‘You may trust your husband but I don’t’: Gisele Pelicot case shows why medical staff should test for STDs

A French woman struggled to figure out what caused a mysterious illness that turned out to be a combination of crushed antidepressants and four STDs — her ex-husband essentially gave her both. The ongoing court case against him has inspired a rallying cry online for every woman to get tested, Kelly Rissman reports

Gisele Pelicot exits the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, after her ex-husband admitted in court that for nearly a decade, he repeatedly drugged his unwitting wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she lay unconscious. (AP Photo/Diane Jantet) (AP)

The devastating case of Gisele Pelicot — a French woman raped while unconscious by dozens of strange men that her husband recruited for nearly a decade — has sparked an outcry on social media for women to check for sexually transmitted diseases, no matter their relationship status.

The 72-year-old told the Avignon, France court about how her now-ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, 71, secretly drugged her and arranged for more than 80 strangers to rape her over nine years, from 2011 to 2020. Dominique admitted to the mass rape and asked for foregiveness, while 50 of the suspected rapists are also standing trial.

Gisele revealed that she had sought medical care after experiencing a wide range of concerning symptoms, including gynecological issues, hair loss, and, most alarming for her, memory lapses.

She feared she was developing Alzheimer’s, and even saw a specialist at her husband’s encouragement. Instead, the memory loss came from her husband slipping drugs into her drinks.

Gisele Pelicot exits the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, after her ex-husband admitted in court that for nearly a decade, he repeatedly drugged his unwitting wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she lay unconscious. (AP Photo/Diane Jantet) (AP)

As for the gynecological symptoms, many of the men who raped her did not wear condoms. One HIV-positive man is alleged to have raped her six times. She did not contract HIV but was later diagnosed with no fewer than four sexually transmitted diseases.

“They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag,” Gisele testified.

Outraged by the horrifying stories from Pelicot’s trial, social media influencer Jennifer Lee posted a now-viral TikTok warning women to get screened for STDs regularly, no matter your relationship status, using her own experience as a cautionary tale.

“The Gisele Pelicot case should serve as a reminder for every single woman to get tested regularly. It does not matter if you’re in a committed relationship. The same thing happened to me,” she says in the video, which has been liked over 43,000 times.

The 30-year-old Seattle native told The Independent that she had fallen “madly in love” with an Australian man she had met at a hostel while vacationing to Banff in December 2019. They reconnected in early 2023 and after a short stint dating long-distance, and decided to become exclusive, going on a romantic trip to Vancouver in April 2023.

Still going strong months later, Lee flew to Australia to visit him that June. When they tried to have sex, Lee knew something wasn’t right. It was “so painful that I actually felt like I was being ripped open from the inside…like shards of glass in my like in my vaginal canal,” she recalled.

Jennifer Lee posing near Lake Louise in Canada in 2023 (Jennifer Lee)

Lee recalled asking him before they slept together in Vancouver whether he had been STD tested; he replied that he was “clean,” according to a police report. But the first night she arrived in Australia, she found herself unable to sleep, keeled over in pain, bleeding profusely — and regretting not asking for more proof.

“Paranoid” about avoiding STDs, Lee said she typically requires her partners to show her a “printout from their doctor’s office of their negative test results” — but this one time she didn’t make “because I was so in love with him.”

The next day, her boyfriend took her to a doctor who, Lee recalled, insisted that she didn’t need a STD test because she was in a monogamous relationship. The doctor concluded that either she was experiencing period pain or inflammation from sex and advised her to come back after some time had passed, since the pain had just started the night before.

Her boyfriend then dropped her off at his house before running an “errand,” according to the police report. He came back bearing bad news, Lee says, telling her “turns out I wasn’t clean,” the report adds. Lee then tested positive for two STDs: chlamydia and Mycoplasma genitalium. The latter is caused by a bacteria and can manifest as bleeding between periods, pain or bleeding after sex, a burning sensation when peeing, and discharge, according to the CDC.

“So for two months, I was sick without knowing it,” she said.

Lee was put on an antibiotics regimen, but she had been infected for so long that she wound up hospitalized. When she was finally released from the hospital, her body had finally overcome the infection but other, devastating symptoms lingered, putting her in a wheelchair.

Jennifer Lee in the hospital in July 2023 after discovering she was sick with two STDs (Jennifer Lee)

Lee wrote in the police report that she’d developed supraventricular tachycardia, a type of heart arrhythmia, as a result of the prolonged infections.It took her until March — nine months after she contracted the STDs — before she able to walk again without support, if only just for 10 minutes, says Lee.

Lee isn’t alone. Her TikTok has sparked many others to comment that they, too, had suffered horrific health maladies after belatedly discovering that they had an STD after not being tested because they were in a monogamous relationship.

“I didn’t find out until I was very pregnant,” wrote one TikToker about her delayed diagnosis. “Almost killed me and my daughter and disabled her for life.”

Another wrote: “My ex-fiance gave me two of them also and now I’m infertile because I festered and then I was misdiagnosed and treated seven times for a UTI.”

Yet another commented that she found out while she was pregnant and had suffered a “hard pregnancy. We almost died. He was born [premature.]”

Others remarked on their doctors’ views on testing.The CDC recommends women be tested for gonorrhea and chlamydia annually, but according to some TikTokers, some physicians have shied away from testing if the patient is in a monogamous relationship.

“My [doctor] told me I didn’t need an STI test because I’m in a committed relationship but I told her I would rather be safe than sorry,” one user commented.

One user said doctors “always looked at me weird” when she’d ask for a STD screening while in a long-term monogamous relationship.

But one said that her OBGYN insists on her patients getting tested, touting the mantra: “You may trust your husband but I don’t.”

Lee concurred, saying: “It should be the responsibility of your doctors to make sure that’s happening at a regular interval.”

Jennifer Lee celebrates one year after being released from the hospital after battling two severe infections (Jennifer Lee)

Lee broke up with her boyfriend that November.

But nearly a year later, she’s not exactly through with him. She reported the incident to police in Australia, stating that she only consented to have sex with him because “she was under the impression that he has tested for STD and cleared,” the report says.

Pelicot’s case, which is still ongoing,“ripped open my ability to continue walking in silence,” said Lee, allowing her to speak publicly about her experiences (including that she’s a survivor of molestation) and file the report with law enforcement.

“The level of violation that happened to her is so vastly more than what happened to me. But I cannot look at that and not draw ties,” she continued. “This case just horrified me to my core.”

And she urged people to get checked for STDs — and for medical professionals to insist on it. “Every woman, no matter the status of their relationship, should be being tested,” Lee said.