“My world is falling apart, everything is falling apart for me” : Calm and determined, Gisèle Pélicot recounted on Thursday, September 5, at the Mazan rape trial, this day, November 2, 2020, when she revealed everything, in front of her husband and the fifty other men accused of having raped her for ten years. At 71 years old, she never realized that, since 2011, her husband had been drugging her with sleeping pills and abusing strangers, whom he recruited on the Internet to come and rape her. “The police saved my life by investigating Mr. P’s computer.”How she now describes her husband, from whom she is in the process of divorcing, the septuagenarian recalls.
She then unfolded her version of this file for almost an hour and a half, for her first speech since the start of an extraordinary trial that began on Monday, in Avignon, before the criminal court of the department. This day in autumn 2020, the police of Carpentras (Vaucluse) asked her to come. Yes, she is indeed married to Dominique P., “a good boy”, “a great guy”responds to the researcher who receives it.
Then he shows her pictures. In the picture, “I am lying in my bed, and I am being raped. These are scenes of barbarism. My world is collapsing, everything is collapsing, everything I have built up over fifty years. Frankly, these are scenes of terror for me.”He explained to the court, which is made up of five professional judges.
“A rag doll”
“They consider me a rag doll”The mother insists, under the gaze of her daughter and two sons, who have been by her side since the beginning of the hearings. That day, however, she refused to watch the videos. Something she will not accept until May 2024, when the trial approaches, on the advice of her lawyer. “Each one is more atrocious than the other”he insisted on Thursday. “Scenes of barbarism, rape, I wonder how I could bear it”He adds, believing it to have been “sacrificed on the altar of vice”. “The body is warm, not cold, but I died in my bed”describe again.
In total, nearly four thousand photographs and videos were found on her husband’s various computers, USB sticks and hard drives. The images were of the approximately two hundred rapes she suffered over ten years, first in the Paris region, but especially in Mazan, the town in the Vaucluse region of six thousand inhabitants where the couple moved in March 2013.
“And don’t talk to me about sex scenes, they are rape scenes, I have never practiced threesomes or swinging, that’s what I mean”The victim continued, indirectly answering questions posed to the head of the investigation on Wednesday by the lawyers of some of the accused, who maintain that they only participated in the scenario of a libertine couple. “I was never an accomplice” neither “pretend to sleep”The victim then responds, questioned by Roger Arata, the president of the court.
Of all the men who abused her, she only recognised one, who had gone to the couple’s home in Mazan to talk about cycling with her husband: “I would meet him from time to time at the bakery, I would say hello to him, I had no idea that he had come to rape me.”
“For all those women who are on drugs and don’t know it”
“I have a feeling of disgust”He insists, addressing the accused: “Be responsible for your actions at least once in your life”he says, although he has been talking for an hour and only stops to drink a glass of water.
The world workshops
Online courses, evening classes, workshops: develop your skills
Discover
And it addresses the issue of chemical submission: those anti-anxiety drugs that her husband made her swallow, without her knowledge, and then gave to the men she had provoked. “I speak for all those women who are drug addicts and don’t know it, I do it on behalf of all those women who may never know it. […], “so that no more women have to submit to chemical submission”He continued, recalling that this was the reason why he refused on Monday to allow this trial to be held behind closed doors.
In the prison box, her husband remains upside down. He was arrested in September 2020, after filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre in Carpentras, which would allow the whole affair to be exposed. He was first arrested for similar acts in the Paris region in 2010. But he was sentenced to a simple fine of 100 euros and his wife was never informed. “A person in danger could not be helped. I lost ten years of my life, I will never get them back.”accused on Thursday.
Gisèle Pélicot’s children told Agence France-Presse on Thursday that they wanted the press to publish their surname, which several media outlets, including The world I had decided not to do it until then. “There is no problem for them”His lawyers insisted, Mare Stéphane Babonneau and Antoine Camus, “They are more proud of their mother than ever”Gisèle Pélicot, who has been in the process of divorce since the events were revealed in the fall of 2020, now uses her maiden name.
