Store guard helped uncover abuse of Pelicot by husband

When Gisèle Pelicot was called to talk to police in November 2020, she believed it was to discuss upskirting allegations made against her husband of 50 years.

- HOLLY EVANS

Referring to him as a "super guy", she had no awareness that detectives were about to blow apart her seemingly idyllic life with Dominique Pelicot, who she had met at the age of 19.

When he was arrested at a shopping centre two months previously for covertly trying to take pictures up women’s skirts, police had decided to seize his phones and computer. They discovered a meticulously organised library of 20,000 images and videos of 71 men having sex with an unconscious woman. The woman was his wife, the mother of his children and his lifelong partner.

Police would go on to show her countless photographs of unknown men raping her, in the place where she should have been safest: her own bedroom in her own home. “I asked him to stop. It was unbearable. I was inert in my bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart,” Gisèle later told a jury.