The second day of the trial of Dominique P., a pensioner tried in Avignon for drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of strangers on the internet to rape her over a ten-year period, opened on Tuesday with the harrowing reading of the long and very crude summary of the facts.
Less than 20 minutes after the start of the hearing, the victim’s daughter, Caroline Darian (her pen name for the book she published in 2022, “And I stopped calling you dad”, Editor’s note) had to leave the room, seized with tremors, at the moment when the president of the criminal court of Vaucluse mentioned a passage concerning her.
President of this criminal court composed of five professional magistrates, Roger Arata coldly began his reading of the summary of a 31-volume case, for which 51 men will be judged over four months, without any prior word for Gisèle P. and her three children, many intimate details of whom will be revealed throughout the day.
“Given the number of accused, the mass of information seized and in order to have information for everyone, the upcoming reading will be concise and focused on the salient points of the case,” Mr. Arata simply specified.
If, without counting the husband, 72 men in total were identified by the investigators, from the photos and videos of the events taken by Dominique P. himself, only 50 were identified and arrested, risking up to 20 years in prison for aggravated rape.
As the president of the Vaucluse criminal court recalled, this case broke out on September 12, 2020, when Dominique P., now 71, was apprehended by a security guard in a supermarket in Carpentras (Vaucluse), after filming customers up their skirts.
When questioned, he explained that he had “acted on impulses” that he “could not control”.
It was when Mr. Arata explained that photomontages of Caroline, naked, were also found on his computer, in a folder entitled “Around my daughter, naked”, that the latter collapsed in tears, supported by her two brothers and her mother.
Then, faced with the litany of details, Ms. Darian left the room trembling, escorted by her two brothers and her lawyer, Me Antoine Camus, before reappearing some twenty minutes later.
Gisèle P., in a white shirt, a small purse in her hand, remained very calm throughout, as if distant.
At the other end of the room, opposite her, her husband and chief aggressor remained impassive as the facts were stated, in the box where the 18 accused detainees appeared.
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