UPDATE: FRANCE MASS RAPE TRIAL ENTERS FINAL STAGE
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Agency Report
Monday marked the start of the last round of testimony in the trial of a French man who drugged his wife for ten years so that dozens of strangers could rape her. Later this week, sentencing demands will be made, and a verdict will be rendered next month.
The 71-year-old Dominique Pelicot’s case has provoked outrage, demonstrations, and a discussion on male aggression in French culture. He would leave the historic trial as one of France’s worst sex offenders if found guilty.
Dominique Pelicot and forty-nine other men have been in the dock in the southern city of Avignon since early September. There is yet another defendant out there.
The victim, Pelicot’s former wife Gisele, has become a feminist icon by refusing to be ashamed and demanding the trial be open to the public to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.
“The shame isn’t ours to feel, it’s theirs,” she said.
The final four men were scheduled to testify on Monday after the court had been considering the charges against the 47 defendants for the previous ten weeks.
These four defendants share common backgrounds with the other accused. They are Joseph C., a 69-year-old retiree; Philippe L., a 62-year-old gardener; Boris M., a 37-year-old worker at a transport firm; and Nicolas F., a 43-year-old freelance journalist.
Previous defendants have stated that they were not aware that Gisele Pelicot had been knocked unconscious by drugs and that they thought they were participating in a game conducted by a libertine couple in which the wife pretended to sleep.
They will probably be shown the films of their actions, which Dominique Pelicot has painstakingly recorded, documented, and stored away, just like the majority of the accused.
Investigators tallied around 200 cases of rape, over 90 by strangers and the majority by her spouse.
“We’re tired,” said Antoine Camus, one of the two lawyers representing 71-year-old Gisele Pelicot and her three children.
He said Gisele Pelicot was tired of hearing “the same explanations from the defendants” that she was the victim of rape “by accident” or rape “by error of judgement.”
Dominique Pelicot has confessed to being a rapist.
Only 14 of the co-defendants have acknowledged the charges of aggravated rape, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail for the majority of them.
The 35 others insist that they believed they were playing sex games and deny ever raping Gisele Pelicot.
According to Gisele Pelicot, she had never consented.
In 2020, she was devastated to learn that her husband of fifty years had been surreptitiously giving her high doses of tranquilizers for years in order to rape her and allow several strangers to stay with him in their Mazan village house.
Dominique Pelicot documented his actions with meticulous precision on a hard drive in a folder labelled “abuse”, leading police to track down 50 suspects beside the husband.
For years Gisele had strange memory lapses and other health problems and thought she might have had Alzheimer’s. Then police told her she had been drugged and raped for nearly a decade.
None of her abusers alerted the police. Dominique Pelicot was caught by chance when he was detained in 2020 for filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket.
The couple’s two sons and daughter have regularly appeared at the trial to support their mother.
David and Florian were expected to testify Monday afternoon or Tuesday.
Their sister, who uses the pen name Caroline Darian, has already been heard during the first week of the trial but her lawyer said on Monday she would like to testify again.
Darian believes she was also drugged by her father. Naked photomontages of her had been found on Dominique Pelicot’s computer.
Once David and Florian are heard, Dominique and Gisele Pelicot will be given a final opportunity to speak. Prosecutors are then scheduled on Thursday and Friday to give their closing arguments and make their sentencing demands for the defendants.
The verdict is expected to be delivered by December 20 at the latest.
AFP
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