It was November 2011, and Gisèle Pelicot was sleeping too much. She spent most of her weekends in a slumber. She was annoyed, because during the we
It was November 2011, and Gisèle Pelicot was sleeping too much.
She spent most of her weekends in a slumber. She was annoyed, because during the week she worked hard as a supply chain manager, and her time off was precious.
Yet she could not seem to stay awake, often drifting off without even realising it and waking hours later with no memory of having gone to bed.
Despite this, Gisèle, 58, was happy. She counted herself lucky to have her husband of 38 years, Dominique, by her side. Now their three children Caroline, David and Florian were grown, the couple were planning to soon retire and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in France’s idyllic southern region of Provence, where Mr Pelicot could go on bike rides and she could take Lancôme, their French bulldog, on long walks.
She had loved Dominique since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw that young man in a blue jumper it was love at first sight,” Gisèle would reflect, much later. They both had complicated family histories marked by loss and trauma and had found peace with one another. Their four decades together had hit rough patches – frequent financial troubles and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they had made it through.
Years later, when asked by a lawyer to sum up their relationship, she said: “Our friends used to say we were the perfect couple. And I thought we would see our days through together.”
By that point, Gisèle and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom in Avignon, not far from Mazan: she was surrounded by their children and her lawyers, and he, dressed in grey, prison-issue clothes, in the defendants’ glass box.
He was facing the maximum jail term for aggravated rape and was rapidly becoming known in France and beyond as – in his own daughter’s words – “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”.
But in 2011, when Gisèle felt she was sleeping too much, she couldn’t have guessed that was how things would play out.
Source: BBC
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