Paris: In a horrifying revelation, a man has gone to trial for allegedly drugging his 72-year-old wife and raping her, as well as recruiting dozens of strangers to come to his home and sexually assault the victim. In a case that has horrified France due to the mass scale of the crimes, it has come to light that the woman was so heavily sedated she was not aware of the abuse she had endured.
The defendant, identified as Dominique Pelicot, 71, allegedly crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication and mixed it into his wife Gisele's evening meal or in her wine at their home in Mazan, Provence, according to the Guardian. A father of three, he recruited men to rape and sexually abuse her from an online chatroom, where men fantasised about performing sexual acts on non-consenting partners.
Police identified at least 92 rapes committed by 72 men, of whom 50 have been identified and charged and are now standing trial alongside the husband. The victim, now 72, only learnt of the abuse in 2020 after being informed by police, BBC reported. Her lawyer Antoine Camus said the trial will be a "horrible ordeal" for her as it will be the first time she sees video evidence of the abuse.
The presiding judge, Roger Arata, announced that all hearings would be public, granting Gisele Pelicot her wish for “complete publicity until the end” of the court case. The victim was supported by her three children and requested for a public trial because one behind closed doors was "what her attackers would have wanted".
When did it start?
The horrifying sexual abuse is believed to have started in 2011. Investigators also found chats on a website in which Dominique P allegedly recruited strangers to come to their home and rape his wife. Most of the accused rapists, aged between 26 and 74, participated once but some took part as many as six times, prosecutors claimed.
Dominique Pelicot was arrested on November 2, 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in the local supermarket. Police found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 of images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.
He later confessed to the crime and admitted that he "put her to sleep", "offered her" and filmed the horrifying rapes. Health records reportedly show he obtained 450 sleeping pills in one year alone. The accused men recruited by her husband were instructed to avoid smelling of any kind of fragrance or cigarette smoke to avoid alerting his wife and to leave if she moved so much as an arm, investigators said.
Who are the accused?
Apart from Dominique Pelicot, who was also charged with a 1991 murder and rape of a 23-year-old estate agent named Sophie Narme and an attempted rape in 1999, the 50 others include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, a soldier, a firefighter and civil servant. Several of the accused have denied the charges, telling police they had no idea that Gisele was not a willing partner and accused Dominique of tricking them.
Gisele was reportedly drugged “almost to a state of coma”. Now divorced, her lawyers claimed Gisele believed he had an illness nobody could explain and consulted several doctors, always accompanied by her husband, who blamed her symptoms on tiredness after looking after their grandchildren. Her three children and other relatives suspected she had Alzheimer’s disease.
“The trial involves acts of extreme violence repeated over a period of ten years of so. Photographs will be circulated, videos will necessarily be viewed and it appears that publicity would be dangerous for public decency and would undermine the dignity of the individuals, both victims and defendants,” the prosecutor argued.
Dominique and the 50 other defendants face 20 years in prison if convicted of aggravated rape in the trial that is expected to last four months.
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