Summit Books will publish Paris-based journalist and author Monique El-Faizy’s In This Dark Room: Secrets, Shame, and Reckoning at a French Trial, with an on-sale date to be announced at a later date. Judy Clain acquired North American rights to the book from Larry Weissman of Larry Weisman Literary.
Summit billed In This Dark Room as “a gripping journalistic account of the infamous 2024 rape trial” that ended on December 19 with a guilty verdict for Dominique Pelicot, the 72-year-old Provençal man who admitted to drugging his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and the many strangers he had met on the internet and invited to force themselves on her while he filmed the assaults. The book, the publisher added, is “an exploration of the banality of evil and a fascinating portrait of both the woman who stood up and the tormentors whom she forced to sit in shame for their crimes.”
In a statement following the return of the guilty verdict, El-Faizy said: “Gisèle Pelicot’s remarkable bravery paid off today. The 51 guilty verdicts handed down in Avignon represent justice for her and send a clear signal that sex without consent is rape. But sending these men to prison is not enough in itself. For real change to happen, France must have a serious reckoning and take concrete steps to change the societal attitudes that brought us here in the first place. There is still a lot of work to be done.”
El-Faizy has written for such publications as the Financial Times, France 24, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is the coauthor, with fellow investigative journalist Barry Levine, of All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, published by Hachette, which PW's review called, “a thorough and disturbing rundown of President Trump’s attitudes toward and interactions with women.” El-Faizy’s 2006 book God and Country: How Evangelicals Have Become America’s New Mainstream, published by Bloomsbury, received a starred review from PW, which called it a “snapshot of American evangelicalism” and “a must-read for students of American religion.”
