Faced with 50 accused of rape permitted by her husband, the victim testifies

Photo: Christophe Simon Agence France-Presse “I lost ten years of my life, I will never get them back,” Gisèle Pelicot said Thursday at the trial of her attackers.

Philippe Siuberski – Agence France-Presse in Avignon

Published at 10:48 Updated at 12:53

• Europe

“My world is falling apart”: calm and determined in the face of her husband and the 50 other men accused of raping her for ten years, the main victim in this case recounted the moment when the police revealed to her the extent of the attacks she had suffered, during an extraordinary trial in the south of France.

Drugged with sleeping pills by her husband, who recruited strangers on the Internet to come and rape her, this 71-year-old woman had never realized that since 2011 all these men had abused her, before this Monday, November 2, 2020, when she discovered everything.

“The police saved my life, by investigating [my husband's] computer,” said the victim, calm, precise, no longer describing her husband, whose divorce, only by her surname.

Then, for almost an hour and a half, she spoke this Thursday for the first time since the start of the trial, which began Monday in Avignon (south), before the criminal court of Vaucluse.

On that autumn day in 2020, the police in Carpentras, in Vaucluse, asked her to come. Yes, she is married to Dominique Pelicot, “a great guy”, “a great guy”, she replies to the investigator who receives her.

Then he shows her photos.

In the image, “I am inert, in my bed, and I am being raped. These are scenes of barbarity. My world is collapsing, everything is collapsing, everything I have built in 50 years. Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me”, she explains, in front of the court, composed of five professional magistrates.

Since the trial began, AFP and other media outlets have chosen not to use Pelicot's name, in order to protect the privacy of the couple's three children and six grandchildren. But they made it known on Thursday, through their lawyers, that they now wished for their surname to be known, because it has become “that of courage embodied” by their mother and grandmother.

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“Rag doll”

“They consider me a rag doll,” insists the mother on Thursday, under the gaze of her daughter and of his two sons, at his side since the start of the hearings.

That day, however, she refused to watch the videos. Which she would only agree to do in May 2024, as the trial approached, on the advice of her lawyer. “They are each more atrocious than the last,” she insisted on Thursday. “Scenes of barbarity, rapes, I wonder how I could have held on,” she added, believing that she had been “sacrificed on the altar of vice.”

“The body is warm, not cold, but I died on my bed,” she continued.

In total, nearly 4,000 photos and videos were found on her husband's various computers, USB sticks and hard drives. The images of the approximately 200 rapes she suffered in ten years, first in the Paris region, but especially in Mazan, a small town of 6,000 inhabitants in Vaucluse (south), where the couple moved in March 2013.

“And don't talk to me about sex scenes, these are rape scenes, I have never had a threesome or a swinger relationship, I want to say that,” the victim continues, indirectly responding to questions put to the director of investigation on Wednesday by the lawyers of some of the accused, who maintain that they only participated in the scenario of a libertine couple.

“I was never an accomplice” nor “pretended to be asleep,” the victim then replies, questioned by Roger Arata, the presiding judge.

Of all these men who abused her, she only recognizes one, who had come to the couple's home in Mazan to talk about bikes with her husband: “I met him from time to time at the bakery, I said hello, I didn't imagine that he had come to rape me. »

« So that no more women have to suffer chemical submission »

“I feel disgusted,” she insists, addressing the accused. “Take responsibility for your actions at least once in your life,” she says, after speaking for an hour already, only stopping to drink a glass of water.

And she addresses the issue of chemical submission, the anxiolytics that her husband made her swallow, without her knowing, and then handed her over to the men he brought in.

“I speak for all those women who are drugged and don't know it, I do it on behalf of all those women who may never know it, […] so that no more women have to suffer chemical submission,” she continues, recalling that this is why she refused on Monday for this trial to take place behind closed doors.

On the prisoner's bench, her husband keep your head down.

Arrested in September 2020, after filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping center in Carpentras, which would allow the discovery of this whole affair, Dominique Pelicot had been arrested a first time for similar facts in the Paris region, in 2010. But he had been sentenced to a simple fine of €100, and his wife had never been informed.

“There was failure to assist a person in danger. I lost ten years of my life, I will never get them back,” she accused on Thursday.