For the first time, victim Gisèle Pelicot lost her temper on Wednesday at the trial of the serial rapes in Mazan in the south of France, expressing her feeling of humiliation in the face of the insinuations of certain lawyers about the rapes she suffered, telling them: “A rape is a rape!”
• Also read: Serial rape trial in France: the main accused’s emulator, a “rapist” with a violent childhood
• Also read: Decade of rapes in Mazan: husband admits to being a “rapist” and asks for forgiveness
“Since I arrived in this courtroom, I feel humiliated. They call me an alcoholic, that I get into such a state of drunkenness that I am an accomplice of Mr. Pelicot,” her ex-husband who handed her over to men after drugging her, she stated before the criminal court of Vaucluse, in Avignon.
“It’s so humiliating and degrading to hear this!”
“In the state I was in, I absolutely could not answer anyone. I was in a coma and the videos that we are going to broadcast will be able to attest to that. And the experts were shocked by these videos, and they are men,” she explained.
“The 50 behind didn’t ask themselves the question (of consent)? What are these men, are they degenerates or what?” thundered this 72-year-old woman who is said to have been the victim of some 200 rapes, 92 of which were committed by 50 co-accused who have been tried since September 2 alongside her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot.
“Not for a second did I give my consent to Mr. Pelicot or to these men behind it,” she stressed.
“There is no such thing as ‘rape and rape’. Rape is rape,” said Ms Pelicot, referring to the comments of a lawyer who had considered that there was “rape and rape”, seeming to minimise the real intention of some of the accused, many of whom claim to have thought they were taking part in a sexual game between a libertine couple.
“I explained that there was rape in its media and legal sense. If the remarks hurt you, could shock you, I am sorry. That was not my intention. My intention was to recall the rules of law,” replied the lawyer Guillaume De Palma.
“I am a rapist”
Photos of the acts committed against Gisèle Pelicot between 2011 and 2020 were also broadcast for the first time at the hearing on Wednesday afternoon at the request of defense lawyers.
On Wednesday morning, like Dominique Pelicot the day before, the first of the 50 other co-accused, Jean-Pierre M., 63, admitted to being “a rapist”.
He is the only one not to be prosecuted for sexual assaults on Gisèle Pelicot, but on his own wife, on whom he had modeled the same criminal scenario developed by Dominique Pelicot.
“I love her, my wife. I will do everything to be well. I am in prison and I deserve it. I have done despicable acts. I am a criminal and a rapist,” this former employee of a cooperative clearly stated, adding: “What I did is horrible, I want a harsh punishment.”
The two men had met on the website coco.fr. The main accused in the Mazan rapes had first suggested that he “rape” Gisèle “several times”. But “I refused”, said Jean-Pierre M.
Asked whether Dominique Pelicot had made it clear to him that Gisèle would be “drugged and that he was looking for a man for his sleeping and medicated wife”, he answered in the affirmative, undermining an argument regularly put forward by defence lawyers according to which their clients had not been informed of this procedure.
“If I had not known Mr. Pelicot, I would never have taken action. He was reassuring and imposing,” said Jean-Pierre M.
He detailed the times when, as a child, he had to perform oral sex on his father as a “reward” for being able to go fishing with his sister. He also recounted the scenes of his father raping his mother that he had to witness.
Since the beginning of the Mazan trial, which has had a strong impact in France and abroad, feminist activists and associations have once again called on men to “finally take responsibility” in the fight against violence against women and to “no longer remain silent”.
In France, some men like the journalist Karim Rissouli have also publicly called for awareness: “This is perhaps the first major trial of masculinity where we collectively become aware that our way of being men in this country for centuries has consequences.”
