has been found guilty of aggravated rape of Gisèle Pelicot; attempted rape and aggravated rape of C. Marechal [la mujer de Jean-Pierre Marechal, el llamado “discípulo” de Pelicot]and other derived crimes such as the dissemination of prejudiced images of his ex-wife. His sentence will be 20 years in prison, the maximum for these crimes. He raped his wife for at least nine years, while she was sedated with tranquilizers that he gave her hidden in food or drink. So did at least 71 other men, of whom 50 were identified by the police and have also been found guilty, mostly of aggravated rape; and also, for the most part, the sentences are below what the prosecution had requested. The family, in the room, shakes their head no while the court reads the sentences.
Pelicot, who has listened to his sentence without expressing any emotion, contacted the men online and offered them to go to his family home, sneak in and sexually assault his wife, to whom he had been married for 50 years. Gisèle Pelicot was only aware of all this when she saw the videos at the police station. Today he is 72 years old, has three children and a life crossed by a half-century black hole. Also, that is his particular victory in the midst of indescribable suffering, the feeling that the horror experienced will not have been in vain.
All the accused were recorded by Dominique Pelicot. There is irrefutable evidence for all of them, although only 16 apologized to the victim and some remained at the end of the trial without acknowledging what they did, even though it was recorded. It doesn’t matter. What mattered were two things. First, understand the reasons for the horror. Something that can hardly be answered. Second, observe the impact and capacity for transformation that this case may have on society. And that is due, fundamentally, to how the victim decided it would develop.
Gisèle Pelicot, who heard the sentence accompanied by her three deeply moved children, opted at the beginning of the process for the possibility of it being open. That is, the public and journalists could enter, take notes and tell it. Something completely unusual in this type of trial, where victims often feel unfairly ashamed of what happened and prefer anonymity. “It is time for shame to change sides,” she proclaimed on the first day in court before the cameras, one of the few times she has spoken to the media. The phrase, an old slogan of feminism, immediately became a banner of the process and of a fight, or rather a first assault, that lasted 5 weeks (it began on Monday, September 2 in Avignon and lasted until this past Monday , December 16).
It all started in a supermarket in Carpentras, in the French region of Provence. Or rather, it all ended there. On September 12, 2020, the establishment’s security guard, one of those secondary characters who actually determine the depth of the stories, saw a man filming several women upskirt with his phone. “Your phone records well from there, eh?” he asked that supposed client. The sworn guard alerted the women, continued to scold the man who was recording and locked him in a room of the supermarket until the police arrived. That man was Dominique Pelicot and he had just reached the end of the journey to horror that had dragged his wife on for at least a decade.
The police questioned Pelicot and released him. He seemed like a simple voyeur. An old man with impulses voyeuristas. But another secondary character, Laurent Perré, one of the police officers who was in charge of the case, decided to ask the judge to search the man’s house. When the agents entered, they found a computer and a hard drive with more than 20,000 videos and photographs in which, mainly, Gisèle Pelicot, the wife of that retiree, appeared being raped by dozens of different men while she, apparently, was asleep or sedated That same police officer was in charge of calling the victim, who was absolutely unaware of everything that had happened to him during those years in which he suffered dizziness, sexually transmitted diseases and a strange drowsiness caused by the sleeping pills that he unconsciously consumed. “You have to see some images,” he heard on the other end of the phone. And there the last 50 years of his life stopped making sense.
The first attack, orchestrated by the person whom she described the day she was called to the police station as “a great guy,” dates back to September 2013, according to the analysis of computer equipment: several SIM cards, a video camera, a camera and a hard drive with more than twenty thousand photographs and videos. The investigation also reveals that at least 72 men passed through that house in Mazan, a town in the southwest of France. But only 51, including Dominique Pelicot, were charged.
The case came to light four years ago, but it was in September, at the beginning of the process, when all the details became known. Dominique Pelicot had been offering dozens of men on a dating and swinging website to his wife, to whom he had been married for 50 years. He did not ask for money or other remuneration. Only discretion and being able to film or photograph those men who periodically entered his house to rape his wife while she was sedated with the tranquilizers that he administered to her hidden in the food. They did whatever they wanted with it, many even avoided using protection, despite having contagious diseases like HIV.
The profiles of the 50 accused – 32 free and 18 detained – are varied in personal and professional terms: journalist, worker, nurse, gardener, firefighter… Their lives, in general, seem ordinary and simply attached to the system, although the The years that many of them have spent in prison have darkened their appearance. The accused were between 27 and 74 years old, most were from towns no more than an hour from Mazan – the place where the Pelicots lived and where the rapes took place. Also that the majority of attacks occur in a domestic setting or that the weapons used are simply the home medicine cabinet.
We could all be the monster, the rumor that emanates from the defenses of the accused indicates. And that has been, in part, the cry of what in France is usually called neofeminism, one of the several currents that often confront each other within activism for the defense of women’s rights. An idea that continues to divide a country that, however, will not be the same again after this trial, to which the press from all over the world (about 200 media outlets are present at the reading of the sentence) gave name, surname and face during these four months.
