A retired business owner is on trial in France charged with drugging his wife and inviting more than 80 men to rape her over a decade while she was unconscious.
In a case that has shocked France and drawn attention to predators who use chemicals to sedate their victims, Dominique Pélicot, 71, has admitted that he mixed ground sleeping pills and tranquillisers into the food and drink of his wife, Gisèle, 72, as a prelude to the crimes in which he also took part and filmed.
At the start of the trial of Pélicot and 50 men accused of raping her, the presiding judge granted a request by his wife for the proceedings to be public, including playbacks of her ordeals, Antoine Camus, her lawyer, said.
Dominique Pélicot, 72, has admitted to mixing ground sleeping pills into his wife’s food and drink
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“For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over ten years,” he said.
Stéphane Babonneau, another of her lawyers, said: “She wants to raise awareness, as widely as possible, of what happened to her so that events like these never happen again.”
Feminist activists demonstrated outside the court as the trial opened. Protesters want French law to be changed to redefine rape as any sex without consent. The current law defines it as “penetration by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”. They want the law to state explicitly that a rape is committed if the perpetrator uses drugs to “impair the judgment” of the victim.
Mrs Pélicot had been suffering from memory loss and physical symptoms but had been unaware of her abuse until police told her. They had raided their home in Mazan, a town 20 miles from Avignon in southeast France after three women reported her husband for filming under their skirts in a supermarket and found carefully organised records of his sessions.
The couple, who had been together for 40 years and had moved from the Paris area in 2009, have three children and two grandchildren. Mrs Pélicot, who is divorcing her husband, arrived at the court supported by their two sons and daughter. Mr Pélicot, a former employee of EDF, the electricity supplier, who went on to create an electrical supplies firm, was described as a kind and considerate family man.
Gisèle Pélicot arrives at court with her son, David, centre
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Police spent two years looking for men who had been invited by Pélicot on a French website used by sexual predators, which has now closed, to have sex with his wife, supposedly with her consent, as part of a fantasy involving submission.
They identified 92 rapes committed by 83 men and tracked down 50. Aged between 26 and 74, they include builders, office workers, pensioners, a soldier, a journalist, a prison guard, an electrician and a fireman.
All have admitted their actions but most argued that they believed Pélicot’s claim that his wife, who was said by experts to have been in a near comatose state, had consented to the acts as part of a “libertine” scenario.
Some said they believed she had sedated herself and others said they believed she was pretending to be unconscious. Some argued that Pélicot had the right to “do what he likes with his wife”.
Most men visited once, but some returned up to six times. Only three men left the house after finding out that the victim was unconscious.
Béatrice Zavarro, Pélicot’s lawyer, said he had “always declared himself guilty” and was not contesting the charges. He wanted his co-defendants to recognise their involvement in his crimes rather than blaming him, she said. Rape carries a 20-year maximum sentence.
Pélicot is also facing trial for an attempted rape in 1999 and a rape and murder in 1991, having recently been identified through DNA traces recorded at the time. He admits the attempted rape and denies the rape and murder.
His daughter, Caroline Darian, wrote a book in 2022 about the case involving her mother, titled And I Stopped Calling You Papa. She also founded an association called Don’t Put Me To Sleep, to raise awareness of drug-induced crimes. “This case is revealing about what is going on in our society,” she said. The perpetrators “are kids, old men, they are everyone”, she told Le Parisien newspaper.
Sandrine Josso, a French MP, began campaigning against “chemical submission” this year after a senator was charged with putting the drug ecstasy into her champagne glass to assault her. “Chemical submission is the perfect crime,” she said.
