“Ludo de Villiers”, “biker”, “Cédric” or “Luc Pizza”… Behind these nicknames, no man has been identified. For lack of images or saved by photos that were too blurry, how many men who raped Gisèle Pelicot escaped justice? At the Mazan rape trial, where 51 men were tried, found guilty and sentenced by the Vaucluse criminal court, this question remains unanswered.
Hidden behind nicknames like “Laurent du Vaucluse”, “routier” or “Luc Pizza”, these men had also been lured by Dominique Pelicot on the site coco.fr. To them too the sixty-year-old, now 72 years old, had handed over his wife, knocked out with anxiolytics and totally unconscious, for ten years, between July 2011 and October 2020. Like the others, he had photographed and filmed them, then carefully storing these images on his computer or various hard drives.
59 men judged out of 72 visible
Despite the meticulous work of investigators, praised by Gisèle Pelicot herself at the hearing, an identity could never be associated with these files. As for the photos of the first referenced rape of Gisèle Pelicot, the night of July 23 to 24, 2011, when the couple was still living in the Paris region, in Villiers-sur-Marne. Or for the video of his last attacker, “the biker”, the night of October 22 to 23, 2020, in Mazan.
In total, some 200 rapes against Gisèle Pelicot were recorded by investigators, based on videos and photos taken by her now ex-husband, including more than a hundred by Dominique Pelicot himself. For the other proven sequences of rape on Gisèle Pelicot, 72 perpetrators are visible. Around fifty were finally tried by the Vaucluse criminal court, in Avignon, and sentenced on December 19. Of which 17 have appealed and should be retried, between September and December 2025.
Photos too blurry
But several escaped justice. Karim K., for example, died before the trial, and when the police came to arrest him, Jean-Pierre H. had just been buried. For the others, it was impossible to identify them. “We have certain people who we saw very blurry and we could not get a photo,” explained the investigating judge in charge of this investigation, on November 8, in court, during an extraordinary trial. almost four months.
For others, there were sometimes usable images, but which did not correspond to any photo already recorded by the justice system in the TAJ (Processing of Judicial Affairs) file or could not be associated with any telephone number. And neither facial recognition software nor searches via social networks have been able to give them a name.
“We could have investigated for ten years”
“In consultation with the judicial police, we decided to stop the investigations at one point. We could have investigated for ten years,” said the magistrate during her hearing, emphasizing the need for a fairly rapid trial, particularly for the victim.
The first of these strangers invited by Dominique Pelicot to their home in Mazan, this town in Vaucluse where the couple had moved to retire in early March 2013, “Richard” was never identified either. He came on the night of September 25, 2013. Likewise, “Black Villiers”, “Ludo de Villiers”, “Cédric”, “Pascal”, “Serge” or even “Olivier” will never be found again. No more than “Michel”, who wore sandals, “a little bit like a monk”, according to Dominique Pelicot’s details to investigators.
Our file on the Mazan rape case
A lack of images
Then there are these possible rapists who have slipped through the cracks of justice due to lack of images. Like the truck drivers to whom Dominique Pelicot told two of his co-defendants, Christian L. and Patrice N., that he had handed over his wife to motorway rest areas, before retracting this before the investigators. The facts allegedly took place during a return from vacation on the Ile de Ré, in May 2019, and during a return from Normandy.
Among the files found on Dominique Pelicot's computer equipment, but without images, the investigators had notably detected a file entitled “road workers of November 24, 2018”, “road workers” in the plural therefore. A person who ultimately would not have come, he had justified himself.
