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At the Mazan rape trial, the long-awaited speech of Dominique Pelicot
Not to “flee”, “explain”: accused of having drugged, raped and had his wife raped by dozens of men recruited on the internet, Dominique Pelicot is to speak on Tuesday in Avignon, for the first time since the opening of his trial. If his health allows it. “Since the beginning, he has told me that he is waiting for this trial. Since the beginning, he has told me that he will explain himself,” repeated his counsel, Me Béatrice Zavarro, on Monday, during a break in the hearing, on the sixth day of this trial which opened on September 2 before the criminal court of Vaucluse and is scheduled to last four months. “That’s the first thing he told me this morning, that he absolutely wanted to be there tomorrow, that he does not intend to flee,” insisted the lawyer of the septuagenarian, excused from the hearing on Monday due to intestinal pain. “He will explain the reasons why he did that. He will explain himself, he will justify himself, if justification was still needed for (what he did), because it is unforgivable,” Me Zavarro told AFP last week. Dominique Pelicot, who had followed the proceedings until then without reacting, sometimes huddled on himself, should be heard from 4:00 p.m. And his questioning could last until late Tuesday evening, as the court, the counsel for the civil parties and those of his 50 co-accused will have so many questions to ask him. If necessary, his hearing could continue on Wednesday, said the presiding judge Roger Arata on Monday evening: “Mr. Pelicot was in care today (Editor’s note: Monday), he returned to the remand center. I was not given any details on the care he received and no more information on whether he will be there tomorrow.” For their part, the experts heard on Monday have already warned about the comments that this “manipulator” could make: “Even if he apologized, the problem is that he is divided, with zero empathy,” warned Dr. Paul Bensussan, psychiatrist. – “No propensity for sincerity” – “We can’t count on Mr. Pelicot, he lies, contradicts himself” and “adapts as we go along”, “there is no propensity for sincerity” in him, he insisted. Other experts heard on Monday also mentioned the main accused’s penchant “to consider the other as an object that can be manipulated”. “He only delivers part of the truth when he is put against the wall”, his daughter, Caroline Darian (Editor’s note: her pen name under which she published a book in April, “Et j’ai arrêt de t’appelle”) accused on Thursday. “dad”), assuring that she no longer believed anything about the man she now refers to as her “genitor”, or “Mr. Pelicot”. Before hearing Dominique Pelicot on Tuesday, the Vaucluse criminal court, composed of professional judges, heard his ex-wife on Thursday, from whom he has been officially divorced since August 22. “In 50 years, I have never seen him say an inappropriate sentence about a woman or use obscene words”, she assured, during a moving testimony, recounting this “attractive young man, sailor sweater, long hair” with whom she had “fallen in love” in the summer of 1971, forming with him “a fusional couple”, without “power struggle”. She could be heard again on Wednesday morning. Before the main accused speaks, the criminal court should first hear in the morning Stéphan Gal, the second director of investigation of this extraordinary case with Jérémie Bosse Platière, who was questioned last week. Then it should be the turn of the computer expert, who had been tasked with searching the computers, hard drives, telephones and other USB keys of the main accused, in which the thousands of photos and videos of the rapes of Gisèle Pelicot had been found. The hearings of her two sons David and Florian, her son-in-law Pierre P., and her brother, Joël Pelicot, a retired general practitioner, initially scheduled for Monday afternoon, have not yet been rescheduled.siu-dac/ol/lpa
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