Gisèle Pelicot’s Sons Tell of a ‘Devastated’ Family at Rape Trial in France

It was not just Gisèle Pelicot’s life that collapsed the day the police delivered the news that they believed that her husband of 50 years had been drugging her and inviting other men into their house to rape her alongside him for almost a decade.

“It was the whole family,” their eldest son, David, told a court Monday, in a dramatic day when the couple’s three children addressed their father, who was sitting in a box on the edge of the packed courtroom in Avignon, France.

“You need to know this trial is a trial of a devastated family,” David said.

David Pelicot, 50, is haunted by fears that his own son, who remains in psychological treatment, was also abused by his grandfather. His sister, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, is a shadow of her former self, convinced she was also drugged and sexually abused by their father. (Their father denies both those charges.) The youngest sibling, Florian, took the stand to say that his marriage had collapsed.

“It cost me a divorce and thousands of questions,” said Florian Pelicot, 38.

He added, in anguish, “How do we rebuild ourselves? What’s the method? How do we do it?”

Some 51 men are on trial, mostly for accusations of aggravated rape of Gisèle Pelicot. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to crushing sleeping pills into her food and drinks for almost a decade, and then inviting dozens of other men he met online into their home to rape her alongside him while she was unconscious.

At least a dozen of the men, including Mr. Pelicot, have pleaded guilty. The rest have admitted that they had sexual relations with Ms. Pelicot, but say they did not intend to rape her. Instead, many have argued that they believed that Ms. Pelicot had consented and that they had been lured by Mr. Pelicot with the promise of a threesome, in which Ms. Pelicot was pretending to sleep as part of the couple’s fantasy.