Giselle Bellico: Newsnight interview review – You can’t help but look in admiration at her strength and grace | television

IIt is difficult to judge an interview with Giselle Bellicot in ordinary terms. Let’s start with the easy part: Victoria Derbyshire is the perfect interviewer. The Newsnight co-presenter has the kind of steely warmth that goes well with the innate dignity of Mrs Bellicott – as she is called all the time – as they walk unflinchingly through her terrible story.

Her “descent into hell” began on November 2, 2020, when local police summoned her and her husband, Dominique Bellicot, to the station. They believe it is related to his recent arrest for secretly taking photos up the skirts of three women in a supermarket. It wasn’t. In the course of this investigation, they found on his laptop thousands and thousands of videos and photos accumulated over a decade of his wife unconscious and being raped by strangers.

They showed Mrs. Bellicott a set of pictures. She barely recognized herself, was wearing underwear she didn’t own, and didn’t recognize men. “Something exploded inside me,” she told Derbyshire. She did not name what she saw until several hours later, when she was home and told a friend: “Dominic raped me and raped me.” She was raped by at least 70 men. They were drawn – as Derbyshire points out in an on-camera clip at the top of the program, as the names of convicts fill the screen – from within a 30-mile radius of their home in Mazan, the pretty little Provençal town where they had retired a few years earlier. Fifty-two people – as well as Ms Bellicott’s husband – were identified by police, and after a three-month trial, most were found guilty of aggravated rape, two of sexual assault and two of attempted rape. Dominic received the maximum sentence of 20 years.

Derbyshire’s questioning is not explicit, but it is clear and direct. That would be an insult to Mrs. Bellicott and her proven ability to survive trauma that would be unimaginable to be anything else. She is known to have waived her right to anonymity on the grounds that “shame must change.” It does not belong to the rape victim but to the rapists. It’s often said that she became a feminist icon as a result, but it’s actually more specific than that. It has become a repository of hope and – although it has become a devalued word in the age of Instagram – it is an inspiration to all women around the world, including rape victims who have not (yet) pressed charges, or who belong to the estimated 30% of females who have experienced physical and/or sexual violence, overwhelmingly at the hands of males (in March 2025, the Office for National Statistics said 98% of victims reported their attacker was male).

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it would be good to hear Ms Bellicott tell Derbyshire how her reactions and thinking on the issue of anonymity have evolved. At first, she wanted the usual closed hearing. “I definitely didn’t want anyone to see me,” she says, as she felt like “the dirty stain will stay with you for life.” But the four years she “carried this shame” between the discovery of her abuse and the trial gave her time to think and come to the conclusion that such “self-inflicted pain… meant that the victims were being punished twice. I thought that if I could overcome it, all victims could do it too. I’m sure of it. They shouldn’t lose confidence.”

Mrs. Pellicott sits, completely calm, effortlessly poised, even when she sometimes sheds tears, and even when she explains how and why her husband had to mix muscle relaxants with the tranquilizers he gave her so that she would “lax and expand” enough so that the next day she wouldn’t feel pain because of what the men did to her non-consenting body (and realize that something was wrong), Mrs. Pellicott has an extraordinary personality. We can only admire her strength and grace, and hope very much that she can maintain a closeness with her daughter Caroline – another suspected victim of Dominic’s, who is also under investigation for the attempted rape of one woman in 1999 (which he admitted) and the murder of another in 1991, which Dominic denies.

But behind every examination of the Bellicott case there lurks a question. How many people are out there reading or watching or listening not in abject horror but in thrall? How many men think: “I wish, I wish…” or “I can, I can…”? Is this a pathological or realistic question to ask? Last month, former Conservative councilor Philip Young pleaded guilty to nearly 50 charges of drugging, raping and sexually assaulting his ex-wife, Joan, for which she also waived anonymity. Another man pleaded guilty to raping her as well. It’s hard not to think about the 30 mile radius around you and wonder.