Dominique Pelicot remained in her box for two minutes on Monday, September 9: time for the lawyer Béatrice Zavarro to discuss the “intestinal difficulties” and the “possible urinary tract infection” of his client, and obtain from President Roger Arata his dispensation from this sixth day of hearing which, however, was entirely dedicated to him.
Curiously, therefore, in the absence of the person concerned, a personality researcher, an expert psychologist and two expert psychiatrists took turns before the Vaucluse criminal court in Avignon to analyse the background and profile of Dominique Pelicot, whose reactions to certain comments made in the bar we would have liked to be able to examine.
“Without any outstanding personality traits”, “Correct relationship with reality”, “without mental pathology”, “without psychiatric history”He listed the specialists who had known Dominique Pelicot; during the investigation, his relatives had also described him as “Father unquestionably present and loving”, “Very committed to the education of his grandchildren”of “patriarch breathing happiness”within a “very close family”.
Dominique Pelicot worked as a labourer, then a construction supervisor in an electrical installation company, then became a real estate agent and before that he sold alarms, computer equipment and telephones. He was a complete man, he played sports. Gisèle Pelicot was the first and only love of his life; they married in 1973 and, despite some turbulence in the 2000s, they reflected the image of a “couple in love, no false note”.
behind this “facade of normality”According to psychiatrist Paul Bensussan, Dominique Pelicot was able, for almost ten years, to drug his wife in order to rape her and have her raped while she was sleeping by dozens of strangers he met on the Internet. He, who practiced ordinary sexuality with her when she was not unconscious, then gave free rein to all his paraphilias – or sexual deviations – in particular his “somnophilia bordering on necrophilia” experts point out. “We will have to approach this enigma up close”said Paul Bensussan.
A “two-faced” defendant
“What force of personality allows someone who claims to love his wife to inflict these scenes on her, to witness her decline, to endanger her? How can we make this dizzying contradiction coexist?”asked Stéphane Babonneau and Antoine Camus, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers.
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