Gisele Pelicot’s ‘descent into hell’ shows once again why women are so furious

Sign up for the Independent Women email for the latest news, opinion and features Get the Independent Women email for free Get the Independent Women email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. I, personally, am baseball-bat-to-a-glass-window furious that in the past week alone, we’ve seen headlines describing an incredibly courageous woman – Gisele Pelicot – whose life as she knew it disintegrated in 2020 when she discovered her husband had been drugging her and inviting strangers to rape her for years in her own home, while filming it – as “taking public revenge on men”. Her daughter, Caroline Darian, told the same court of the women’s “descent into hell”, in which “you have no idea how low you will sink”. The BBC World Service staff gender and identity correspondent Megha Mohan, who has been looking into these cases for months, puts it thus: “These stories should be allowed to be told before a famous woman is killed.” She’s right. As the writer Caroline Criado Perez put it in her newsletter this morning: “To men, I have a question: why are you not talking about it?” Yes, women are angry.