Stéphane Babonneau and Antoine Camus have spoken a lot, a lot since the trial opened. They asked many more questions than the attorneys general. They are the ones who fought, against the defense, against the president of the Vaucluse criminal court, to obtain that the videos be broadcast publicly, and not behind closed doors. We clung to the calm and rationality of their interventions when the debates became brutal or delirious. Lawyers for civil parties rarely have the leading role in assizes or in criminal court; at the Mazan rape trial, this was the case.
One last time, Wednesday November 20, Gisèle Pelicot's two lawyers had the floor. An hour each, time to plead in the same way they had through the hearing: sober, subtle, elevating the debate without raising their voice.
Antoine Camus got up first, and was initially delighted that his client had renounced the closed session. Yes, it was necessary “open the doors of this room, invite the whole of society to take up this issue, make our debates the breeding ground for awareness, for a change in mentalities, for a better future which would finally break with a violence that we would like from another age. How in France, in 2024, can a woman still suffer what was inflicted on Gisèle Pelicot for at least ten years? How in France, in 2024, can we find 50 individuals within a 50 km radius to enjoy sexually, without the slightest exchange, a body that we would believe to be dead and that we have to roll over to move it? ? »
Opening the doors of this room will also have made it possible, he stressed, to “to show the way in which we still defend rape, in France, in 2024” : Gisèle Pelicot was pushed around, roughed up, humiliated at the hearing by the lawyers of the co-defendants, who sometimes suggested collusion with Dominique Pelicot. Again on Tuesday, some attributed direct responsibility to her in her ex-husband's drift, accusing her of not having known how to interpret the first “signals”. It was further implied that she could not have noticed anything for ten years. Me Camus denounced “a form of courtroom mistreatment” : “Certain defense strategies no longer have their place in a judicial forum in France, in the 21ste century. If the defense is free, it also says what we are. »
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