In the courthouse in the southern French city of Avignon, Gisèle Pelicot spoke out once again on Tuesday about the rapes she suffered at the hands of scores of men while heavily sedated, assaults that were instigated by her husband over a decade. The victim expressed indignation at the defence's attempts to portray her as an "accomplice" of her husband, Dominique Pelicot.
“Ever since I arrived in this courtroom, I've felt humiliated,” said a visibly angry Gisèle Pelicot. "I've been called an alcoholic. I'm said to be Mr Pelicot's accomplice. You have to have a certain amount of patience to put up with what I've heard," she said at the witness box at the court.
Dominique Pelicot, the victim's husband, and 50 other men, have been on trial since September 2 in the criminal court in Avignon, accused of raping Gisèle while she was drugged with sleeping pills and unconscious.
Gisèle, 72, was married to Dominique Pélicot for 50 years, and the couple raised three children together.
But between 2011 and 2020, Dominique Pelicot contacted scores of men on the online dating site Coco – shut down by French authorities in June – inviting them to come and sexually abuse his wife.
Of the 83 potential suspects, 54 have been identified and 50 are defendants in the current trial.
Apart from the extraordinary scope of the trial – three months of testimony, dozens of accredited international journalists – it will also call attention to the issue of “chemical submission”, when victims of a sexual assault are subdued by drugs.
Caroline Darian, Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter, has recently set up the association "M'endors pas" ("Don’t sedate me"), to raise awareness of the extent of the phenomenon.
Debates over consent
At the beginning of the week, it was still unclear whether the trial would continue, as the main defendant Dominique Pelicot was in hospital with a kidney infection. He finally returned to the dock on Tuesday, holding a cane and seated on a chair. Questioned at length, Pelicot, 71, admitted he had been the instigator of the Mazan rapes.
“I'm a rapist, just like the others in this room,” he said, referring to the other defendants.
Since then, the defence has been trying, with varying degrees of subtlety, to prove that not all of the accused were aware that they were committing rape when they went to the Pelicot home at night.
Last week, Guillaume de Palma, the lawyer for several of them, said that “there is rape, and then there's rape”, implying that a man who was unaware he was committing rape could not be judged for the crime.
Gisèle Pelicot dismissed this defence, saying, “When you see a woman deeply asleep on her bed, isn't there a moment when you wonder, ‘Isn't there something wrong here?'’’
“Rape is rape,” she said angrily from the stand. “Whether it's 3 minutes or an hour. It's absolutely despicable.”
A man with a dual personality
The day’s testimony shed light on Dominique Pélicot's dual personality, with his former wife describing him as initially “kind and caring” and “a great guy”.
“I only knew the ‘A’ side of Mr Pelicot,” she says. “I would have bet my life that I was living with an extraordinary man, but my children and I were completely deceived.”
More troubling details of Pelicot’s dark side have emerged. It is now known that he is under investigation for rape in a case dating back to 1991 and for attempted rape with a weapon in 1999. These cases are still under investigation by the cold-case division of the Nanterre court near Paris.
The police investigation, which found computer hard drives containing hundreds of videos of his wife being raped, also discovered photos of his daughter, Caroline, naked and asleep. Pelicot maintains that he has never touched children, least of all his own. “It raises questions when you see photos of Caroline asleep,” Gisèle Pelicot noted simply in her court testimony.
In the morning, the judges heard from Jean-Pierre Maréchal. Between 2018 and 2020, Marechal, 63, worked with Pelicot to drug and rape Marechal's wife. Pelicot supplied Maréchal with Temesta, a powerful sleeping pill, and went to Maréchal's home on several occasions to perform sex acts on his wife.
Maréchal is in prison and admits to raping his wife, but he is the only defendant who says he refused to abuse Gisèle Pelicot. “I raped my wife, I couldn't go and rape another woman,” he said, in testimony that was often rambling.
“My client is the product of Pelicot's perversion’, said his lawyer, Patrick Gontard, as he left the courtroom. “I'm firmly convinced that if Maréchal had not met Pelicot, nothing would have happened."
Dominique Pelicot’s guilt is beyond doubt. But dozens of other defendants still have to explain themselves to the court between now and December.
Several of them dispute the charge of rape, and their lawyers are determined to point out the flaws in the case against them.
Though visibly affected by the aggressivity of the proceedings on Tuesday, Gisèle Pelicot never backed down. She can count on the support of several dozen people who applaud her every time she leaves the courtroom.
This past weekend, thousands of people demonstrated across France in support of Gisèle Pelicot, some carrying signs that said the trial should shift the "shame" felt by victims back onto the accused.
Read more‘We believe you’: French demonstrators rally in support of mass rape victim
“Thanks to you, I have the strength to continue the fight to the end”, Gisèle said to her supporters.
This article was adapted from the original in French.
