“I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy.”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro on interviewing Gisèle Pelicot

by Nona Willis Aronowitz

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, co-host of the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” has covered harrowing circumstances all over the world for the Times, NPR, and the Associated Press. She’s reported on everything from the war in Iraq to the Arab Spring uprisings to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But her recent interview with Gisèle Pelicot, she told me, was one of the hardest she’s ever done. 

In our new series, The One Who Got the Story—where we catch up with a woman or non-binary journalist who was behind a major story of the week—we ask Garcia-Navarro how she prepared to interview a woman who endured some of the most shocking sexual abuse one can imagine. Pelicot, whose husband secretly drugged her and invited dozens of men into their home to rape her, made the extraordinary decision during the trial to waive her right to anonymity and allow media in the courtroom. And yet, she’d never truly told her story—until now. On the occasion of her new book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, Pelicot, 72, sat down with Garcia-Navarro for her first interview with an American outlet. It’s a sensitive yet unflinching conversation about pain and renewal. Here’s how Garcia-Navarro did it.

I noticed in the beginning of the interview, you asked Gisèle how she’d like you to refer to her rapist (she answered, “Monsieur Pelicot”), and that struck me as a question specifically tailored to someone who’s gone through trauma. What kind of preparation did you do before talking to her?

Because she had never spoken [to the media] outside of the confines of the trial, I didn’t know what I was going to get. Some victims of trauma really have trouble articulating their interior life, how they might have felt about things, their recollections of things. So we just prepared by being extremely careful. We made sure that where the interview was going to take place was going to be a very intimate environment. [The crew rented an apartment in Paris for the interview.] The majority of the crew was female. And then I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy and she had her voice. [Asking her what she’d like to call her abuser] was a way for me to signal that this was something she had agency over.

You were extremely careful, but you also didn’t shy away from the awful details. At one point you quoted a graphic passage of the book in which Gisèle notices that a crown in her mouth was loose, which she learned later was a result of, as she wrote, “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into [her] mouth.” Can you explain more about the reasoning to include this?

I know that there’s great concern about retraumatizing people and I understand that. I also do feel that sometimes, in trying to protect the victim, we do a disservice to the audience in not really showing the full scope of the horror that somebody went through. I asked for her permission [beforehand]; I said I was going to quote directly from the book, and she said that that was fine. I tried to be as sparing as I could. I just used one line, but it was a line that really haunted me. It said so much about the dynamic between her and her ex-husband, how he gaslit her, how he manipulated her…I felt it was really important for people to know.

You’ve reported amid conflict zones and revolutions, but how does this interview rank in terms of difficulty?

I mean, 100 out of 10. It’s one of the hardest interviews that I’ve done because I think it’s just really hard to get right. And if I did, I’m grateful for it. A consistent theme is that people said that they went in bracing for the worst and thinking this was just going to be a tour of horror. What they found instead was her beautiful ability to explain her own experience. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.