The Mazan rape trial has been suspended until Monday morning, pending the return of Dominique Pelicot, the main accused in this case, announced the president of the Vaucluse criminal court, Roger Arata, on Thursday, September 12.
The 71-year-old pensioner has been ill since Monday and has been excused from court hearings. If he were “permanently unavailable”the case would then be “returned”added the magistrate, thus referring to the pure and simple stopping of this trial, which began on September 2 and was scheduled to last until December, and its postponement to a later date.
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“Either Pelicot is there [lundi], and we continue. If he is not there for one, two or three days, we will extend the suspension.”Mr. Arata first said. “But if he is permanently unavailable, the case will be postponed.”he continued.
This announcement by the president of the criminal court has caused confusion among the defense lawyers and the civil parties. “Understand who can”reacted thus M.e Antoine Camus, one of the two lawyers for the civil parties, Gisèle Pelicot, the main victim in this case, and the couple’s three children.
A decade of rape
If this is a referral, then “Everything has to be re-established, a schedule, the availability of the room, the court, etc. And what about those who are in detention? Because at that point, I can assume that there will be requests for release.”for his part, confirmed Me Béatrice Zavarro, the lawyer of Mr. Pelicot, the man who, for ten years, from July 2011 to October 2020, drugged his wife with anxiolytics and then raped her and had her raped by dozens of men recruited on the Internet.
Everything had come to light after Mr. Pelicot had been arrested filming up the skirts of three women in a shopping center in Carpentras (Vaucluse). It was while searching his computer that investigators had discovered this decade of rapes, photographed, filmed and meticulously captioned and archived by the accused.
Alongside him, 50 men, aged 26 to 74, are being tried in Avignon, most of them charged with aggravated rape, for which they face twenty years of criminal imprisonment. Eighteen of these accused, including Mr. Pelicot, appear in custody. Thirty-two others appear free, the last one, on the run, being tried in absentia.
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Covered by media around the world, having become the symbol of the issue of rape under chemical submission, this trial of the Mazan rapes is also taken as an example by feminist movements to relaunch the debate on the issue of consent.
Mme Pelicot is even becoming a symbol of the fight against sexual violence. His stylized face, with the slogan “Shame changes sides”is thus used for a call to demonstrate on Friday at 1 p.m. in Avignon, “against rape culture”. Numerous calls for demonstrations have also been launched for Saturday across France, in support of Mr.me Pelicot and to all rape victims.
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