Gisèle Pelicot is confronted with her tormentors

It is nine o’clock in the morning and President of the Court Roger Arata is about to open the hearings of the fourth week of the trial. Lawyers and journalists have already taken their seats in the courtroom of the Palace of Justice in Avignon (Southern France). Then the sound of swelling applause comes from the lobby. “Aha, Gisèle Pelicot has arrived,” says the reporter from the local newspaper “Vaucluse Matin”. As they do every morning, the spectators – mostly women of all ages – greet the main character of the trial with an acoustic tribute before following the proceedings on a screen in an adjoining room due to a lack of seats.

Accompanied by her older son David, Gisèle Pelicot enters the bright, high-ceilinged main hall. Tastefully dressed in beige, and now without sunglasses, the 72-year-old pensioner sits to the left of the court, with her two lawyers in front of her, as if they were her bodyguards.

On the right, a tall, white-haired man with a cane enters his Plexiglas box, flanked by two armed police officers. Dominique Pelicot, the mastermind and accomplice in almost a hundred rapes of his wife, is 71 and has confessed: “I am a rapist,” he confirmed at the start of the trial in early September, as if he were stating his profession. Media from all continents call him “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hide”: During the day he had looked after the family for 50 years; at night, the former electrician searched the Internet for men who wanted to rape his drugged wife.

Even more unbelievable: 83 men actually took part from 2011 until Dominique Pelicot was caught in 2020. An alert guard caught the pensioner in a shopping center in Carpentras filming under women’s skirts. The police looked in his computer – and came across hundreds of photos and videos of a heinous ongoing crime that might never have been discovered, because the victim knew nothing about it. Barely once a month, her husband poured tenfold doses of sleeping pills into her evening meal; later he cleaned her of traces of sperm. Gisèle Pelicot had abdominal pain, but the gynecologists found nothing. She also suffered from memory lapses and thought she had Alzheimer’s. In truth, she had been made completely groggy and abused by countless men – without her knowledge.

“Be careful, you’ll wake her up!”

Now Gisèle and Dominique are sitting opposite each other, fifteen metres away, eye to eye. What do they think when their eyes meet, here in the courtroom, after fifty years of happy marriage, followed by total betrayal and intimate violence?

The other defendants are sitting on the benches between the now divorced couple. 50 of them have been identified. Some are in coercive detention and are waiting in a second glass cage; the less serious cases fill the benches. The men are very different, even if, according to expert reports, none of them has been blessed with life; they gossip with their lawyers during breaks or stare at the floor.

Andy R., a 37-year-old casual worker, is the first to be questioned. Short, with a beard, dressed in black, with a heavy gold chain around his neck, he explains haltingly that he spent New Year’s Eve 2018 alone, drinking a lot and snorting. On the now banned swinger website Coco.fr, an unknown man asked him if he wanted a threesome with his wife.

A later hour, Andy R. was at Dominique Pelicot’s in the Provence village of Mazan. He undressed in the kitchen and, at the request of the owner, warmed his hands on a stove. Then they suggested the bedroom. He lay down next to a woman who was lying half-naked on the bed, her face against the wall. She didn’t move. He tried to caress her, then penetrate her, but to no avail, says the man with the Spanish-sounding surname. Dominique warned him of all his plans: “Be careful, you’ll wake her up!”

“That would have been fine with me,” says Andy R. now in a shaky voice. But the woman didn’t move. Pelicot finally asked him to stop and go home. “Sors!” he said: Get out!

The accused was afraid of Dominique Pelicot

Silence in the courtroom, time stands still for a moment. Gisèle Pelicot is following the scene with great concentration, as always, with her chin raised. But the presiding judge, Arata, will know more precisely: “Was there penetration with a penis or a finger?” That would constitute rape. Dominique Pelicot filmed everything, but the sequence is unclear. Andy R. says in a shaky voice that he doesn’t think so.

Judge Arata wants to know whether Andy R. never asked himself why the woman wasn’t moving. Andy R. clears his throat. At first he thought that her immobility was “un truc”, a game between the couple. “Did you never think that you would have to ask the woman for her consent?” the judge interrupts him. “First outside, on the street,” says Andy, quickly becoming hoarse. “There I suddenly felt like a thief.”

Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyer wants to know whether there was any talk of sleeping pills or even drugs. The man in black says no. “Were you sure she was asleep?” – “Yes, a deep sleep.” – “Was she snoring?” – “Possibly, yes.” – “And you call that ‘a game’?” asks the lawyer. “I have no further questions.”

The prosecutor asks why Andy R. didn’t stop the listless, morbid “game” earlier. “Because of Dominique Pelicot,” comes the answer. “He was impressive, and I didn’t even want to object to him filming everything.”

Videos are no longer shown publicly

Dominique Pelicot is given the floor in his glass case. He made a serious accusation against Andy R.: “He was not drunk at all, he knew very well that the aim was to abuse her without asking her.”

Dominique Pelicot seems tired, deadly successful, but when he can accuse the younger, intellectually inferior “visitors” of contradiction or a lie, he wakes up from his lethargy; his voice becomes sharp, as if he were the judge. Pelicot obviously does not want to pay for the atrocities alone. But with his attacks he ultimately unintentionally confirms that he was the dominant figure, the mastermind of these acts of violence, that he had instructed, manipulated and sometimes lured the others into a trap in order to get film material.

A second defendant is called, Hugues M., a 39-year-old motorcycle fan. He admits that he likes sexual “role play with domination and disguise”. But when he entered his bedroom at Pelicot’s invitation and found a woman lying motionless on the bed, all sexual attraction disappeared. Dominique Pelicot then raped his own wife to show the visitor what to do. Um, Hugues, I tried to caress the half-naked woman, but she just snored. So he packed his clothes and left.

The youngest defendant is different. Joan K. was 22 years old at the time of the crime, a soldier by profession and depressed. Now he is sitting in a glass cage and, like Pelicot, faces the maximum sentence for rape, 20 years. Because Joan K. visited the Pelicot villa in Mazan more than once in November 2019. He returned in January 2020 at Pelicot’s request and raped Gisèle Pelicot a second time, until he had an orgasm. This is shown by several short video clips that are absolutely repulsive in their rawness. The court has since decided not to show these videos in public anymore.

Gisèle Pelicot asked lawyers if they thought she was guilty

The case of Joan K. interests the public prosecutor because it provides insight into the motives behind the crime. “I don’t deny that I find it exciting to imagine myself with a sleeping woman,” the young ex-military man told the police. Why? the lawyer now asks. “Because it’s like rape.”

Such statements have a wide resonance outside the courtroom. French feminist Noémie Renard says that the Pelicot case is based on a general “culture of rape” that is part of the “banality of masculinity” and also affects “ordinary men”. In mid-September, a women’s collective sang in front of the courthouse in Avignon: “You are the rapist. You are the husbands, the fathers, the state, society.”

A trial visitor who came to the trial in Avignon with her daughter from Carpentras, 30 kilometers away, sees things differently. “These defendants are not average men. After this trial, Dominique Pelicot will have to answer for the murder of a real estate agent. The other defendants also committed or at least condoned violence. Otherwise she could have called the police, right?”

The elegantly dressed visitor is the first to clap as Gisèle Pelicot leaves the courtroom. “This woman impressed me immensely. “She demanded that the trial be public and that the videos be shown because she has nothing to hide,” says the woman from Carpentras.

Her daughter was here last week and says that the defendants’ lawyers had hinted that Mrs Pelicot would have found out about her husband over time. Others had claimed that she was an alcoholic, an exhibitionist, a nudist. Gisèle Pelicot then asked to speak and whether she was considered guilty. “She added that she now understood why so few victims of rape dared to report it,” said the student. “That’s just brave. And strong, at her age.”

The trial will last until December 20th.