“In the excitement, I didn’t notice” that she wasn’t waking up, said one of the accused on Thursday at the trial in France of dozens of men accused of raping a woman drugged by her husband, who has become an icon in the fight against violence against women.
“The shots where the woman is sleeping don’t interest me at all. But I admit that I didn’t pay attention,” tried to explain Fabien S., a 39-year-old man with a troubled childhood, a former homeless person and an alcoholic since he was 14.
Like the fifty other men on trial in Avignon, in the south of France, since September 2 — with very different profiles — he faces 20 years in prison for having imposed sexual acts on Gisèle Pelicot, 71, whom her husband Dominique Pelicot admitted to having drugged for ten years in order to rape her and deliver her to men recruited on a controversial libertine site, coco.fr.
A major user of this site closed in June by the French justice system, Fabien S., incarcerated since his arrest in 2021, three years after the events, does not hide the fact that he has had many different sexual experiences.
In August 2018, after a few exchanges on coco.fr with Dominique Pelicot, he went to the couple’s house in Mazan, in the south-east of France, and found Gisèle Pelicot, apparently asleep.
“I was in the mood, I didn’t think she was drugged. I thought she was an accomplice,” he said, explaining that he stayed “a quarter of an hour” rather than running away, because he thought she “was going to wake up.”
“I acknowledge the facts, but I did not go to rape her, I was not aware” that she would be unconscious, he assured, while presenting his apologies to Gisèle Pelicot, seated in the room, for “having been able to believe that she was an accomplice”.
Dominique Pelicot maintained that Fabien S., like all the other men who came to their home, was “perfectly aware” that his wife would be drugged without his knowledge.