable upbringing with her own.

After she and Pelicot were wed, she said, she became a secretary in Paris, and Pelicot an electrician. They started a family and later opened their own business and their life was, by and large, good.

As for their love-life, she admitted finding some of his 'fantasies' distasteful, but it was otherwise normal until more recent years, when their lovemaking became rather perfunctory and unromantic.

The one flaw in their marriage, which Mme Pelicot alluded to only briefly, came many years ago, when she had an affair. Court files say that when her husband found out, he lifted her clean off the ground. But that was the only time he became physically violent towards her, she said. Yesterday, she passed off this fling as 'unimportant'.

Intriguingly, under cross-examination by a defence lawyer, Mme Pelicot was also asked about allegations her husband raped and murdered a young estate agent in Paris – a notorious unsolved case from 1991. She replied that she would not have suspected him to be capable of murder but remarked that people often lived together for years without really knowing each other.

Judge Arata asked Mme Pelicot what she hoped the trial would achieve. 'That justice will be exemplary,' this petite but redoubtable woman replied, eyeing the sea of male faces defiantly.

• Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland