Gisèle Pélicot, 72, said “police saved my life” when they investigated her husband, Dominique Pélicot’s, computer in November 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket near their home in a village in southern France.

Police said they found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.

Recounting the moment in November 2020 when police first showed her images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated by her husband, Pélicot, who had been drugged to the point of unconsciousness, told the court: “My world fell apart. For me, everything was falling apart. Everything I had built up over 50 years.”