When on September 12, 2020, prosecutor Jean-François Mayet, on duty at the Carpentras prosecutor’s office, was informed of the arrest of a certain Dominique Pelicot, caught in a supermarket filming up customers’ skirts, he did not do so. Imagine that, four years later, together with his colleague Laure Chabaud, he appeared before the local, national and international press, against fifty-one defendants in the trial. of Mazan’s violations. On Monday, November 25, the first day of this two-voice accusation, the tense bodies of the two representatives of the accusation, their sometimes disorderly speech, their gazes glued to the typewritten sheets placed on the desk, spoke of the common consternation felt . given the magnitude of the task facing them.
Without a doubt, they lacked that encouragement that we had the right to expect from the prosecutor’s words, speaking on behalf of society. The arguments, the previous week, of the two lawyers of Gisèle Pelicot, Mare Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau had set the bar very high, both in form and substance. It has not been crossed. But the studious austerity of the two attorneys general was, basically, like this hearing, dominated from beginning to end by the civil side. For Gisèle Pelicot, Jean-François Mayet also reserved his first words, greeting the “admirable burst of resilience” with which he imposed the publicity of the debates, against the initial opinion of the prosecutor.
“It was in a protective approach that we requested the closed session, was justified. But this was without knowing his strength of character, undoubtedly multiplied by the violence of the crimes. And you were right, ma’am. » “This judgment, continued the attorney general, It comes to shake our society in our relationship with others. It highlights the deficiencies of certain human beings when it comes to their needs, their desires and when it comes to understanding the desires of others. It reveals the inability of some men to be in symmetry with women. All of us who are here went to Mazán to have an easy sexual relationship, to respond to a need, to a desire in which the other’s place was nonexistent. Neither before nor after were they asked about Gisèle Pelicot’s consent. »
One hundred aggravated rapes
The function of opening the searches against the fifty defendants (the fifty-first is a fugitive), gathered in the courtroom, then fell to the attorney general, Laure Chabaud. Or rather, against these forty-nine plus one, Dominique Pelicot, “cornerstone of this archive.” Around a hundred aggravated rapes, between 2011 and 2020, “committed alone, others under duress” and testifying to“a desire to submit, to degrade someone who may be the person he loves most.” But also, he recalled, a “perversion that goes beyond his relationship with his ex-wife” and allows Dominique Pelicot to also be prosecuted for possession and dissemination of images that violate the privacy and integrity of his daughters-in-law and his daughter, Caroline.
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