Watching Gisèle Pelicot speak in her recent BBC Newsnight interview is both gut-wrenching and profoundly inspiring. There is no spectacle in her voice. No dramatics. Just steady resolve. The kind that can only come from surviving something unimaginable — and deciding that silence will not protect anyone.
Her words land heavily:
“I wanted the shame to shift to the other side.”
“Shame must be carried by the accused, not the victims.”
“Victims are still made to feel like the guilty party.”
To understand the weight of those statements, we must remember what she endured.
Several years ago, French police uncovered evidence that her husband had been drugging her for nearly a decade and inviting dozens of men to sexually assault her while she was unconscious. The crimes were recorded. They occurred in her own home. The scale of betrayal and coordination stunned France when the case moved into public view during the 2024 trial. Rather than request anonymity, Gisèle chose openness. She insisted the proceedings be public so that responsibility would be visible.
It was that decision — not only the horror of the crimes — that reverberated globally.
Because what Gisèle challenged was not just a group of perpetrators. She challenged a culture.
For generations, survivors of gender-based violence have carried shame that was never theirs to hold. Shame has been misplaced — attached to the violated rather than the violator. It has silenced disclosures, fractured families, and distorted justice. It has asked victims to shrink, to hide, to protect reputations that were not their own.
When Gisèle says she wanted shame to shift, she is naming a deeply ingrained pattern — the instinct to scrutinize the harmed instead of the one who caused harm.
And she is rejecting it, not only for herself, but for every survivor who has ever been made to feel responsible for their own violation.
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