Gisèle Pelicot

Gisèle Pelicot

Her biography is available in 36 different languages on Wikipedia. Gisèle Pelicot is the 37th most popular celebrity, the 1,167th most popular biography from Germany and the most popular German Celebrity.

Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman and former logistics manager, is most famously known as the central victim and survivor in the Pelicot rape case (also called the Mazan rape case), where her husband Dominique Pelicot repeatedly drugged her unconscious over nearly a decade (2011–2020) and invited dozens of strangers—ultimately identified as over 50 men—to rape her while he filmed the acts, resulting in at least 92 documented assaults of which she had no memory. In a landmark 2024 trial in Avignon that shocked the world, she chose to waive her legal right to anonymity and insisted on a fully public hearing to expose the horrors of drug-facilitated sexual violence and shift the shame onto the perpetrators rather than victims, leading to convictions for her ex-husband (sentenced to the maximum 20 years) and all co-defendants. Surprisingly, despite the profound betrayal by her husband of nearly 50 years—whom she met at 18 and described as "love at first sight"—and the immense personal toll that fractured her family and left her life "collapsed," she has since found new love, rebuilt parts of her life through music, walks, and time with her grandchildren, and published a 2026 memoir titled A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, emerging as a global feminist icon who inspired changes to France's consent laws and galvanized support for sexual violence survivors.