“Everything was wonderful with my husband, he was always a very good person, a very protective father. It is inconceivable that he did that. He destroyed us.” The sobbing woman who spoke before the Vaucluse criminal court on Wednesday 11 September was not Gisèle Pelicot. And the man who listens to her while looking at his feet in the dock is not Dominique Pelicot.
This 63-year-old man is called Jean-Philippe Maréchal. Like the other defendants, Dominique Pelicot explained to him how he drugged his wife to abuse her and invited him to go and rape her himself. Jean-Philippe Maréchal always refused. On the other hand, he applied Dominique Pelicot’s method at home, to whom he in turn proposed to rape his wife, Cilia Maréchal, the woman crying in the bar. Between 2015 and 2020, Dominique Pelicot visited the Maréchals a dozen times, even though the lady had been drugged. This is the case within the case.
The events came to an end one evening in June 2020 when, clearly not drugged enough, Cilia Maréchal woke up startled and found a pot-bellied stranger in her room, next to her husband. Dominique Pelicot had fled, Jean-Philippe Maréchal had tried to embroider the lie of an encounter with a stranger who wanted to see her underwear. “I didn’t believe him, but suspecting it was rape, no, that was unthinkable.”he says, as Jean-Philippe Maréchal sinks deeper and deeper into the box. Dominique Pelicot, for his part, does not give up: he is not there to listen to the story of this other woman whom he raped while she was sleeping.
Three days have passed since the “Pelicot trial” progressed without Pelicot, who was ill and excused, and the hearing came to a halt imperceptibly. The questioning of the 71-year-old defendant, scheduled for Tuesday morning, then Tuesday afternoon and finally Wednesday, kept being postponed.
While he is away, we will not be able to hear from his sons David and Florian, nor from his son-in-law Pierre, nor from his brother Joël, who have a lot to say, nor from his ex-wife Gisèle, who must return to the stand, nor from the other defendants, who are stamping their feet. The already overcrowded trial calendar was derailed at the first grain of sand.
Floating print
Reorganising this extraordinary hearing is a headache. Does no one now have the slightest idea of who will be heard and when? Certain civil parties, for whom it is difficult to be in Avignon every day, feel embarrassed: a son of Dominique Pelicot, noticing the latter’s absence on Tuesday, decided to take the road to Paris, but turned around halfway because there was talk that his father would return to court on Wednesday morning, so that was not the case.
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