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18-11-2024
PARIS: After 10 weeks, the mass rape trial that has shocked France is moving on to the final phase of closing statements.
The case focuses on a formerly married couple, Dominique and Gisele Pelicot, pensioners who are now in their early 70s.
Pelicot’s legal team will give their final statements on Tuesday, and the defence will then follow, ahead of a verdict from a panel of five judges expected on 20 December.
Dominique Pelicot went on trial with 50 other men in the southern city of Avignon in September.
Every chapter of this case has played out in the full glare of publicity because Pelicot has waived her anonymity, making the whole trial open to the media and the public.
In France, it has become known as the Affaire Mazan, after the village near Avignon where the Pelicots lived.
In November 2020, Dominique Pelicot admitted drugging his then-wife for almost a decade and recruiting dozens of men online to rape her in their home when she was unconscious.
Police tracked down his co-accused from thousands of videos they found on Pelicot’s laptop, although they were unable to identify an additional 21 men. Investigators said they have evidence of around 200 rapes carried out between 2011 and 2020.
The majority of the defendants deny the charges of rape, arguing that they cannot be guilty because they did not realize Pelicot was unconscious and therefore did not “know” they were raping her.
That line of defence has sparked a nationwide discussion on whether consent should be added to France’s legal definition of rape, currently defined as “any act of sexual penetration committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”.
The trial has also shone a light on the issue of chemical submission drug-induced sexual assault.
Blackouts and memory loss after years of marriage
Dominique and Gisele Pelicot, who were both born in 1952, married in 1973 and had three children. She worked as a manager in a large French company, while he, a trained electrician started several ultimately unsuccessful businesses.
The Pelicots lived in the Paris region until 2013, when they retired to the picturesque southern village of Mazan. They had a big house with a swimming pool and often used to entertain their extended family during the summer holidays.
By all accounts, they were a happy, close-knit couple. “We shared holidays, anniversaries, Christmases… All of that, for me, was happiness,” Pelicot has said.
Between 2011 and 2020, Pelicot experienced unsettling symptoms she took to be signs of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour, and underwent extensive medical exams. The blackouts and memory loss were, in fact, side-effects of the drugs her husband was giving her without her knowledge.
Pelicot divorced her husband soon after his crimes came to light. She is only using her married name for the purposes of the trial.
Dominique Pelicot has been in jail since November 2020. He will be sentenced next month, alongside the other 50 defendants.
In September 2020, Dominique Pelicot was spotted filming under women’s skirts by a security guard in a supermarket in southern France.
Police detained him and confiscated his electronic devices. They noticed suspicious chats on his Skype account, then found thousands of videos of men having sex with a seemingly unconscious woman Pelicot’s wife, Gisele. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
