Notizie.it editorial team According to the charges, Dominique Pélicot, an unsuspecting former salesman, had organized a veritable ring of rapists in the small village of Mazan, in Provence, in the south of France, where he had retreated with his wife to enjoy his retirement.
Woman Drugged by Husband and Raped by at Least 70 Strangers
After almost forty years of life together and three children, Gisèle she could never have imagined the horror her husband had subjected her to for about ten years: in the evening, before going to bed, he would drug her without her realizing it. And after she had lost consciousness, he would have her raped by a stranger selected on the web: he didn't do it for money, he just wanted to participate in the rapes and film them.
According to what has been reconstructed so far by investigators, this happened at least 92 times higher, with about seventy different authors of rape. “I am inert, asleep and they are raping me.”
“These men desecrate me, they take advantage of me. None of them thinks that something is happening”, said the woman recalling November 2, 2020, when she was unaware and summoned with her husband to the Carpentras police station and saw evidence of the violence she had suffered, documented by her husband. “They show me a photo. I don’t have my glasses on. I don’t recognize the woman on the bed. The policeman says to me: 'Mrs. Pélicot, look carefully.' I have trouble recognizing myself, I'm dressed in a certain way. I'm inert, asleep and they're raping me. Rape is the wrong word, it's barbarism".
The violence and the videos of the husband
The investigation revealed that Dominique Pelicot participated in the violence against his wife and filmed it. 92 acts of violence were recorded from 2011, when the couple still lived in the Paris region, until 2020, when they had already moved to Mazan, a city of about six thousand inhabitants in the south of France. The woman only realized what had happened to her at the age of 68, after thearrest of husband who had been caught in a shopping center filming under the skirts of three women. During the investigation into that crime, investigators discovered on the man's computer photos and videos of his unconscious wife being raped by strangers.
Inside a folder called “abuse” they were stored more than 20 thousand photos and videos, which the pensioner had carefully listed with a date, a name or nickname and a pornographic title. They were the evidence of the rapes suffered by his wife without her realizing it. According to what was reconstructed by the investigators, le violence would have started in 2013.
Pélicot's ritual was always the same: on a website, now closed, the man contacted the potential rapist. After setting up a dinner date, the pensioner injected a powerful anesthetic into his wife's meal, causing her to quickly lose consciousness. At that point, the accomplices went into action: the men invited to abuse his wife had to follow a series of precautions each time: park their car a few hundred meters from the house, not wear perfume or smoke to avoid odors that could interrupt the woman's unconscious state, undress in the kitchen to avoid leaving traces of their clothes in the bedroom, and wash their hands in hot water. Pélicot didn't ask for money. What he wanted was to give his instructions, observe the rapes in which he himself could participate and film them. The wife does not remember anything except that some evenings she felt particularly tired after dinner and went to bed. According to what was reported in the trial, she was raped at least 92 times by about seventy different perpetrators. Investigators have identified fifty of them: they are between 21 and 68 years old.
Some of them defended themselves by claiming that they had done it because they believed the woman was consenting and that it was an erotic game between the couple. Of course, everyone knew that the woman was sleeping, since in most of the videos recovered the victim was snoring: acts that border on "necrophilia", wrote the expert in charge of drawing up the psychological profiles of the perpetrators of the rapes. The perpetrators of the rapes risk up to twenty years in prison.
For Dominique Pélicot the legal troubles do not end here: in fact he is also accused ofmurder and the rape of a woman in 1991. Next Wednesday he will have to testify in court about what happened in Mazan on September 11th. The trial underway in Avignon should conclude by the end of the year.”
