In 1973, Gisèle Guillou married Dominique Pelicot and settled with him in Paris. Gisèle and Dominique were 18 when they met, 20 when they married; both seeking safe harbour after childhoods marked by conflict and loss.
Just over 275 years earlier in the same city, Charles Perrault had laid the template for the French fairytale tradition by publishing his Histoires ou contes du temps passé. It is rich in warnings for young women seeking happiness in marriage.
Notorious among them is the tale of Bluebeard. A powerful man leaves his new wife at home, with strict instructions never to unlock his underground chamber. Yet curiosity gets the better of her. She finds the corpses of six previous brides. A telltale stain of blood on the key, impossible to remove, proves to her returning husband that she has discovered his secret. If she had never pried, might they have lived happily ever after? Don’t look too closely, girls.
On 2nd November 2020, an uncomfortable deputy police sergeant in Provence explained to Gisèle Pelicot that he was in possession of video footage showing that her husband had invited at least 53 men to their house to rape her on occasions when she had been deeply sedated. It would take a further four years for Dominique and 50 of his co-conspirators to be convicted; some are still out there, unidentified.
Few could argue that Gisèle would have been better off not knowing what was happening to her body at night. But there are times during her thoughtful, self-questioning recent memoir when she seems to ask herself just that. How closely, she wonders, should any of us examine a marriage? Even now, there are things she does not want to know about the man with whom she shared nearly 50 years of life.
A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides is one of three memoirs released over the past year by women best known for exposing systemic abuses of power. Last October, Knopf published the posthumous memoir of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the most well-known survivor of sexual abuse and trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein. The publication of Nobody’s Girl was a contributing factor in the removal of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s princely style and titles, although King Charles’s eldest brother continues to deny Giuffre’s allegations that she was trafficked to him by Epstein for sex.
At this year’s British Book Awards, Nobody’s Girl shared the inaugural “Freedom to Publish” award with Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, an exposé of Facebook and its parent company Meta. The prize was supported by Index on Censorship, of which I am the deputy chair. As our CEO Jemimah Steinfeld said at the podium, both Nobody’s Girl and Careless People faced intense legal pressure from powerful interests that sought to silence them before publication; both saw the light of day only thanks to “tenacious publishers who refused to back down”.
Epstein’s attempts to silence Roberts Giuffre before his death are well attested. Alongside the details of explicit bribes and threats, Nobody’s Girl includes descriptions of a phenomenon reported by several of Epstein’s accusers: a car arriving nightly outside their home, the driver sitting silently for hours, “bright lights aimed at their windows at night”. Being American, she responds by sleeping with a loaded revolver on the nightstand.
Meta reacted to Wynn-Williams’s Careless People by leveraging a non-disparagement clause she signed when she moved from the United Nations to work as a public policy leader with the company. Her publishers successfully argued that this applied only to Wynn-Williams, and not to their own activities in publishing her words. The author herself remains prohibited from promoting the book or even discussing it in private with her family, lest her words be interpreted as “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments”. This led to the recent sight of Wynn-Williams sitting on stage at the Hay Festival, silently observing while fellow panellists Carole Cadwalladr and Tim Wu discussed the book. If you don’t have anything non-disparaging to say, say nothing.
Wynn-Williams remains prohibited from promoting the book or even discussing it in private
Many people have also tried to prevent Pelicot from sharing her story. The pivotal narrative moment in A Hymn to Life involves her sudden decision to refuse a closed, anonymous trial. Her U-turn goes against the wishes not only of the accused rapists—“simmering with rage… seeming to take up all the space in the room”—but also the presiding judge and even the public prosecutor.
Dominique’s brother, a local mayor, would have preferred to keep the family name out of the press. In court, he ferociously denies the testimony of Gisèle, Dominique and his half-sister that the cycle of abuse started with their parents, with Pelicot père a wifebeater who raped the foster child entrusted to their home. Even the security guard who first arrested Dominique for upskirting at a local supermarket, triggering the revelatory search of his digital devices, received threats from the families of local men charged with the rapes, furious that he has disturbed this particular hornets’ nest.
As she does throughout the book, Gisèle is careful to detach her understanding of the macrofeminist narrative in which she has accidentally found herself from the local, legalistic and deeply personal calculus that guides her as she picks her way through her immediate battlefield. She and her friends had come of age during the feminist awakenings of the 1960s, but without taking much notice. “We sensed that times were changing, but we weren’t entirely sure how this concerned us… We’d heard of The Second Sex though it never occurred to us to read it.”
Yes, her decision to go public is influenced in part by her memory of a feminist slogan that “‘shame has to change sides’: words I’d heard over a decade ago”. But first she realises that an open media policy provides her with her only chance to redress a traumatic gender inequality in the courtroom itself. If she’d chosen anonymity for herself and for the accused rapists, “I would be alone with them. Locked in with them… And all their eyes would be on me as they stood shoulder to shoulder, like a wall.” Instead, when reporters are allowed to join her in the courtroom, they are overwhelmingly female.
Pelicot forced France to face up to the depravities respectable men get up to in secret. Wynn-Williams’s Careless People confronts us with the social—and feminist—cost of maintaining our Instagram addiction. And in Nobody’s Girl, Roberts Giuffre confronts us not only with the horrors of Jeffrey Epstein, or the influence of the British royal family, but also with truths that even some feminists would rather not know. Epstein’s network did not merely encompass dinosaurs like Donald Trump—whom she absolves of any wrongdoing—but philanthropists and prominent Democratic politcians. Sometimes Bluebeard is a liberal.
In fact, readers looking to pin the blame on lone individuals in any of these stories will find they are reading the wrong books. Although each of these memoirs features a celebrity bogeyman—Dominique Pelicot, Jeffrey Epstein and Mark Zuckerberg, who notably differs from those other two in not being accused of any sexual crimes whatsoever—their greater social impact is in exposing a network of malevolent actors who think themselves unaccountable. In the case of Pelicot, that network is still being uncovered. Since April 2026, 156 people have been arrested in Europol’s Project Medusa investigation into “misogynistic online communities” that share footage of drug-facilitated rapes.
The headlines generated by Careless People have largely emphasised the political impact of Facebook’s quest for profit. There is much to be appalled by here. The complicity with the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance of its people; the manner in which Facebook rapidly expanded into Myanmar without adequate safeguards or content moderation that might have prevented the incitement behind the 2017 religious genocide. (Meta has since admitted it was “too slow to act” on abuse in its Myanmar services.) At times, though, Wynn-Williams’s narrative feels undermined by her own naiveté as a newcomer to the private sector. She is appalled to discover that Facebook provided Trump with more support than Hilary Clinton in 2016, for one simple reason: he spent more money.
Yet, like Roberts Giuffre and Pelicot, Wynn-Williams is also taking aim at a macho system built on pack mentality. The social network was not only Zuckerberg’s product: it informed his employment model. In one uncomfortable passage, Wynn-Williams attributes to an unnamed colleague the observation that almost everyone on the senior leadership team is “a Jew who went to Harvard”. Wynn-Williams attempts to impose a bit of distance between herself and this claim, acknowledging the danger of getting into “an anti-Semitic conversation I don’t want to be part of”. But, as a woman with much to say elsewhere about her own bravery, if she wants to make this point, she should own it.
What is clear is that, like most packs, the members of Meta’s leadership team seem quick to protect each other. When Wynn-Williams makes a complaint of sexual harassment against Joel Kaplan, her Trump-connected boss and now Nick Clegg’s successor as Meta’s president of global affairs, it is dismissed before she is even given a chance to provide allegedly damning emails and witness testimony. (Meta insists that her sacking, that same year, resulted from “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.)
Facebook began as a platform to allow college boys to rate the appearance of their female peers. By the time Wynn-Williams is making her sexual harassment complaint, she has discovered that it has developed tools to identify when teenage girls feel “worthless”, or when they delete a selfie, so that it can serve them a beauty advert. The existence of “Facebook Feminist Fight Club”, a secret group of 200 furious female employees, offers little organised resistance and only a space to vent. Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook leader who presented herself as a trailblazer for corporate women with her 2013 book Lean In, is depicted as a hypocrite who seemingly does little to change the company’s culture.
Each of these three books reserves a particular bitterness for women who collaborate with boys’ clubs. Roberts Giuffre’s contempt for Ghislaine Maxwell, who recruited her into Epstein’s household, is understandable, but there’s still something discomfiting about her sideswipes at Maxwell’s ageing body. Maxwell’s short haircut, for example, “while provocatively stylish for a woman of twenty or so, looked a bit haggard on someone twice that age”. Even as a comment on Maxwell’s insecurity around Epstein, this feels unnecessary. She prefers to believe that Epstein himself was a victim of childhood abuse, just as Pelicot does of Dominique.
Even Pelicot, at times, seems to apply a harsher standard to the women she encounters. She struggles to connect with her first lawyer, in part because she chafes at the woman’s eagerness to publicise and frame the case in the context of years of feminist struggle. “When [she] had originally suggested having an open hearing as a way of staging a massive public trial of violence against women, I had categorically refused.” Yet this is precisely the strategy which she eventually embraces, with the support of a new male team of Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau.
The shift is in keeping with the image throughout this book of Pelicot, the reluctant feminist. She is determined to raise awareness about the specific cause of drug-assisted marital rape: “It fills me with relief to think that a woman who wakes up, unable to remember what happened the night before, might think of me—or rather my story.” But it takes her time to accept the value of the organised feminist movement, and there is a lingering distaste for the educated, upper-middle-class French feminist elite. “Here I am in my seventies, a martyr, the symbol of a new feminist wave that I hardly know a thing about.” She wants to embrace it, but she also insists that “I will stay as I am, without hatred, unable to set men against women, for I believe we are meant to live side by side.” She has found a new man to love. She believes in marriage.
It is this conscious dissonance that makes A Hymn to Life by far the most compelling of these three books. It is the most honest, the most self-critical and the most precise in its use of language. From a technical perspective, this is surprising. For us to read Gisèle Pelicot’s words in English, they have been filtered through three collaborators: the well-known French ghostwriter Judith Perrignon and the translators Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver. Yet Pelicot’s emotions still reach us because they focus on the most ordinary aspect of this extraordinary drama—the story of a family.
As has been reported, Gisèle’s relationship with her daughter, Caroline, fell apart following Dominique’s arrest. Yet Caroline’s belief that she, too, had been raped by Dominique is only one part of the story. Watching Caroline smash up the kitchen in a marital home that Gisèle had still hoped to keep and maintain, she recognises that the two have incompatible coping strategies: “I embraced silence, she demanded noise.” Gisèle questions everything: her abilities as a mother, her blindness as a spouse, her place in feminism. In doing so, she gives us permission to ask those questions too.
Amy Wallace, ghostwriter of Nobody’s Girl, has a harder task. The manuscript was completed before Roberts Giuffre’s death by suicide: in it, Virginia praises her husband Robbie as a “saviour” and “bully-basher” who helps her “fight bad guys”. After her death, allegations of domestic violence emerged, which Robbie Giuffre denies, although Wallace reports that he had pleaded guilty to one incident in 2015. In a foreword, Wallace adds corroborating details, but never interpolates these allegations into the glowing descriptions of her husband signed off by Virginia for the posthumous text.
Roberts Giuffre grew up in an impoverished milieu of violence and rape that made her a prime target for predators like Epstein
This is not a coincidence. Epstein and his associates attempted to smear Roberts Giuffre by pointing to her allegations of abuse by other men and boys, even earlier in her childhood. Wallace’s achievement as a journalist and ghostwriter is to comb through court records and corroborating evidence to show that, rather than being a serial fantasist, Roberts Giuffre did grow up in an impoverished milieu of violence and rape that made her a prime target for predators like Epstein. “Forrest”, the friend of her father whom she says raped her aged seven, was convicted in 2000 of abusing a girl her age and similarly accused by many others, although her allegations that her own father also took part cannot be proven (and are denied). Ron Eppinger, a friend of Epstein who picked Roberts Giuffre up in his limo after she ran away from a harsh disciplinary camp for troubled adolescents, was jailed for 21 months for sex trafficking in 2001. Then Maxwell found her. She was not a vexatious serial complainant—she was an abused child.
In literary terms, however, Wallace rarely breaks out of the genre conventions of the misery memoir. To pad out Virginia’s quieter years, she sprinkles in aphorisms on trauma recovery and quotes extensively from the lyrics of popular songs in which Virginia and her readers might find shared meaning. Nobody’s Girl is an essential memoir for what it tells us about power and predators. As a piece of writing, it is forgettable.
Over it all hangs the shadow of Robbie Giuffre, the last man to offer shelter to this damaged girl. Beneath his wife’s glowing descriptions, there are darker signs. He has a “temper”, she acknowledges, and he intervenes in Virginia’s medical appointments—as did the controlling Dominique Pelicot. As a portrait of a marriage, warts and all, Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life offers a sharper honesty. Open Bluebeard’s chamber, she tells us. The monster is inside the home.
