Betrayal of Identity

“We are made up of our memories,” Gisèle Pelicot writes in her book “A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides” about her life before and after the revelation that her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had spent 10 years drugging her to the point of total incapacitation, raping and inviting 70 other men to rape her with him. “What was I to do with them? What meaning should I give them?”

But it wasn’t the memories of her sexual assaults she struggled with after Dominique’s arrest in 2020. She has none, except for a decade marked by horrifying blackouts, memory lapses and escalating gynecological problems that went without diagnosis until he was locked away. Rather, it was the memories of having had what she thought was a happy life together.

Survivors of intimate partner violence trusted their relationships. “One of the biggest, biggest issues [for them] to get over psychologically is that sense of betrayal,” said forensic psychologist Lenore Walker, author of the seminal book about the cycle of abuse, “The Battered Woman.” 

Pelicot, who now uses her maiden name, Guillou, wrote of the days after the police first revealed that her husband had long been involved in sexually assaulting her that “I wanted to hold on to those pictures of a father, a husband, a family built from two messed-up kids from the Indre who got married in the shadow of a beautiful chateau.” 

Diane Barth, clinical social worker and psychotherapist, believes this is common for people who suffer from abuse by a parent or spouse. “Protecting him protected her sense of her identity,” Barth said. ”What she’s struggling with [in the book] is: Can she hold on to some version of that sense of who she is, which requires her to hold on to some version of who he was — the parts of him that she did appreciate, that did seem to be a good person?”

Or, in Gisèle’s words: “I couldn’t face losing everything …. If the last 50 years of my life were taken away from me, it would be as if I had never existed. I would be dead.”

Her children felt differently. Within days, her daughter Caroline Darian, ripped up Giséle’s family photographs featuring Dominique, and the couple’s sons, David and Florian, all but emptied the couple’s house of their father’s belongings. (Dominique later confessed to taking nude pictures of his daughter and daughters-in-law without their consent. Caroline and others, including Dominique’s older brother, believe he likely also assaulted her. He has denied it and no charges have yet been brought due to lack of evidence.)

Megan Cutter, the chief of victim services at RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization, said people’s experiences of intimate partner violence vary widely. “Their reactions, the timelines of those reactions, and feelings and emotions all look really different,” she said.

This was particularly true for the members of the Pelicot family, who were all victimized in different ways. 

For many survivors of intimate partner violence, the people in their lives (and the lives of their abusers) may respond in varying ways. Some may still trust, communicate with or have a relationship with the perpetrator; others may reject them. As Cutter said, “And you might also be experiencing this secondary sense of judgment or challenge around what the other people in your life think you should or shouldn’t do, particularly because the abuser is your intimate partner.”

Gisèle felt this sense of judgment from others deeply — especially as she tried to process the idea that one of the most meaningful relationships of her life had ultimately been unfathomably abusive. “I didn’t recognize my life as it was summed up by other people,” she wrote of the pretrial process. “I had been happy, I was sure of it. I was more than just a victim.”

Accepting a new truth can be a challenge. “I think your whole world is turned upside down,” Cutter said. “You might have a person who you thought was someone you love — who you might even still have some feelings of love for, whether that’s currently or in those memories — who also is implicated in hurting and abusing you.”

Her effort to reconcile the husband she thought she knew with a sexual predator she had no recall of experiencing took time, effort and no small amount of therapy — and, ultimately, the unfolding of the horrors of Dominique’s crimes.

She wrote that in the immediate days after his arrest, “I was probably incapable of interpreting the evolution of his personality and his authoritarian outbursts, perhaps because they didn’t stop him laughing with us, or singing in the car, or because they weren’t in the form of commands.” She also recounts thinking around the same time: “I would never have stayed with a tyrant.” It led to a need to reexamine her life and look for “the signs I had been unable to decipher.”

Those signs, she realized, had actually been there: A physically violent outburst after she admitted to an affair. A decades-long effort to push her sexual boundaries that she resisted and he openly resented (and insulted her for) while still not giving her a single orgasm. A number of affairs that she allowed but was not allowed to question. An increasing irritability toward her. And a number of incidents with spoiled or strange-tasting food that he quickly threw away when she noticed something off.

Put together, she eventually came to feel “the shame of having understood nothing, of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own,” she wrote. 

Cutter notes that a challenging aspect of intimate partner violence is how integrated it may be with the happier parts of the relationship. “That’s the challenge Gisèle talks about in her memoir: How do I categorize and look at the rest of this relationship? How has this impacted my other life experiences?” she said.

“Most abusers have both personalities,” said Walker. “They have both the mean, very abusive side of them, and they have the very loving and protective side of them. And so if you don’t realize that the both of them are part of him, and you think that the real person is the very protective, loving side of him, then you miss the cues.” 

Giséle wrote that she had difficulty breaking out of that bifurcated thinking for more than two years after her husband’s arrest. “I partitioned Dominique into two,” she said.

All of that changed in November 2022, when police interviewed her about a 1990 rape and murder and a 1999 rape in the Paris suburbs in which they had come to suspect Dominique. (He ultimately confessed to the 1999 rape after his DNA matched blood recovered at the scene. He has denied involvement in the 1990 murder and Gisèle has stated that she is still not ready to accept that he is a murderer without a confession or more evidence.)

“I [had gone] to the point of seeing in everything that had happened to me — in all the evil things he had done to me with other men — a form of ghastly possession, the decaying of our love,” she wrote. “It sickened me, it could have killed me, but it was still fundamentally about him and me.”

“The new inquiry told quite a different story,” she explained. “This was a sexual predator who preyed upon young women .… This was a leap into another dimension, where humanity no longer existed and language failed.”

Denial is “almost always” part of the process, said Barth. “That’s part of what one has to deal with, because you’ve got guilt, you’ve got your own doubts, you’ve got your feelings that maybe you did something to bring it on,” she explained. “It can be easy to say, ‘Well, maybe I just didn’t give him what he needed.’”

Giséle wrote that it was not an easy process to rebuild her life, especially because she felt that women of her generation were taught to prize a romantic relationship over everything else. 

“Women who take their identity from a relationship are the ones who have the most difficulty in having to rebuild. They may never have built [a separate identity] because they just lived in the shadow of the relationship,” said Walker, noting that Dominique was Gisèle’s first boyfriend at the age of 19. 

By the time the trial began, Gisèle had not only read the 400-page record of the case presented by prosecutors, but forced herself to watch the videos the prosecutors planned to present at trial to counter the defendants’ narrative that she had consented. 

“We had spent a lifetime together, but all I had left of him by this stage were his transgressions,” she said of seeing Dominique in court. “What did this clinical assessment leave me of the man I had known? Had he died long ago? And if so, when? After 10, 20 or 30 years of marriage? Had he ever in fact existed?”

After hearing Dominique’s final cross examination at trial, in which he said he’d raped his then-wife because he wanted to “force an insubmissive woman into submission,” she wrote, “The man I had believed I was in a relationship with for the past five decades was not in this courtroom.”

But the trial was not all tragedy for Giséle.

“I can’t remember the day I first heard the applause as I walked into the Palais de Justice,” she wrote. “I realized that the people around me, mostly women, were forming a guard of honor, something I had never imagined or expected. I could feel the warmth of their bodies, their emotion and vulnerability melding with mine.”

“Trauma survivors need to have people who walk through the pain with them, who witness it,” said Barth. “She got the whole world witnessing it with her, and she got all these women coming out, talking about their identification with her or their own stories.”

Cutter agreed, explaining, “To know that actually there are other people who are also experiencing this is important, not to normalize it, but rather to have a conversation where we’re saying, ‘This isn’t just happening to this one person. This is happening to others, too.’”

It wasn’t just that Gisèle’s story resonated with women. Their stories resonated with her. 

“How could I tell the women waiting to thank me for my courage — when I had no claim to any such thing — that their presence outside the courtroom eased for me what was happening inside, that the long-buried stories they came to lay on the steps were the best possible response to the denial and bravado of the men flexing their muscles inside?” she wrote.

“That’s one of the things about memoirs,” said Barth. “They tend to be a way for a person to feel that other people are validating and acknowledging their experience, validating who they are, and that’s all part of the post-trauma identity formation process.”

“It is strange to think of me before, me today, to superimpose one on top of the other,” Gisèle wrote near the end of her memoir. “I know how alike they are, the life force they share, but I know their differences, too.”

“I am no longer the wife in shock and I am no longer the woman I was before I discovered Dominique’s true nature. I am moving forward.”