Giselle Bellicot publicly recounts her horrific discovery of her husband’s rapes
Paris — Giselle Bellico’s brain froze as the French police officer revealed the unthinkable.
She remembers him telling her: “Fifty-three men came to our house to rape me.”
Sharing details of the horror that was so far largely Reserved for French courtsPellicott is publicly telling her story of survival and courage in her own words, in a book and her first series of interviews since a landmark trial in 2024 transformed her into a world-class scientist. An icon against sexual violence She imprisoned her husband Kick her out With drugs so other men could assault her dormant body.
Excerpts from “Hymn to Life, Shame Must Change Its Sides,” published by French newspaper Le Monde on Tuesday, traced back to November 2, 2020 — the day her world collapsed.
Police summoned her then-husband, Dominique Bellicot, for questioning after a supermarket security guard caught him secretly filming an upskirt video.
Giselle accompanied him and was completely unprepared for the bomb dropped by Officer Laurent Perret. Gradually, carefully, he explained to her how the man whom she considered a loving husband and whom she described as a “superman” had in fact made her an unwitting victim of his perversions.
“I will show you pictures and videos that will not satisfy you,” the officer said, the words she recounts in the book.
The first showed a man raping a woman who was lying on her side and wearing a suspender belt.
“That’s you in this picture,” the officer said.
Then he showed her another photo, and another after that – taken from a collection of photos Dominique Bellicot had taken of his wife over the years when he would regularly knock her unconscious by sticking drugs on her food and drink, so that strangers he invited into their home could assault her while he photographed her.
Giselle Bellico couldn’t believe that the lethargic woman in the photos was her.
“I did not recognize the individuals. Neither did this woman. Her cheek was very flabby. Her mouth was very limp. She was a rag doll,” she wrote in her book.
“My brain stopped working in Deputy Police Sergeant Perrett’s office.”
The shocking case and her courage in demanding this He was tried in open court stimulate A national reckoning on the scourge of rape culture. The horrific trial ended in December 2024 with… Guilty rulings for all 51 defendants.
Dominique Bellicot and 49 other men were convicted of rape and sexual assaults over a period of nearly a decade. Another man was convicted of drugging and raping his wife with the help of Dominique Bellicot.
Dominique Bellicot, who was found guilty of all charges, was given the maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison. Sentences ranged from three to 15 years in prison for the other convicts. Only one of them later appealed and was seen His sentence for rape was increased Imprisonment for nine to ten years.
In excerpts from the book published by Le Monde newspaper, Bellico says that accepting the possibility of a closed trial would have protected her attackers and left her alone with them in court, “hostage to their looks, their lies, their cowardice and their contempt.”
“No one will know what they did to me,” she explains. “There will not be a single journalist to write their names next to their crimes.” “Above all, no woman can walk in and sit in the courtroom lest she feel alone.”
The 73-year-old adds that if she were 20 years younger, “I would not have dared to refuse the closed hearing.”
“I was afraid to stare,” she writes. “Those damned looks that a woman of my generation always had to deal with, those damned looks that make you hesitate in the morning between pants and a dress, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you and embarrass you. Those damned looks that are supposed to tell you who you are, what your value is, and then abandon you when you grow up.”
