The 71-year-old man is accused of drugging his wife and inviting strangers to rape her for nearly ten years. He is due to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon and will appear until December before the Vaucluse departmental criminal court, alongside 50 other men.
His cell phone in hand, he walks the aisles of the shopping center. On this Saturday, September 12, 2020, still a summer day in Carpentras (Vaucluse), Dominique Pelicot tracks down three women, and films under their skirts. Suddenly, a security guard stops him. In his bag, this man, then aged 67, has slipped a second phone, his camcorder, a camera and condoms. Dominique Pelicot explains that he is “under the influence of impulses”, in the absence of his wife, who left for the Paris region a month ago to look after their grandchildren. He assures us: he has not “the habit of such actions.”
However, the exploitation of his computer equipment reveals a completely different reality. In his laptop, seized during a search of his home in the village of Mazan, at the foot of Mont Ventoux, investigators discovered a hundred videos and 300 photos, in which his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, is raped by dozens of men. They also found messages in which Dominique Pelicot clearly invites them to have sex with his wife, at home, while she is unconscious. Her husband admits to having drugged her without her knowledge with Temesta, a powerful anxiolytic. He hides tablets in a walking shoe, stored in the garage of the house. Investigators have just lifted the veil on an extraordinary case of chemical submission.
When investigators show Gisèle Pelicot the pornographic photos, she is shocked. She does not remember anything. Her husband is indicted on November 4, 2020 and placed in pretrial detention. The couple have since divorced. The psychological and psychiatric portrait of the main accused will be drawn up on Monday, September 9, by four experts, during his trial, which opened on September 2 before the Vaucluse departmental criminal court in Avignon. If the provisional hearing schedule is respected, Dominique Pelicot will give her first explanations on Tuesday afternoon. Fifty other men are also on trial, mainly for aggravated rape, until December 20.
Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot were 21 when they married in April 1973 in Indre, two years after they met.. “They were very young. It was my client’s first love, and I think it was the same for the gentleman,” Antoine Camus, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, told franceinfo. According to The New RepublicDominique Pelicot has “left college after 5th grade to start an apprenticeship in electricity”. He grew up in a “a family with a confused history and troubled bearings, marked by certain secrets” and an incestuous climate, the personality survey revealed.
The young couple settled in the Paris region and had three children. The youngest was born in 1986, thirteen years after the eldest, David Pelicot, who will testify on Monday. But the couple was struggling. During an interrogation, Dominique Pelicot said he had discovered that his wife had been unfaithful. He then left her for a few months for another woman before returning to the family home. A period that their youngest son, Florian Pelicot, who will also be questioned on Monday, “badly experienced” : if he describes to investigators a “normal childhood”, a father “always there for his children”, “rather polite and respectful” towards women, he also mentions “an exhibitionist side” at his parents’ house, who could “to be found naked in their house”. He also confides having understood, “growing up”, that his father was hiding money problems from his wife. Dominique Pelicot changed jobs several times and worked in particular as a real estate salesman. In 2001, the couple divorced for financial reasons, but continued to live together, before remarrying in 2007 under a more favorable regime.
Dominique Pelicot’s daily life as a father in the 1990s and 2000s reveals nothing. It was only after his arrest, years later, that investigators discovered his possible involvement in other cases. In the fall of 2022, the septuagenarian was indicted, despite his denials, for the rape and murder in 1991 of Sophie Narme, 23, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. The proceedings against him were the first initiated by the unit cold casesdedicated to serial or unsolved crimes and based in Nanterre. These are accusations “based solely on comparisons”, denounces to the AFP his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, who claims that her client “fell from the clouds”.
Dominique Pelicot is also indicted for an attempted rape in Seine-et-Marne in 1999. Backed into a corner – his DNA was found at the scene – he admits to the facts but denies having used a weapon. In these two cases, which have not yet been judged, the modus operandi is identical, with two women drugged with ether “during an apartment viewing, both victims being real estate agents”, specifies, at the beginning of 2023, the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office.
Until his conviction for filming under women’s skirts in Carpentras, Dominique Pelicot had no criminal record. On July 31, 2010, he was nevertheless caught in a shopping center in Seine-et-Marne for similar acts. He was then filming under skirts using a camera hidden in a pen. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine of 100 euros.
Shortly after, Dominique Pelicot began to frequent Coco.fr. It was, he says, on this website, known for its sexual and illegal content and now closed, that he got the idea to get sleeping pills to force his wife to perform sexual acts. The first photos found date from the night of July 23 to 24, 2011. Facing investigators, Gisèle Pelicot managed to recall waking up with a start at that time, while her husband was raping her.
From March 1, 2013, when they left the Paris region to live a peaceful retirement under the Mazan sun, Dominique Pelicot multiplied the invitations to rape. At the same time, Gisèle Pelicot felt many phases of forgetfulness and had gynecological after-effects, without suspecting the cause. Between 2011 and 2020, 92 sexual acts were recorded on her. Dominique Pelicot repeats that he is not the only one: at least three men, under pseudonyms, invited him to perform sexual acts on their sleeping wives. Investigators identified one of them, who is among the accused.
During questioning, in front of the investigating judge, Dominique Pelicot, who maintains never having received any money, explains having felt “pleasure of seeing one’s wife touched by someone else” and speaks of a “addiction preventing him from stopping.” The investigation carried out in Avignon highlights a “modeled sexuality” on a “two-faceted personality”.
“He presents himself to the world as having a relationship with ordinary sexuality, without having any particular attraction to it, but in the closed family environment, he does not respect the limits of the intimate and the corporeal.”
The personality investigatorduring instruction
A psychiatric expert detects in Dominique Pelicot a “paraphilic deviance”, that is to say an appetite for sexual acts on non-consenting persons, which notably mixes “voyeurism and somnophilia”. “His wife’s inertia allows him to increase his feeling of control”, emphasizes this psychiatrist. Another expert notes: ““extraordinary fantasies”. Gisele Pelicot “was used here as bait”, underlines the second psychiatrist, who describes her husband’s criminological dangerousness as:“high”.
“The psychological register is the most important aspect to explore”insists Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer. From the first hearings, his client admitted to having been raped himself at the age of 9, by a nurse, during a hospitalization. Added to this are two traumas. He first indicates having surprised his parents during sexual relations, at the ages of 11 and 13, with his mother in a submissive position. “He sees sex scenes that are not necessarily consensual,” points out Beatrice Zavarro. Then Dominique Pelicot reports having witnessed a gang rape when he was an apprentice on a construction site, at 14 years old. “His past is punctuated by very unpleasant elements, which have disturbed him”argues his lawyer to franceinfo.
Dominique Pelicot has spoken to his children only about the rape he says he suffered when he was younger. But in the eyes of his daughter, Caroline Darian, he “plays the victim”. The forty-year-old, now committed to raising public awareness of the dangers of chemical submission, does not believe in “this story”. In the hearing, she states that her father is a “a person who lies a lot.” She was very close to him before the affair was revealed. Now she calls him her “father”. “I loved my father. I loved the image of the man I thought I knew. The image of this healthy, caring, considerate man”, she said in court on Friday, before which she recounted the “cataclysm” suffered by his family.
Caroline Darian is also a victim: two photos of her, unconscious and in her underwear, were found on Dominique Pelicot’s computer. These are facts for which he is also being tried, as is the case for taking photos of his two stepdaughters, naked in their bathrooms, using hidden cameras. His grandchildren see him as an affectionate grandfather, while reporting disturbing moments. One of his granddaughters saw him taking photos of her and her sister during a midnight swim in the pool.
“It’s a devastated family but they are standing firm and determined to stick together.”observes their lawyer. Antoine Camus emphasizes that they are mainly waiting for answers to their questions. Caroline Darian wonders during her hearing: “How do you rebuild yourself from ashes? When you know that your father is probably one of the biggest sexual predators of the last twenty years?” “LThe psychotherapy sessions allow him to move forward on the question of why”Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer assures in response. And to promise: “There will be a start of a response that he will communicate to the court when the time comes.”