A conversation around A Hymn to Life, the memoir by Gisèle Pelicot, who was drugged and raped by her husband and dozens of other men, in a case that stunned France and the world. Journalists Catherine Porter, Anne-Sophie Moreau and Valentine Faure, together with translator Natasha Lehrer, will examine the broader questions Pelicot’s case raises about violence against women, justice, and public reckoning in France and beyond. Drawing on courtroom reporting, literary translation, philosophy, and cultural criticism, the panel will explore how such cases are narrated, understood, and remembered—and what they reveal about the status of women today.
About the speakers:
Catherine Porter is an international correspondent for the New York Times based in Paris. A foreign correspondent for the past 14 years, Ms. Porter is an expert on Haiti, having reported on the country since the devastating earthquake in 2010. Her book about the experience, entitled “A Girl Named Lovely,” was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. She was part of a team in 2022 that won the George Polk award for their reporting on the assassination of former Haitian president Jovenel Moïse and she led The Times’ five-part investigation into the Haitian independence debt, which won the prestigious Hillman Prize in 2023. Based in Paris since 2022, she was one of a handful of foreign journalists who covered the Pelicot trial since the day it opened, sure it would spark existential discussions in France. Thankfully, she was right.
Anne-Sophie Moreau is a French journalist and editor-in-chief at Philosophie Magazine. She is the author of Fermentations (Le Seuil, 2025), a philosophical inquiry about microbes and politics. She addresses social and moral issues in her essays and articles.
Valentine Faure is a French journalist who works for the Ideas section of Le Monde. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. She is the author of Quand je me suis relevée j’ai pris mon fusil (Grasset, 2018), focusing on a widely publicized case in France to examine female counter-violence—its history, moral dimensions, and repression.
Natasha Lehrer’s essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, Observer, Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, Frieze and other journals. She has translated over two dozen books. In 2016 she won the Scott Moncrieff translation prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. Her translation of Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger was shortlisted for 2025 National Book Award for translated literature and for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Greg Barrios Book in Translation prize. She teaches at the University of Oxford translation summer school and is regularly invited to speak at universities in France and the United States.
