From Monday until December 20, 51 men are being tried in Avignon for aggravated rape. Dominique Pélicot is accused of having orchestrated and filmed the multiple rapes of his wife committed by men recruited on a dating site, over a period of ten years.
The trial of an unspeakable affair opens on Monday, September 2 at the Avignon courthouse. Until December 20, 51 men, including Dominique Pélicot, a septuagenarian, will be tried by the departmental criminal court for four months. “My client lived for almost fifty years with someone she thought she knew, but who betrayed her. She is angry. She is devastated.”confided to franceinfo Antoine Camus, one of Gisèle’s two lawyers, who also represents her daughter, Caroline Darian, and several members of the family.
To understand the ins and outs of this extraordinary case, we have to go back to September 12, 2020, when Dominique Pélicot was arrested for filming under the skirts of customers in a supermarket, which led to a search of his home. Until then, his wife Gisèle believed she was leading a quiet life with him in Mazan, at the foot of Mont Ventoux, in Vaucluse. The couple moved there in March 2013, to spend their retirement in the sun. In front of investigators, during her very first hearing, Gisèle described a caring and attentive husband, “a great guy”.
Her life is, however, punctuated by memory lapses, episodes of amnesia, and a great fatigue that often overwhelms her. These symptoms have even worsened since moving to the south of France. The sixty-year-old also notes that her absences do not occur when she stays with her children, in the Paris region. This state causes her a lot of anxiety, to the point that she no longer dares to take the train or the car, for fear of losing control.
In November 2020, when her husband was taken into custody for the second time, the Carpentras police gave her the most unthinkable and despicable explanation possible: they suspected the man she had been married to since 1973 of giving her Temesta, a powerful anxiolytic, without telling her, which left her lethargic. They explained to Gisèle that her husband was accused of having men come to their room to rape her, while he was filming these forced reports. For ten years, between 2011 and 2020, Gisèle thus suffered 92 rapes, investigators counted. Some of the perpetrators went to the couple’s home several times. Tried for “aggravated rape”, they face up to twenty years in prison.
Gisèle prepares for it as best she can. “She wants to cope, but she has been through extremely difficult times.”, confides Stéphane Babonneau, his second lawyer. “Her life was destroyed. In the first months after the police revelations, she was in a state of total incomprehension, in a period of shock.” For the purposes of the procedure, she had to confront the pornographic photos and videos in which she appears. The police found hundreds of them during searches. The pensioner was unable to recognize any of the men visible in these images.
Investigators have uncovered a recurring modus operandi: men were recruited via the site coco.gg, a chat room known for its sexual and illegal content, which was the source of ambushes set for homosexuals and was closed in June. “There is no discussion about the materiality of the facts, they are recognized and will be fully assumed during the trial”Dominique Pélicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, told franceinfo.
His client, a former real estate salesman, claims that everyone who came knew that his wife was on medication. According to him, everyone was well aware that they had sexual intercourse with a person who was asleep before their arrival and who could therefore not give their consent. However, he claims never to have received any money. They were also given instructions not to wake her: come without perfume or the smell of tobacco. “People would come in quietly, whisper, and if the victim moved an arm, they would leave.”explained Commissioner Jérémie Bosse Platière of the Avignon judicial police to AFP at the end of 2021, when the affair broke out, with the publication of an article in the Parisian.
Some people question Dominique Pélicot during online discussions transcribed in the file: “Do you still have it tested from time to time?” The rapes took place many times without a condom, “some lasted until six o’clock”underlines Stéphane Babonneau. “She doesn’t suspect anything?” asks another. The person concerned answers: “No, she puts it down to fatigue.” In an exchange found by investigators, Dominique Pélicot said he gave his wife up to ten pills in a single dose. Such a dose, well above the recommended dosage, can induce deep sleep and could have killed Gisèle, estimated a toxicology expert questioned as part of the investigation. According to information from the Primary Health Insurance Fund in September 2020, 450 pills were prescribed to Dominique Pélicot in the space of a single year.
The effects of the medication are not lost on Gisèle’s entourage. People close to the couple told the police about several moments when she didn’t seem like herself. Like this dinner in August 2018, during which she was completely elsewhere. Her husband had put her to bed, without her being able to say goodbye to her son and his wife, too exhausted. They had been shocked to see her in this state. Or that evening of December 30, 2019, when Gisèle and Dominique Pélicot received a couple of friends, who found her very tired, thin, and feared that she had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s.
His last moment of absence was in October 2020. Gisèle was returning from the Paris region and he had served her dinner at 4 p.m. A blackout, until the next morning. “Dominique Pélicot did not hesitate to continue his actions between his two police custody periods, the first having taken place in September and the second in November 2020″comments Stéphane Babonneau, who points out that she was also handed over to attackers on the evening of her birthday.
Gisele lived through years of medical wandering: she went to see several doctors and had a brain scan which revealed no abnormalities. She also consulted twice for gynaecological pain: tests detected significant inflammation of the cervix. One day when she complained of these pains, her husband retorted, in a joking tone: “But what do you do with your days?” she told investigators. “She lived for ten years with cognitive, neurological and gynecological disorders, which were never linked together, because it was not thought that this kind of thing was possible.”observes Stéphane Babonneau.
The work of the police has shown that 72 men took part in these acts, of which about twenty have not been identified. The accused in the trial are between 22 and 70 years old, almost all have a clean record, and are, for the most part, well integrated into society. Among them: a truck driver, a firefighter, a worker, a nurse, a contractor, a soldier, a journalist and a plumber.
Most of them admit the facts. Others, a minority, say they did not know that Gisèle was drugged and say they thought she was pretending to be asleep. “They were convinced, because that’s what Dominique Pélicot had told them, that the couple was in a sexual delirium, a fantasy, so it didn’t surprise them.”, explains Guillaume de Palma, who represents six defendants. “They deny any intention to rape”, insists the lawyer to franceinfo. This line of defense is “absolutely intolerable”believes Stéphane Babonneau, who assures that viewing the videos during the trial will invalidate this hypothesis.
His client is apprehensive about the confrontation with the accused. She is preparing for it, “because she feels that it is not her place to be ashamed, that she has no reason to hide”her lawyer emphasizes. After the facts were revealed, she left Vaucluse and lives out of sight, with the support of her three children and her grandchildren.
Gisèle had to start from scratch, but “she is now on the way to reconstruction”, assures Stéphane Babonneau. The one who believed she was suffering from a degenerative disease “has regained the perspective of a future: she is no longer in avoidance behavior, in the fear perpetual absences. She has regained control of her life and the past three years have allowed her to find the resources to prepare for this trial.”