A HYMN TO LIFE

A memoir by the victim of an infamous and shocking series of sex crimes.

Pelicot courageously waived her right to anonymity to prosecute her husband, who repeatedly drugged her for a decade and then encouraged dozens of men to rape her. Her moving memoir, written with journalist Perrignon, opens with a diagnostic incident in which he has been arrested. He confessed to her that “he had done something foolish…filming under three women’s skirts” at a supermarket in the South of France, about which she comments, “It was terrible to think of my husband stalking these women, unbearable to imagine him as an offender, but it could have been so much worse.” It quickly became so much worse when a police officer tells her, “I am going to show you some photographs and videos that you are not going to like.” The revelation forces Pelicot to examine in retrospect a telling pattern of behavior that included domination, debt, and strange fantasizing, with him “suggesting things he had seen in porn magazines”; more than that, as she learns more of her husband’s secret life, she also learns that he is under suspicion of having committed murder. In time, he and 51 men he recruited stood trial, with her husband receiving what might seem an unduly lenient 20-year prison term, the others, “all those ordinary men,” terms of three to 15 years. There were other perpetrators who could not be identified, too, now “filthy bastards walking free.” Pelicot writes convincingly of the shame that women defending themselves against sexual abusers too often face at the hands of lawyers who tried to “reduce one woman—and therefore all women—to absolute submission in the name of male domination,” and she is unsparing of an insatiable media at a time when she “wanted to be accorded a little time, restraint and discretion.”

A heartrending and courageous account of the ultimate betrayal.