The challenge for anyone reading about the mass rape and meticulous degradation of Gisèle Pelicot as told in her extraordinary new memoir, is to separate it from all the other stories about the degradation of women. Otherwise, one might drown. This time it’s not the billionaires or world leaders repeatedly using the word “pussy” to connect to a sex offender indicted for federal sex trafficking of children. It’s not the weaponised mass rape and sexual torture of women and children in Sudan or Bucha. This time the victim is a modest, reserved French woman in her 60s, a loving wife, mother and grandmother, happily retired to the neighbourly civility of Mazan, a Provencal village.

Gisèle Pelicot’s most intimate details are already known to the world. We know that Dominique, the kind and caring father of her children, the “great guy” who never made jokes about women or behaved inappropriately towards them, the man with whom she had “this joie de vivre” for half a century, was also the man who drugged and raped her and invited more than 80 apparently ordinary men to their family home to violate every part of her unconscious body while he recorded them. Rape reports often sanitise details; hers doesn’t. One haunting detail is of a dental crown dislodged due to “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into my slack mouth”.

For the sceptics – the defence lawyers, the doctors, the true crime........

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