The accused, 18 of whom are in pre-trial detention, are men, aged between 21 and 68 at the time of the events.
Firefighter, craftsman, nurse, prison guard, or journalist; single, married or divorced: the morning will be devoted to the calling of the accused, who will have to state their identity and profession. “There is no typical profile of a rapist. The rapist is Mr. Everyman,” explained to AFP Véronique Le Goaziou, associate researcher at the Mediterranean Sociology Laboratory, specialist in sexual violence before trial.
The majority came once, ten times several times, sometimes up to six nights. They do not suffer from any notable psychological pathology, according to experts, who nevertheless point out their feeling of “omnipotence” over the female body.
Many maintain that they only thought they were participating in the fantasies of a libertine couple.
But, according to the husband and main accused, now 71 years old, “everyone knew” that his wife was drugged without his knowledge. And for the investigation, “each individual had free will” and could have “left the premises”.
A total of 92 rapes have been recorded. Since 2011, when the couple still lived in the Paris region, but mainly from 2013, after their move to Mazan (Vaucluse), a town of 6,000 inhabitants, and until 2020. Each time, the former EDF employee administered a powerful anxiolytic to his wife.
For the men, recruited on coco.fr, a dating site closed since June because it was accused of being a den of sexual predators, the instructions were strict, so as not to wake the victim: no perfume or smell of cigarettes, and warm your hands by running them under hot water.
‘I was his thing’: How a pensioner invited over 80 people to rape his sedated wife for ten years
“No memory”
And Gisèle P., the ex-wife, did not realize anything and learned everything at the age of 68, when the investigation began in the fall of 2020, after almost 50 years of living together: her husband had just been caught in a shopping center filming up the skirts of customers.
While searching her computer, investigators discovered numerous photos and videos of her, visibly unconscious, raped by strangers.
For her, the trial promises to be “an absolutely terrible ordeal,” confided Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers, who is also defending her three children and five grandchildren. She “will experience for the first time, in a delayed manner, the rapes she suffered for ten years,” because she has “no memory of them,” he explained to AFP before the trial opened.
Along with the other civil parties, Gisèle P. will be heard on Thursday, after two days devoted to reading the investigation report (Tuesday) and hearing the investigators’ testimony (Wednesday), according to a provisional schedule providing for 69 days of hearings.
Dominique P., who participated in the rapes and filmed them, did not demand any financial compensation.
The man, who says he is ready to “confront his wife, his family”, according to his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, should be questioned on September 10 by the court, which will consider the cases of four other accused in the following days.
The trial will then progress in groups of five to seven accused each week, for more than two months, in order to dissect the responsibilities of each in a 31-volume procedural file.
The indictment is scheduled for November 13 and 14, before three weeks of pleadings by the defendants’ lawyers. The deliberations could last from December 9 to 13, but the criminal court has given itself some leeway by setting the final trial date as December 20.
Hunted by the Nanterre “cold cases” unit in the Paris region, the main accused was implicated in two other cases, a murder with rape in Paris in 1991 which he denies, and an attempted rape in Seine-et-Marne in 1999, which he admits to, after being caught by his DNA.
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