Gisèle Pelicot’s battle isn’t over

Last month, 24 hours after launching my new show on Sky News, an email from Penguin Random House dropped into my inbox, with the casual question: “Would you be interested in an interview with Gisèle” – the second name isn’t required – “for your new show?” My reply, after thinking for less than a nanosecond: “Yes Please with a capital P to this.”

Honestly, Gisèle Pelicot is pretty near the top of every journalist’s interview wish list. She’s legendary – just pick a suitably excitable adjective. Ever since she courageously waived her anonymity to face her ex-husband Dominique and 50 other men who raped or sexually assaulted her, she’s become a standard-bearer for women across the globe: tiny in the crowd outside the courthouse in Avignon, in southern France, elegant in her little round sunglasses and glossy bob, immortalised on murals the world over, alongside her rallying cry, “La honte doit changer de camp” (“Shame must change sides”). So yes, this is an interview no one would turn down.

Entre nous

Gisèle does not speak fluent English, so in order to have a smooth conversation we’d each need to hear the translator in our earpiece. I am determined not to speak “through” Carine, the translator. It’s important to me before a big interview to establish a rapport with my interviewee, to try to get inside their head. Tricky, when there’s a language barrier. So, I dredge up my schoolgirl French and inevitably – given the sweltering heat – embark on a conversation about the weather. “Il fait chaud” isn’t so hard, after all.

For someone who’s recognised wherever she goes, Gisèle is surprisingly unguarded. She is affable, relaxed, and warm. We start with 2 November 2020, the day, as she puts it to me, “my whole life collapsed”, forcing her to rebuild from “a field of ruins”. She speaks rapidly, without any hesitation or upset. I press her on her extraordinary composure and she explains that she doesn’t “show my suffering or my tears. I share my laughter, but not my suffering. And that’s possibly what also allowed me to save myself, not to show all this suffering to my children and to my friends.”

As she recounts in her bestselling memoir A Hymn to Life, her children had a very different reaction to the horrors that befell the family, destroying their father’s belongings and the furniture in their home to remove every trace of him. Gisèle’s daughter Caroline is present at our interview, and she also accompanied her mother to the Hay Festival. Their relationship is mending.

A work in progress

As we are editing together the interview the next morning, news breaks of a development in the awful story of the teenage boys who avoided jail sentences for raping two teenage girls. The Prime Minister intervenes to announce that the Attorney General is referring the case to the Court of Appeal; their sentences will be reconsidered. In our interview Gisèle was a powerful advocate on the victims’ behalf, arguing simply: “They have to have justice.” It seems to me that this case – and the controversy over the sentencing – illustrates perfectly why Gisèle’s voice needs to be heard. Shame is changing sides, but it’s a work in progress.

Keyboard wars

I get sent a letter full of fury about the BBC’s decision to commission a man to write a drama about the murder of Sarah Everard. The BBC says the stellar writer Jeff Pope – whose drama Believe Me, about the women drugged and raped by John Worboys, is available on ITVX right now – will treat the retelling with “the utmost care”, ensuring the issues that led to Everard’s death would “remain in the public consciousness for years to come”.

But the letter – which was sent to BBC bosses – reveals simmering anger that a story that, as the signatories put it, “cracked open a national conversation about systemic misogyny” will be recounted by a man. The screenwriters aren’t claiming that men “cannot write about women’s experiences”, but they point out that women in the industry have spent a lifetime navigating misogyny. “That knowledge is not incidental to writing this story. It is the story.”

Some of the women who signed the letter want to keep it private. After careful discussion with my editors, we decide to broadcast but without naming the signatories, though one of them, Kayleigh Jones, agrees to be interviewed. After coming off air, the author Bonnie Greer retweets my post about the segment accompanied by a single word: “Wow…” The former GB News host Dan Wootton quote-tweets me with the verdict: “You sexist.” If journalism is about starting a public debate, then I consider it job done.

Cathy Newman presents The Cathy Newman Show on Sky News and Times Radio Drive on Fridays

[Further reading: Gisèle Pelicot is not your hero]