A French woman whose the husband is accused The man who allegedly enlisted dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged told his trial Thursday that police saved his life by uncovering the crimes.
“The police saved my life by investigating Mr. P.’s computer,” Gisèle Pelicot told the Avignon court, referring to her husband, one of 51 men from all walks of life on trial for the alleged attacks.
Pelicot had initially wished to remain anonymous but has since appeared in public and her lawyer said she had agreed to be fully identified. She insisted that the trial be held in public so that all the facts of the case could be revealed.
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Pelicot, now 71, had remained stoic and silent for the first three days of the high-profile case, communicating only through her lawyers. But she revealed her emotion on the stand Thursday as she recounted the moment in November 2020 when investigators first showed her footage of a decade of sexual abuse allegedly orchestrated and filmed by her husband, identified in court as Dominique P.
“My world is falling apart. For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I’ve built for 50 years,” she told the court. “Inside, I’m a wreck.”
“Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me,” she said of the images as her husband listened with his head bowed.
“I’m lying there motionless on the bed being raped,” she added, calling the video “barbaric.”
“They treat me like a rag doll,” she told the five-judge panel, adding that she only had the courage to watch the video in May, years after first learning about it.
“Don’t talk to me about sex scenes. These are rape scenes,” she said, stressing that she had never practiced swinging or any other form of libertine sex.
Lawyers for some of the defendants were questioned in court Wednesday about whether the couple had a promiscuous relationship or whether it was credible that Pelicot did not notice anything during the decade of alleged abuse.
The line of questioning appeared to unsettle the complainant, although she remained in place while her three children briefly left the courtroom.
“Of course she was upset,” explained her lawyer, Antoine Camus. “She wanted to respond. We felt her dancing behind us saying, ‘I want to respond. I have to respond,’ and we answered, ‘Tomorrow!'”
“I’m absolutely not complicit,” she said Thursday. “I never pretended to be asleep, nothing like that.”
A file called “abuse”
Pelicot’s husband is accused of abusing her between 2011 and 2020, drugging her with sleeping pills and then recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her, lead investigator Jérémie Bosse Platière told the court on Wednesday.
Dominique Pelicot was unmasked by chance after being caught filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket.
On Tuesday, he answered “yes” when asked if he was guilty of the charges against him.
The 71-year-old father of three is said to have documented his actions with meticulous precision on a hard drive containing a folder labelled “abuse”.
This allowed French police to track down more than 50 men suspected of raping his wife while she was under the influence of drugs. A third of them were identified using facial recognition software, Mr Bosse Platière said.
The Hautes-Alpes police prefect said he had selected investigators “who had the courage” to deal with videos and images of abuse.
As part of their investigation, police compiled a list of 72 individuals suspected of abusing Pelicot. Investigators identified approximately 200 cases of alleged rape, committed by her husband and more than 90 strangers he allegedly recruited through an adult website.
According to the prosecution, the alleged attacks took place between July 2011 and October 2020, mainly at the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 inhabitants in the southern region of Provence.
Most of the suspects face up to 20 years in prison for aggravated rape if convicted.
Eighteen of the 51 accused are in custody, including Dominique Pelicot, but 32 other accused are attending the trial as free men, having not been taken into custody. Another suspect, still on the run, will be tried in absentia.
The trial is expected to last four months, until the end of December, which Camus said would be “a totally horrible ordeal” for Pelicot.
“For the first time, she will have to relive the rapes she suffered for 10 years,” of which she has “no memory,” he told AFP.
Dominique Pelicot admitted to investigators that he had given his wife powerful tranquilizers, often Temesta, an anti-anxiety medication.
The alleged abuse began when the couple lived near Paris and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later, prosecutors said.
The suspect allegedly gave the men strict instructions not to wake her up when they abused her at night. No smell of cigarettes or aftershave was allowed, they had to warm their hands before touching her and undress in the kitchen so as not to accidentally leave clothes in the bedroom.
