The Vaucluse criminal court, which has been trying a septuagenarian in France since September accused of raping and having his wife raped by strangers recruited on the Internet, finally authorized on Friday the broadcast of videos and photos of the facts in the presence of the press and of the public.
In a spectacular turnaround criticized by many defense lawyers, the president of the court, Roger Arata, specified that the broadcast of these images would be preceded by an “announcement allowing sensitive people and minors to leave the room”.
Videos concerning some of the accused are to be shown this Friday afternoon.
After a debate of almost two hours followed by a long deliberation, the court reversed the decision of its president and followed the attorney general who ruled on Friday in favor of lifting the closed session on the images.
Lawyers for the victim, Gisèle Pelicot, called the decision a “victory.”
“But a victory in a fight that should not have been fought,” said Me Stéphane Babonneau, according to whom French law has granted victims of rape for more than 40 years the right to decide whether or not to publicize the debates.
The broadcast of these images, preceded by an announcement, will not be “systematic”, specified Mr. Arata, and will only take place in cases “strictly necessary for the manifestation of the truth”, at the request of the ‘one of the parties.
Since the start of the trial on September 2 in Avignon, the hearing room has been reserved for the court, the parties and the press, with the public in an adjoining broadcast room.
On September 20, at the end of the third week of the trial, President Arata banned the broadcast of the images to the public and the press, explaining that they were “indecent and shocking” and therefore to be reserved only for the parties to the trial. trials and magistrates.
Make “the thesis of an accidental rape collapse”
Five days later, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, however, once again called for the lifting of these restrictions, in the name of the fight that she is now waging against sexual violence.
It was on their written conclusions that the parties debated at length before the court on Friday morning.
Mme Pelicot, raped for ten years by her husband and by dozens of men whom he had contacted on the Internet, after he had drugged her with anxiolytics, had opposed the closed session since the beginning of the trial on September 2.
For M’s lawyersme Pelicot, full publicity of the debates, with photos and videos, is important.
“For Gisèle Pelicot, it is too late, the damage is done”, according to Me Stéphane Babonneau. “But if these same debates, through their publicity, prevent other women from having to go through that, then she will find meaning in her suffering. »
For his other lawyer, Me Antoine Camus, these videos “collapse the thesis of an accidental rape”.
“They show that these are rapes by opportunity and, beyond that, it was a question of degrading, humiliating, dirtying, it was in reality a question of hatred of women. No one denounced the facts, everyone contributed in their own small way to this banality of rape, to this banality of evil,” added M.e Camus.
Several lawyers for the 50 co-defendants in this extraordinary trial, however, fiercely opposed the presence of the public and the press.
“Justice does not need that to pass, what is the point of these nauseating projections? We were treated to a screening on a first case. Wasn’t one movie enough? » thus pleaded Me Olivier Lantelme.
“We do not have to pay from a popular tribunal in the name of the French people to a tribunal of the crowd,” thundered Me Paul-Roger Gontard.