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12-09-2024
PARIS: An audible sigh of frustration drifted across the packed seats of courtroom “Voltaire” in Avignon’s Palace of Justice, as the lead judge, dressed in a scarlet robe, announced an unexpected but unavoidable delay to a trial that has gripped France.
“He is ill,” said Presiding Judge Roger Arata, indicating that this extraordinary case of 51 alleged rapists would be delayed for “one, two, three days” or possibly even longer, after it was revealed that Dominique Pelicot was too sick to attend.
His lawyer said later he had been taken to hospital.
On the right edge of the courtroom, her head leaning gently against a wood-panelled wall, Gisele Pelicot showed no visible emotion at the news that she would not, after all, be seeing her husband give evidence that day.
Last week, Gisele Pelicot, 72, told the court that her calm demeanour masked a “field of devastation”, triggered by the instance, four years ago, when a French policeman had informed her that her apparently loving husband had, in fact, been drugging her for a decade and inviting strangers more than 80 local men to enter the family home, and the couple’s bedroom, to rape her while he filmed them.
She has waived her right to anonymity to highlight the danger to women of being drugged and sexually attacked known as “chemical submission”.
It is little more than half an hour’s drive through the gentle hills and vineyards that surround the looming, almost lunar landscape of Mont Ventoux from Avignon’s courthouse to the quaint, medieval village of Mazan. The village was once briefly known for hosting British actress Keira Knightley’s wedding.
This is where the Pelicots lived, and where Dominique Pelicot filmed the local men that he had contacted online.
The mood in any place, at any one moment, is always hard to sum up.
“Honestly, no-one here gives a damn,” said a local caterer, Evan Tuvignon, leaning on his shop counter and suggesting that people were fed up with the whole case but several women told us the village was not only in shock, but that the unfolding revelations in court were causing new tensions in Mazan and the surrounding villages. The names of the accused were recently shared widely on social media, and some of those men have since complained to the court that they, their families and children are now facing harassment on the streets and at school.
Two local women, loading their car on a narrow street in Mazan, said they’d seen the names and had recognized at least three of them.
“It creates tensions, you can imagine. You don’t know who to trust on the street. I’m relieved that I’ll be moving away from this village soon,” said Oceane Martin, 25 but beside her, Océane’s mother, Isabelle Liversain, 50, raised another, deeper concern.
It has been revealed that, while the police have already identified and detained 50 of the men whose images appeared on Dominique Pelicot’s hard drive, another 30 suspects as yet unnamed and untraced remain at large.
“So, we know 30 out of 80 still haven’t been caught. There are tensions here because people don’t know if they can trust their neighbours. You ask yourself is he one of the 30? What is your neighbour getting up to behind closed doors?” said Isabelle Liversain in a voice sharp with frustration but Mazan’s 74-year-old mayor, Louis Bonnet, sought to play down those tensions, arguing that most of the alleged rapists came from other villages and seeking to frame the Pelicots as outsiders who hadn’t lived there long. He went further, saying the threats against the accused and their families were to be expected.
“If they participated in these rapes, then it’s normal that they’re considered targets. There has to be transparency about everything that happened,” he said, while also condemning the accused and their actions. (Int’l News Desk)
