AFP
The question of closed hearing raised at the opening of the trial of a husband who had his unconscious wife raped
The trial of Dominique P., a pensioner accused of drugging his wife and recruiting strangers to rape her for ten years at their home in Mazan, in the south of France, opened Monday in Avignon with the first issue being the thorny question of the closed hearing. Will the trial of this extremely rare case involving 50 co-defendants, scheduled to run until December, take place in public, as requested by all the civil parties, including Gisèle P., the wife of the main accused? Or will it take place in the absence of the public and the press, as the attorney general and the defense wished? With her bobbed red hair and round sunglasses, the main victim, Gisèle P., 72, “wants total, public publicity, right to the end” of the proceedings, explained one of her lawyers, Stéphan Babonneau. Like the public prosecutor, several lawyers for the accused opposed the publicity of the proceedings: “It must not be a spectacle”. The Vaucluse criminal court withdrew at the end of the morning to decide this question, after having called the names of the accused. Dominique P., 71, the husband and main accused, a robust man with white hair, dressed in a black t-shirt, was a bit provocative when his identity was checked, saying: “My home, you know it, it’s prison”. – “An extraordinary trial” – In the courtroom, surrounded by their counsel, the accused appearing free, some of them wearing anti-Covid masks on their faces, sometimes wearing sunglasses, in this room that can accommodate around a hundred people. Emblematic of the issue of chemical submission, this trial should be held until December 20 before the criminal court of Vaucluse, composed exclusively of professional magistrates. Before the start of the trial, around fifteen members of two feminist collectives, “Les Amazones d’Avignon” and “Osez le féminisme 84”, demonstrated in front of the courthouse. Dressed in black, they chanted “Rapists, we see you, victims, we believe you”. “This is finally a very concrete trial for a woman but also for all rape victims”, explained to AFP one of them, Anissia Docaigne. “We hope that justice will be uncompromising, with sentences for all the accused,” she added. “It’s an extraordinary trial” because “the main accused wants to take 50 accused with him in his madness,” the lawyer for two defendants, Roland Marmillot, told AFP. The husband admitted that, on certain evenings, he administered powerful anxiolytics to his wife, without her knowledge. Most often Temesta. And he dates the first events from 2011, when the couple still lived in the Paris region, then they continued until the fall of 2020, after the couple moved to Mazan in 2013. The accused, 18 of whom are in pretrial detention, are men aged 21 to 68 at the time of the events. Firefighter, craftsman, nurse, prison guard, or journalist; single, married or divorced. “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, a specialist in sexual violence. The majority of the accused 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”. 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. – “No memories” – And Gisèle P., did not realize anything and learned everything at 68 years old, 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 under the skirts of customers. While searching her computer, the investigators discovered hundreds of photos and videos of her, visibly unconscious, raped by strangers. For her, the trial promises to be “an absolutely terrible ordeal”, confided Me Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers, to AFP. She “will experience for the first time, on a delayed basis, the rapes she suffered for ten years”, because she has “no memory of them”. Dominique P., who participated in the rapes and filmed them, did not claim any financial compensation. Hunted by the “cold cases” unit of Nanterre in the Paris region, the main accused has been 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.dac-siu/ol/pta
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