“It is an endurance race, but it obviously remains combative and determined to go to the end, because it is also carried by this outpouring of support which goes beyond the borders of France,” explained Antoine Camus, one of his lawyers. “She very regularly receives numerous testimonies which support her and which help her, in this marathon which she is not doing only for herself”, insisted Me Camus.
« On fatigue »
Of the 51 accused in this extraordinary trial, emblematic of the questions of chemical submission and consent, already 36 have paraded, since September 2, before the criminal court of Vaucluse, which will have to pronounce its verdict on December 20, in individualizing for each of these men aged 26 to 74 years. Most are being prosecuted for aggravated rape and risk up to 20 years in prison.
A sentence from which the “conductor” of these rapes, Dominique Pelicot, will have difficulty escaping, he who for almost a decade had drugged his ex-wife with anxiolytics before raping her and making her raped by these fifty strangers recruited on the internet, at their marital home in Mazan (Vaucluse). Facts that he always recognized. Among the 50 co-defendants, on the other hand, very few admit, persisting in having been invited or even lured, by Dominique Pelicot, to participate in the scenario of a libertine couple. And almost all of them claim not to have had the “intent” to rape Gisèle Pelicot.
“We are tired. Gisèle Pelicot is very tired of hearing almost systematically the same explanations from the accused on the legal ground of intention, […] hearing that she was the victim of rape 'by accident', of rape 'by error of judgment', of rape 'unwillingly'. Ultimately, what we come to explain to her is that she is a victim exclusively of her husband,” said Mr. Camus.
HIV-positive repeat offender
The eight accused whose cases will be studied from Monday are Saifeddine G., 36-year-old truck driver; Paul G., 31-year-old worker, aged 22 at the time of the events; Omar D., 36-year-old maintenance worker; Cendric V., 42-year-old restaurant manager; Cédric G., a 50-year-old computer technician, who had planned to reproduce the same chemical submission process on his own wife; or Romain V., a 63-year-old HIV-positive single man who went to Mazan six times, without ever wearing a condom.
Hassan O., 30, still subject to an international arrest warrant, will be tried in absentia. Ludovick B., a 41-year-old unemployed temporary worker, is suspected of having raped Gisèle Pelicot in 2019, with the complicity of her ex-husband, at the home of their own daughter, Caroline Darian, in the Paris region. On the first day of the trial, like 35 other defendants, he denied any rape, prompting mocking laughter from Ms. Darian.
After following the hearings for several weeks, the latter had recently no longer appeared on the civil parties' bench, alongside her mother. On Instagram at the end of October, she published a photo of herself accompanied by a text indicating that she had “decided to return to the clinic for several days, in order to recover all (her) energy, to be able to sleep again (and to ) make up for weeks of repeated insomnia.” “And above all to be able to fully and properly confront one of the greatest sexual predators and manipulators of the last 20 or 30 years,” she continued, referring to this father whom she only describes as “ progenitor”.
