For the first time, the main victim in the Mazan serial rape trial, Gisèle Pelicot, lost her temper on Wednesday, expressing her feelings of humiliation in the face of the insinuations of certain lawyers about the rapes she suffered, telling them: “Rape is rape!”
“Since I arrived in this courtroom, I feel humiliated. I am called an alcoholic, that I put myself in such a state of drunkenness that I am an accomplice of Mr. Pelicot,” her ex-husband who handed her over to men after drugging her, she stated before the criminal court of Vaucluse, in Avignon.
“It’s so humiliating and degrading to hear this!” said the 72-year-old woman, who is said to have been the victim of some 200 rapes, 92 of which were committed by 50 co-defendants who have been on trial since September 2 alongside Dominique Pelicot.
It’s insulting and I understand that rape victims don’t file complaints because we go through a process of venting where we try to insult the victims. And in the meantime, the others [accusés] are very quiet behind!
At the request of defense lawyers, 27 photos of her taken without her knowledge were released — a first since the trial began — supposedly proving that their clients may have been “deceived” into thinking they were attracted to her husband, who claimed to be consenting. Which made Gisèle Pelicot lose her temper.
“Between ‘I baited’, ‘I pretended’, ‘I was drunk’, ‘I was an accomplice’, now they are trying to distribute photos taken by Mr. Pelicot to make me look guilty. Who is the guilty person in this courtroom?” she said.
“Insulting” insinuations
“It’s insulting and I understand that rape victims don’t file complaints because we go through a process of venting where we try to insult the victims. And in the meantime, the others [accusés] are very quiet behind!”
Dominique Pelicot, her ex-husband, is on trial for drugging her in order to rape her and have her raped by dozens of men recruited on the Internet, some of whom are also on trial in Avignon.
The atmosphere in the courtroom became very tense between the civil parties and the defence after the broadcast of these images.
“When you receive photos like these, you can say that this is a woman who likes sexual games,” said defense lawyer Nadia El Bouroumi.
“I am very surprised by these photos which were taken without my knowledge,” replied M.me Pelicot.
Dominique Pelicot confirmed that “all of these photos were taken without his knowledge.” “And in no case were they posted on the Internet to bait. It was for my personal pleasure.”
“Rape and rape”
The “50 [accusés] behind did not ask the question [du consentement] “What are these men, are they degenerates or what?” thundered Gisèle Pelicot. “Not for a second did I give my consent to Mr. Pelicot or to these men who are behind it.”
“There is no such thing as ‘rape and rape’. Rape is rape,” M.me Pelicot, referring to the comments of a lawyer who had considered that there was “rape and rape”, appearing to minimize the real intention of some of the accused, many of whom claim to have thought they were participating in a sexual game of a libertine couple.
“I explained that there was rape in its media and legal meaning. If the remarks hurt you, could shock you, I am sorry. That was not my intention. My intention was to recall the rules of law,” replied the lawyer Guillaume De Palma.
Videos should soon be shown, this time at the request of the civil parties, to prove, on the contrary, Gisèle Pelicot’s non-consent.
“I was in a state of coma and the videos that we are going to broadcast will be able to attest to this.” Even “the experts were shocked by these videos, and they are men,” she explained.
On Wednesday morning, the first of the 50 other co-defendants, Jean-Pierre M., 63, also admitted to being “a rapist”, demanding a “harsh punishment”.
He is the only one not to be prosecuted for sexual assaults on Gisèle Pelicot, but on his own wife on whom he had modeled the same criminal scenario developed by Dominique Pelicot.
The two men had met on the website Coco.fr (since closed). The main accused in the Mazan rapes had first suggested that he “rape” Gisèle “several times”. But “I refused”, said Jean-Pierre M., who said he had suffered sexual violence as a child.
When asked whether Dominique Pelicot had made it clear to him that Gisèle would be “drugged and that he was looking for a man for his sleeping and medicated wife”, he replied in the affirmative, undermining an argument regularly put forward by defence lawyers, according to which their clients had not been informed of this procedure.