the event book by Gisèle Pelicot

How is Gisèle Pelicot?

Judith Perrignon: She’s fine. Since her refusal to go behind closed doors at the trial, she listens to herself and does not let anyone decide for her. She started her life again with Jean-Loup. I met a woman with powerful defense mechanisms, armor inherited from childhood. Which does not prevent worries and sleepless nights.

The book is a highly anticipated publishing event in France and abroad. How did his writing go?

It wasn’t that complicated. Gisèle wanted to talk. Everything matured quite quickly. A form of emergency carried us. A chance, because we had little time. In less than nine months, an almost final version of his memoirs was already completed. I stayed at her house, came back to write with my notes and her expressions in mind, called her if I needed a detail, to confirm an association of ideas… Obviously, there were difficult moments to tell, but Gisèle dried her tears, started smiling again and continued.

How to transcribe without betraying?

A complicity is formed, made up of in-depth discussions and little things. Thus, I understand its mechanisms, its reflexes, what makes it coherent. I was struck by Gisèle’s life force. Her smile is a deep reflection of herself. He’s always been there. The book recounts, for example, this moment when the bailiffs arrived at the Pelicots’ home, heavily in debt, seized everything, in the process traumatizing their daughter, Caroline, then a teenager. Gisèle, when she comes home from work, smiles and tries to reassure her: “It’s just furniture, we’ll get through it. » Nothing must touch it, it has no right to fall or bend. She says it, she is a “little soldier of happiness”, but without stiffness.

What does Gisèle Pelicot expect from this publication?

It’s a way to close this terrible story. To tell it in his own words, since we ultimately heard very little about it. It was also a way of responding to all those women who surrounded her during her trial in Avignon (Vaucluse), or who wrote to her by the thousands from everywhere. Gisèle felt that her story was the surface of many others. She wants to share her journey before returning to the calm life to which she aspires.

Is this also a message for his children?

Gisèle speaks to them in a way that parents rarely speak to their children. She explains to them where she comes from, how she works, and reveals a part of herself to them. This was all the more important as relations with his two eldest children were strained at the time. Everyone reacted differently, and as best they could, with disagreements sometimes stated publicly. This wouldn’t be the first family to explode due to tragedy. His children needed to clear their minds, to erase this father. Gisèle cannot live without a past and without memories.

Caroline, her daughter, is convinced that Dominique Pelicot also drugged her and perhaps abused her. This created a divide between the two women. In January, Caroline spoke in the press about a recent rapprochement…

It is confirmed. They talk a lot now, which makes Gisèle deeply happy.

In And the joy of living, Gisèle Pelicot also tells part of the story of Dominique Pelicot…

Of course. The first time I saw her cry was when she told me about their meeting. She was 19 years old. “I was sure he was going to love me,” she told me, and the tears came as if the spark of love was from yesterday. She holds to this emotion which marked her entry into the adult world, her escape too. It’s a chiaroscuro process. Gisèle needs to preserve part of her history with Dominique Pelicot to survive and rebuild herself.

Motherless, she lived between a grief-stricken father who did not reassure her and a cruel stepmother telling her she was ugly. Gisèle cannot therefore erase her love at first sight with Dominique Pelicot, even if years later, he becomes her executioner. She will always have these two sides of him inside her. She also knows that he is charged with attempted rape in 1999 (which he partially acknowledged, editor’s note) and that he is the main suspect in a murder preceded by a rape committed in 1991 (which he denies, editor’s note). If the investigation proves that he is the perpetrator, it will be very difficult for her and for her children.

From the beginning of the work, we understand that Dominique Pelicot inflicts one of his terrors on his wife by plunging her into a sleep that resembles death…

The ambivalence between sleep and death hangs over Gisèle’s life. That’s what strikes me when she tells me that as a child, while she watches The trail to the stars, her mother is suddenly no longer asleep in the next room, but dead, and she tries to wake her up. A scene that has a terrible echo with the one where, one morning, her grandchildren try to wake her up with slaps. Dominique Pelicot drugged her the day before. It is the strength of a book to be able to make such distant moments resonate.

What woman has she become?

Gisèle was a free woman in many ways. But she inherited an education in “conjugal duty”, the imperative to protect and reassure the man. She carries both the weight of an era and the shortcomings of her childhood. Family and love remain his ideal. When she spoke at the end of the trial, she uttered the word “patriarchal” to denounce the society that allowed so many men to rape her; “a new word for me,” she admitted to me. She is not a radical feminist, but her story is that of a woman whose existence changes several times and who becomes aware, understands, and asserts herself.