Sixty-nine days of hearings to understand how 51 men, generally of a calm social profile, could become rapists. Firefighter, journalist, craftsman, pensioner, delivery man, prison guard… Today, between 30 and 74 years old, they will be tried by the Vaucluse criminal court from September 2 to December 20, because they accepted the proposal of Dominique P. – the anonymity of the accused is intended to guarantee the anonymity of his loved ones – today aged 71, to abuse his wife, who was drugged and put into a coma with tranquilisers that he made her take without her knowledge.
“Without his knowledge” is the name of the chat room on the dating site Coco.fr where the septuagenarian was looking for candidates. “You’re like me, you like rape mode”exchange Dominique P. and an interlocutor after a contact in the chat, closed in June for having been involved in several criminal cases.
It all started on September 12, 2020 with what seemed like a simple news story: the police intervened in a supermarket in Carpentras (Vaucluse), where a pensioner was being held by security agents. In the aisles, with a mobile phone attached to a bag, Dominique P. filmed under the skirts of several female customers. He recalls “an impulse” while his wife was away to look after their grandchildren. Voyeuristic type deviation, concludes an expert psychiatrist. But when they opened the laptop confiscated from his home, investigators discovered a file titled “Abuse”. It contains more than 20,000 photographs and videos, which the pensioner has methodically listed with a date, a name or nickname and a pornographic title.
At the police station, his wife is told that since 2011, her husband – whom she describes as “a great guy” Before facing the reality of the facts, he handed her over to dozens of men during a drug-induced sleep that left her with no memories. “I feel disgusted, I feel dirty, stained, betrayed. It’s a tsunami, I took a TGV”will tell the judge when mentioning the discovery of the facts.
Two-faced personality
It took seven waves of arrests, mainly in Vaucluse, to arrest the accused. Two died, others could not be identified. The investigating judge puts the total number of men who consciously followed the instructions given by Dominique P. at 72: not to wear perfume or smell tobacco, to park the vehicle in the car park of a school a short distance from the couple’s home. P., to undress in the kitchen, to warm their hands on the radiator… Investigators recorded 92 rapes between July 2011 and October 2020.
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