At the Mazan rape trial, civil parties hope for a “raising of awareness” in society

Photo: Christophe Simon Agence France-Presse Gisele Pelicot gestures to the crowd on Wednesday as she arrives at the Avignon courthouse.

David Courbet – Agence France-Presse in Avignon

Published at 9:04

• Europe

Lawyers for the civil parties hoped on Wednesday that the trial of the serial rapes of Mazan, before the criminal court of Vaucluse in Avignon, in the south of France, would serve as a historical example on the questions of consent, chemical submission and more generally of male-female relations.

“How, in France, in 2024, can a woman still suffer what Gisèle Pelicot suffered for at least 10 years ? How can we find in France 50 individuals, but in reality 70 (Editor's note: several have never been identified and will therefore never be tried), men”, to come and sexually assault this body, wondered Me Antoine Camus, one of the two lawyers of Gisèle Pelicot, drugged and raped for a decade by her husband and dozens of men he recruited on the Internet.

Opening the second phase of this trial, that of the pleadings, Me Camus, recalled the videos of the facts, meticulously recorded, captioned and stored by Dominique Pelicot, the main suspect, where Mrs. Pelicot, his ex-wife, was so inert “that one would believe her dead.”

“By this almost political gesture of giving up the closed-door approach”, on September 2, at the opening of this extraordinary trial, Ms. Pelicot “invited all of society to ask questions, to become aware, to change mentalities, for a future that would finally break with the violence that we would like to see from another age”, he affirmed.

“Gisèle Pelicot would have every reason in the world to be in hatred today, to oppose men and women and to castigate male sexuality in general”, the lawyer continued: but she “chose to transform this mud into noble material and to go beyond the darkness of her history to find meaning in it: she is counting on the court to help her do so”.

For an hour, the lawyer asked for “justice and truth” to be served for this family, this woman, her daughter and two sons, and her grandchildren, “buried for four years under the rubble” after the “explosion” of the revelation of the facts, in the fall of 2020.

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“Alone as a dog!”

But he did not dwell on Dominique Pelicot, this “split personality”, with his “A side” of “good husband, grandfather, friend, neighbor”, and his “B side” when, mainly at night, he would overwhelm his wife with anxiolytics so that he could then dispose of her and deliver her to strangers.

The main accused acknowledging his role as “conductor” of the approximately 200 rapes recorded over a decade on his ex-wife, at their marital home in Mazan (Vaucluse), half of which were committed by himself, it seems difficult to imagine that he would escape the maximum sentence provided for, of 20 years in prison.

Me Camus therefore dwelt on the 50 co-accused. And “all had free will,” he insisted: “Each at their own level contributed to this monstrosity and allowed a woman's ordeal to continue.”

“They all chose to resign from thought in order to allow their impulses to prevail,” the lawyer continued, asking that the court make “clear” and “firm” decisions, particularly on the question of the intentionality of the rape, an argument put forward by almost all of the co-accused who acknowledge the materiality of the facts but not “the intention to rape.”

In any case, Mr. Camus dismissed the possibility of any alteration in the defendants' discernment, in response to the dozen defense lawyers who, on Wednesday morning, filed this subsidiary request with the court concerning 33 of the 50 co-accused.

“Rape is rape,” he repeated, facing defense lawyers who will undoubtedly try to explain that their clients were “manipulated” by Dominique Pelicot and that they thought they were participating in the scenario of a libertine couple.

For Me Camus, this trial will also have allowed to highlight the question of chemical submission, “the modus operandi of the perfect crime: Gisèle Pelicot did not wake up with her face swollen or next to a stranger. She woke up next to a man who loved her, did not beat her, who willingly made her appointments with the doctor.”

Before the start of this plea, Dominique Pelicot had again tried to apologize to his family, Wednesday morning, provoking the anger of his daughter Caroline: “You will end up alone, like a dog!”