Since Monday, 51 men have been sitting in the dock at the Avignon Criminal Court in a case that has scandalized France, the most important case related to chemical submission in the country’s judicial history. Dominique Pélicot, 71, is accused of drugging his wife several times so that she would be raped by men with whom her husband had been in contact on the Internet; facts that the accused admitted to the police upon his arrest.
The investigation began on September 12, 2020, when officers went to a supermarket in Carpentras (near Avignon). Dominique Pélicot had been arrested by security officers after being discovered in the corridors recording with a mobile phone under the skirts of several customers. Investigators then seized a laptop at his home in which they discovered a folder titled “Abuse”. It contained more than 20,000 photos and videos, labeled with a date, a name or nickname and a title.
Dominique Pélicot contacted men via a website and invited them to his home and bedroom. There, they found his unconscious wife, whom he had previously incapacitated with a dose of a powerful anxiolytic that he had given her at dinner. He modus operandi The plan included strict instructions that Pélicot’s visitors had to follow: not to wear perfume or smell of tobacco, to leave the car in a parking lot near the house and walk the rest of the way, and to warm their hands on the radiator so that the cold would not wake their wife.
Investigators counted 92 rapes between July 2011 and October 2020, committed by more than 80 men. The first dates back to 2011, when the couple still lived in the Paris region, before moving to Vaucluse in 2013, after their retirement. Two of the accused are being tried for acts committed while Dominique Pélicot already knew that he was the subject of an investigation, in 2020.
In the fall of that same year, police informed Gisèle Pélicot of the recordings discovered on her husband’s computer, whom she had described to investigators as “a great guy.” “50 years of her life pulverized in a few seconds in a provincial police station, when she discovered that she had spent all that time with a man she loved but did not know,” her daughter, Caroline Darian, said last March in an interview on the television channel TMC.
The victim does not hide
In later statements, Gisèle Pélicot explained to researchers that she had suffered for years from problems that she had discussed repeatedly with her children and her family doctor: chronic fatigue, memory problems and gynecological pain for which she could find no explanation. A subsequent forensic examination detected several sexually transmitted diseases.
Carpentras police investigators in charge of the case also discovered that Dominique Pélicot had filmed his stepdaughters in the bathroom, using a phone hidden in a toiletry bag, then published the images on a website.
On Monday morning, the opening day of the trial, the court rejected the accused’s request that the trial be held in camera. The trial, which will last four months, is being held in the presence of the public and the press, as requested by the victim and the couple’s three children. “Gisèle Pélicot is determined to confront her opinions, starting with those of her ex-husband,” Stéphane Babonneau, one of her lawyers, said this week. Even though there will be “extremely difficult moments, he feels that he has nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of: the shame must be on the other side.” The victim’s testimony in court is scheduled for Thursday.
Of the more than 80 attackers, the Carpentras police were able to identify 50. The Avignon prosecutor’s office requested that they be placed at the disposal of the departmental criminal court for aggravated rape. Aged between 22 and 70 at the time of the events, the accused are from the same region. Most of them had no criminal record and five of them are the subject of an additional charge: during a search of their computers, the police found child pornography images.
Other cases
Parts of the summary revealed a few months ago by the newspaper The Parisian They show that during the interrogations many tried to justify the events in different ways. Several of them claim that Dominique Pélicot assured them that his wife had agreed, one of them speaks of “involuntary rape”. An unlikely explanation, according to the experts cited in the investigation, since the victim’s state could not be confused with normal sleep, but was closer to a coma.
Others consider that the husband’s consent is sufficient. In one case, Dominique Pélicot provided drugs to one of the attackers so that both of them could rape, also by chemical submission, his own wife, which gave rise to another legal procedure.
Furthermore, the DNA sample obtained from Dominique Pélicot during his arrest and the interrogations allowed the Police to link him to two other open cases. On the one hand, the sexual assault of a woman in May 1999 in the Paris region. On the other, the rape and murder of Sophie Narme in Paris, on December 4, 1991, a case that has remained unsolved since. An investigating judge in Nanterre indicted him for both crimes.
