Dominique Pelicot He denied this on Tuesday, in the presence of his daughter. Caroline at the Avignon trial, having done the same thing to him as to his mother, Giselethat he drugged her for almost ten years to rape her with other men.You’ve never been drugged or raped, you can’t say that (…). I’ve never done that“, stressed the main defendant in this trial before the criminal court of Vaucluse (south-east of France), addressing his daughter, in his first statement, between sobs.
Caroline Darian, now 45, learned when it was revealed in the fall of 2020 that her father not only kept hundreds of photos and videos of rapes that his mother was suffering, in a state of unconsciousness, at the hands of dozens of men to whom he offered her. There were also images of Caroline naked and apparently asleepwhose existence she did not know or in what conditions they had been taken, and since she saw them, she is convinced that her father had also drugged her. This afternoon, the girl shook her head, as if to deny it when he claimed that he had not mistreated her.
Dominique Pélicot continues to insist and specifies: “The only person I manipulated was my wife.“. A comment that sparked murmurs of indignation from the dock, where there are 50 other men accused – all except one – of having raped Gisèle Pélicot at the invitation of the first. Some of these men deny this accusation for the crime of aggravated rape, punishable by a 20-year prison sentence, and they claim that they did not know that Gisèle Pelicot was drugged and therefore did not consent to have sexual relations with them.
The main accused said that when he started plying his wife with anti-anxiety drugs 2011 In order to sexually abuse her, taking advantage of the fact that she was unconscious, he raped her. The following year, inspired by a sexual encounter page, he began inviting other men to join him in abusing his wife, and these practices continued until he was arrested in September 2020 for recording the high skirts of some women in a supermarket in the city of Carpentras.
Dominique Pelicot repeated this afternoon that everyone knew she was drugged and submissive because she had warned them and also asked them for medical reports to verify that they did not have sexually transmitted diseases. Although at the same time, he admitted that he often did not know the real names of these individuals and therefore could not verify the validity of these reports when he obtained them.
Perverse and “too quantitative” behavior
When asked how he would describe his sexuality in quantitative and qualitative terms, Dominique Pelicot acknowledged that it was a behavior perverted and “too quantitative”which is the consequence of addiction.
After being arrested in September 2020, he told police officers who were interrogating him that he sometimes encouraged the men he invited to his home to rape his wife not to wear a condom because it turned him on more. In any case, he stressed on Tuesday that he had not forced them to come and that they all accepted the scenario he had devised. In his statement, Dominique Pelicot said he felt ashamed of having treated his wife in this way, knowing that “without it I am nothing“and that it is also partly thanks to her that he was able to try to forget “the bad times in life”.
Precisely, when asked if he believes he has lost her forever (last month the divorce between them was made official), he replied that “we must always keep hope. Otherwise, it’s over“The main defendant tried to establish a link between the sexual perversions he had committed with his wife and the traumatic experiences he said he had suffered in his childhood, starting with allegations of sexual abuse by a doctor when he was 9 years old, after witnessing a rape at the age of 14 or the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of his father.
At the end of this morning’s hearing, Gisèle Pelicot was applauded by the public who were waiting for her outside and who crowded into the courthouse to be able to attend or at least hear the hearing. A man offered her a bouquet of flowers. Later, a woman stopped her in the street, gave her a kiss and encouraged her to continue. The trial, which began on September 2, is public because the main victim refused to have it held behind closed doors.
The reason she gave is that Gisèle Pelicot wants all the details to be known so that everyone knows what happened to her This will never happen to any other woman again.
