When the Victim Becomes the Survivor

 A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, Feb. 2026
Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy, Nov. 2025
Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Oct. 2025

Sexual violence so extreme it confounds imagination is the subject of two of the best-selling books on the planet. Women are hungry for such stories, perhaps, because there is hardly a woman alive who does not think:  “That could have been me.” Or, “That might have been my daughter,” raped in war, while walking down the street, drugged on a date, in her marriage bed, gay, straight, or trans, in a bathroom, alley or taxi somewhere, after dinner at a billionaire’s Manhattan townhouse. 

Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre’s ghostwritten autobiography of being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, was bought by Knopf in a bidding war for an undisclosed six-figure advance. It sold a million copies in the first two months of release. Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, written in the aftermath of a decade of being drugged by her husband and raped by men he invited into their bedroom, was published worldwide in 28 languages this April. No literary writer can claim such interest. The two books are publishing phenomena made from societal nightmares. 

A more modest-selling rape book is Jen Percy’s Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation. In an empathic and poetic voice, Percy explores physical reactions to sexual violations. She explains why so many women freeze under attack just as animals do, hoping their attackers will lose interest in a carcass that seems dead. She tells how women dissociate and watch their frozen body being raped from a safe place on the ceiling. She tells the harrowing stories of three black women, incarcerated for decades after they killed their serial abusers in moments of terrified fury.  

For Virginia Giuffre, as for the three imprisoned women in Percy’s book, sexual abuse began at home in childhood, not by strangers but by male relatives. Giuffre’s father fingered her in bed and then invited a close friend to do the same. Rather than believe her story, her mother sent her to a reform school. 

For Gisele Pelicot rape began in the fifth decade of what she thought a happy marriage. She was a grandmother in her sixties, supposedly unattractive to men, when her husband began slipping enough   Lorazepam into her mashed potatoes and drinks that she passed out. For years, he invited local perverts into their bedroom. Some were in their twenties, some married, a brave firefighter among them. They penetrated the mouth, vagina, anus of the woman frozen as if dead on her own bed, while her husband filmed their rapes.  

These books ask the unanswered questions. Why is rape desirable to so many men? What is the pleasure of having sex with children? Of penetrating an unconscious woman? Why is turning a female into a thing a turn on? Most rapists and pedophiles are never arrested, fewer go to trial. Jeffery Epstein’s first arrest for “soliciting sex with a minor” was treated so leniently he was allowed to leave the county jail on “work release”; he continued to rape girls with his ankle bracelet on. 

If Dominque Pelicot had not been arrested for “upskirting” (filming up the skirts of three women) in the supermarket where he and his wife shopped, and where he sometimes scheduled “viewings” for prospective rapists of Gisele pushing her shopping cart, she most likely would have died from an unintentional overdose. Instead, local police arrested him for a sexual misdemeanor, seized his computer and found the rape films he made.

When the police officer first showed Gisele photographs of her limp body being entered by a stranger, she did not recognize herself. “But, look, those are your bedside lamps,” the officer had to say.  

Yet, Gisele Pelicot’s harrowing abuse was unique in two ways not usually applicable to raped women. She remembers absolutely nothing of the many dozens of assaults on her drugged body while the police had irrefutable evidence of serial rape.  At trial, Dominic Pelicot received the longest allowable sentence, 20 years. He is in his 70s and presumably will die in prison. 

Few women are as “lucky,” if that term applies. Most remember in vivid detail what happened as they lay frozen and terrified. Police questioning is often hostile. Very few rape cases ever go to trial. Raped women often suffer for years from a litany of debilitating physical and psychological symptoms, many of which Percy chronicles. In the aftermath of rape, all women, including Pelicot, find their lives drastically changed.

Pelicot thought she was edging toward dementia because of her frequent memory lapses. She feared for her physical health because of messy vaginal discharges. The neurologists and gynecologists she visited, with her husband, attributed these symptoms to neurosis. She was just an aging woman falling predictably apart. 

Once Dominic is in jail, Pelicot begins to come to terms with the hideous reality she had not known existed. Shocked and bereaved, she enters a long mourning process. She moves to an island and begins to walk miles and miles with her dog, along the seashore and through woods, walking her way through memories of the past she thought she lived, walking herself into a new life. Three years after Dominque’s arrest, friends introduce her to a recent widower, a man who cared for his ailing wife. They fall in love and marry. Four years later, she is strong enough to ask that the trial of her abusers be open to the press and public.  It becomes a national, then international event. Every morning a growing crowd of women cheers Gisele Pelicot as she walks to court, followed by her lawyers and her new husband. “Shame must change sides” is their collective mantra and becomes the subtitle of her autobiography. 

Because she does not remember, she can go on to write a story of her life that barely mentions rape. Her greatest trauma is the death of her loving mother when she was only nine and her gentle father’s remarriage to a cold stepmother.

Dominque Pelicot, on the other hand, had an abusive tyrannical father; perhaps this early violence explains his later actions, she wonders. They marry at 19. Gisele is convinced that they have found true love. She starts work as a temporary employee, and then she is hired full-time. Over the years, she ascends to an executive secretarial position, even as she bears three children. Dominque tries to make a living as an electrician, and then becomes an unsuccessful real estate agent. After he is arrested, he will also be convicted of an earlier unsolved rape of a woman to whom he was showing an apartment. It’s possible he murdered another rape victim, but there is not enough evidence to convict. Still, Gisele has no hint. When a close friend tries to tell her she is married to man whose true nature she does not know, Gisele stops speaking to her. Dominique is frequently out of work but because of her success, they join the French middle class. Along the way, Gisele has an affair with a co-worker. They live apart, then reunite. They retire to the town of Mazan in the South of France and rent a house with a swimming pool so that the children and grandchildren will visit often. Gisele writes of many happy times with their family. Although a daughter-in-law finds Dominique masturbating with the door open and he suggests to a grandson that they play doctor, these appear as isolated acts. 

Dominique Pelicot became a sexual monster, but he lived a nondescript life. He had no power in the world except over his wife, and perhaps, his daughter, who is convinced he raped her, too, based on the evidence of two photographs he took of her in sweatshirt and underpants she does not recognize as hers.  His co-conspirators were ordinary, suburban perverts, easy to convict.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre remembered each assault, beginning with her father, in her own bed when she was a child. Rather than believe her, her mother sent her to a reform school from which, Jenna, as she was called, ran away. The man who offered her a ride to Miami, brutally raped her on the way. She escaped again. Sitting alone on a curb her first trafficker, Ron Eppinger, stopped his Cadillac and told her to get in. A supposed model agent, he offered to “take care of her”. He bought her thongs and sexy bras; took her to his home, introduced her to his other girls, and took her to his bed. She was 15 years old. 

Two years later, living again at home, her father got her a job as a towel girl in the spa at Donald Trump’s Ma-a-Lago. She was reading a book on massage, when Ghislaine Maxwell spotted her, pretty and young. She brought her to Jeffrey Epstein’s nearby house to give him a massage, then sex. With Epstein-Maxwell, Jenna found a family of sorts. Sometimes when the day’s sex work was done, the three of them would cuddle on the couch, eat popcorn and watch television. Epstein-Maxwell took Jenna with them to London and introduced her to Prince Andrew. Gishlaine instructed her to do with him what she did with Jeffery. Among the others she serviced is an unnamed former prime minister, believed to be Israel’s Ehud Barak, who left her bloodied from anal sex; and the Harvard lawyer, Allen Dershowitz. 

Virginia Roberts escaped sexual bondage, again, at age nineteen by traveling to Thailand, on Epstein-Maxwell’s dime, to pursue her dream of becoming a practitioner of Thai massage. Maxwell booked her into a nice hotel with enough money to pay for her Xanax addiction. “Have a nice life,” Epstein said when she called to tell him she was never coming back. Four weeks into the eight-week course, she went out drinking with a friend. She met a handsome martial arts practitioner, Robbie Giuffre. Ten days later, they were married by a Tibetan monk. The couple moved to Australia. Soon, she became the mother of two sons. She said the birth of her third child, a daughter, made her realize she must go public with her story to protect other women from sexual abuse.  

But, if Virginia Roberts Giuffre has become the hero of the Epstein survivor movement, she is also its greatest (known) victim. The publishing industry that produced Nobody’s Girl, might be counted as her last abuser. Pelicot’s and Percy’s books are memorable for their empathy for self and others. Nobody’s Girl, written in an as told to a ghostwriter, first person, undistinguished, voice hides the truth about Giuffre’s increasingly violent marriage and her life-long addiction to drugs.

The book begins with her panic attack at the Louvre, on a trip to France to testify against the model-agent, sex-trafficker, Jean Luc Brunel. Behind closed doors, she “answered the most dehumanizing questions you can imagine.” She endured other brutal depositions and won settlements in undisclosed amounts from the Epstein estate, the former prince’s Royal family and Dershowitz, but without any admission of their guilt. Virginia Giuffre was unraveling as fast as her ghostwriter could narrate their fabricated story of Giuffre as the warrior-survivor.

In hospital to treat an infection, she fell and broke her neck. Her increasing physical problems exacerbated her depression. Hospitalized again, she swallowed 240 painkillers she had smuggled in. Revived with Narcan; she survived. “I vowed to get better, once and for all,” she told her ghostwriter, Amy Wallace, who did not pause her work on the final manuscript despite Giuffre’s seriously suicidal state. Too ill to travel across the ocean to testify at Maxwell’s trial, Giuffre’s victim’s statement became a headline in the Daily Mail. Then, Robbie received custody of their children with a restraining order against her. 

As Nobody’s Girl neared publication, Giuffre wrote a note to her ghostwriter and to her longtime publicist that reads like one final plea for help that would not be heard: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that “Nobody’s Girl” is still released.”—which, of course, it has been, literally over Giuffre’s dead body. 

Karen Malpede is a playwright and author of the memoir, Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths.