'I lost months of memories ... all for his sexual benefit'

The case of Gisele Pelicot, whose husband drugged her and invited more than 50 men to rape her as she lay unconscious, has shocked France. A survivors’ group set up by Gisele’s daughter suggests there could be hundreds of women who are victims of the same crime... Zoe Beaty reports

- Zoe Beaty

In the beginning, it was simply euphoria. She felt it almost immediately: a sudden surge of energy, an intense, pure happiness. Love? Possibly. Jane, who is using a pseudonym, had never felt anything like it before. For months prior she’d been in a sluggish depression, sleeping too much and, despite her best efforts, finding little pleasure in anything. The date – her first with John* – was a turning point.

Neither wanted the night to end, certainly not Jane. And so their first date spilled over into the following day, and the day after that, and the day after that. For two weeks this feeling – soaring pleasure – kept coming. Suddenly, in this bubble with John, her low mood evaporated, she was excited, fizzing – she barely needed more than four hours’ sleep per night. “We talked about marriage, about children, our life goals,” says Jane.

“John was a childhood friend I happened to reconnect with on Tinder. I’d known him for years and I was 31; we were at that age when things move faster. I’d been single for a while; I thought God had finally answered my prayers. I trusted him implicitly. I had no idea.”

Five years later, Jane is still wrestling with what came next. It was euphoria she was experiencing, she explains, but now she knows it wasn’t the first rush of love. Rather, she had been systematically drugged – and, she believes, abused – over the course of her year-long relationship.

“I have a six-month period where I have basically no memory,” she explains. Later she found out her boyfriend was consistently spiking her drinks with stimulants like cocaine, MDMA and, at least once, fentanyl, which led her to become disinhibited and lose consciousness. “It was all for his sexual benefit,” says Jane. “He did it so that he could do the things that I didn’t want to do.”