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Mazan rapes: facing the 51 accused, the victim tells how her world “collapsed”
“My world is falling apart, for me everything is falling apart”: calm and determined, facing her husband and the 50 other men accused of raping her, for ten years, the main victim recounted on Thursday that day of November 2, 2020 when she discovered everything. Drugged with sleeping pills by her husband, who recruited strangers on the internet to come and rape her, Gisèle P., 71, had never realized that since 2011 all these men had abused her. “The police saved my life, by investigating the computer” of her husband, explains the septuagenarian, calm, precise, no longer referring to her husband, from whom she is in the process of divorcing, except by his surname. Then, for nearly an hour and a half, she unfolds her version of this case, for her first speech since the start of an extraordinary trial that began Monday, in Avignon, before the criminal court of Vaucluse. This day in the fall of 2020, the police officers of Carpentras (Vaucluse) asked her to come. Yes, she is married to Dominique P., “a great guy”, “a great guy”, she replies to the investigator who receives her. Then he shows her photos. In the image, “I am inert, in my bed, and I am being raped. These are scenes of barbarity. My world is collapsing, everything is collapsing, everything I have built in 50 years. Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me”, she explains, in front of the court, composed of five professional magistrates. – “Rag doll” – “They consider me a rag doll”, insists the mother, under the gaze of her daughter and her two sons, at her side since the beginning of the hearings. That day, however, she refuses to watch the videos. Which she will only agree to do in May 2024, as the trial approaches, on the advice of her lawyer. “They are each more atrocious than the last,” she insisted on Thursday. “Scenes of barbarity, rapes, I wonder how I managed to hold on,” she added, believing she had been “sacrificed on the altar of vice.” “The body is warm, not cold, but I died on my bed,” she continued. In total, nearly 4,000 photos and videos were found on her husband’s various computers, USB sticks and hard drives. The images of the approximately 200 rapes she suffered in ten years, first in the Paris region, but especially in Mazan, this town in Vaucluse with 6,000 inhabitants where the couple had moved in March 2013. “And don’t talk to me about sex scenes, these are rape scenes, I have never practiced threesomes or swinging, I want to say that”, continues the victim, indirectly responding to the questions put to the director of investigation on Wednesday by the lawyers of some of the accused, who maintain that they had only participated in the scenario of a libertine couple. “I was never an accomplice” nor “pretended to be asleep”, then replies the victim, questioned by Roger Arata, the presiding judge. Of all these men who abused her, she recognizes only one, who had come to the couple’s home in Mazan to discuss cycling with her husband: “I met him from time to time at the bakery, I said hello, I “I didn’t imagine that he had come to rape me.” – “Feeling of disgust” – “I have a feeling of disgust,” she insists, addressing the accused: “Take responsibility for your actions at least once in your life,” she says, after speaking for an hour already, only stopping to drink a glass of water. And she addresses the issue of chemical submission: the anxiolytics that her husband made her swallow, without her knowing, to then deliver her to the men he had lured. “I speak for all these women who are drugged and who don’t know it, I do it on behalf of all these women who may never know it, (…) so that no more women have to suffer chemical submission,” she continues, recalling that this is why she refused on Monday for this trial to take place behind closed doors. In the prisoners’ box, her husband remains head down. He was arrested in September 2020, after filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping center in Carpentras, which would allow the whole affair to be discovered. He had been arrested a first time for similar acts in the Paris region, in 2010. But he had been sentenced to a simple fine of 100 euros, and his wife had never been informed. “There was failure to assist a person in danger. I lost ten years of my life, I will never get them back,” she accused on Thursday.siu-ol/iw/bow
