When he was born in 1961, Romain V. was called Jean-Marie, like his father. She changed her name in 2013 because she could no longer stand the name of this man who had made her childhood an endless nightmare. We must also start by saying that his father may not only be his father, but also his brother: according to a sister of Romain V., the latter would actually be his grandfather’s son, who would have slept with his mother. So much for the foundations of an existence in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Before the Vaucluse criminal court, on Tuesday, November 5 and Wednesday, November 6, this skinny 63-year-old defendant described a childhood full of chores, humiliation and abuse, lived in permanent terror of a violent father and a complicit mother. As an adult he will experience a fleeting desire for parenthood; will judge that it is better not to have children “for fear of reproducing the family pattern”.
On the stand, Romain V. also recounted the rape he suffered in his childhood at the hands of a stranger (“in a field, then [qu’il cherchait] rabbit grass ») and the recurrent sexual touching of a priest, a friend of the family, within the parental home, where he remained until he came of age, “not one more day”.
“Ocean of abominations”
What followed was no happier. His marriage, at age 20, lasted only three months, during which time his wife met another man while he was serving in the military. Your professional illness, “The Forklift Driver’s Disease”It left him unemployed in 2011 and since then he has been living on disabled adult benefits. His journey turned him into a fragile man, closed in on himself, alone. She cried throughout the story of her existence in the bar by the personality investigator, who herself confided that she had never met a defendant in her career who had accumulated so many misfortunes.
The list of charges against Romain V. is long: he is one of the four repeat offenders in the case, who went to Mazan six times (between December 2019 and June 2020). Aggravating at first glance: he has been HIV positive since 2004 – which he had not told Dominique Pelicot – and he never used a condom during the numerous penetrations imposed on Gisèle Pelicot, for whom knowing this constituted, according to her lawyers, “a climax in this ocean of abomination”.
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