For Vanessa P., who “no longer has any consideration for” her ex-partner, the anger was cold. Like around fifty other men, aged 26 to 74, Quentin H., 34, then a prison guard, had responded to Dominique Pelicot's invitation to come and rape his wife, at their marital home in Mazan (Vaucluse). ). “When we see what he is accused of, we can doubt everything”, “he is a manipulator”, added this auxiliary childcare worker, without glancing at her former partner.
“Manipulator”, a term also used by Emilie O., 33 years old, about Hugues M., 39 years old. Their union ended in November 2020, when the facts targeting Dominique Pelicot and her husband were revealed. Along the way, she discovered the multiple extramarital affairs of the man who shared her life. “I thought I would live a peaceful and fulfilling life, but I was wrong.” Since then, she has lived with the doubt of having herself been a victim of chemical submission, like Gisèle Pelicot, doused with anxiolytics and raped for ten years by her husband and these fifty men he had recruited on the internet.
To “protect children”
A doubt that Cilia M. no longer has: between 2015 and 2018, her husband, Jean-Pierre M., 63 years old, and Dominique Pelicot, 71 years old, raped her around ten times by reproducing the process used on her on Gisèle. “He was a wonderful person. He destroyed us,” she testified, specifying that she would “never forgive” her ex-husband, whose name she however kept and against whom she refused to file a complaint, to “protect their five children” .
Others still wonder, even if it means finding excuses for their ex-companions. “He was always respectful: when it was no, it was no. He never insisted […] I absolutely do not understand why he is here today,” lamented Corinne M., already separated from her husband, Thierry P., at the time of the acts with which she is accused.
Their relationship had been broken up by the death of their son in a road accident following which Thierry P. had fallen into alcoholism.
“He wanted to look elsewhere”
Samira T. has been looking for “answers to (her) questions for three and a half years” about her companion, Jérôme V., accused of having raped Gisèle Pelicot six times in 2020. But she has not not left and she persists in “supporting” him: “if we met, it’s not by chance, I had this mission”. “He had no reason to look elsewhere,” added, in tears, the woman who had nevertheless accepted his requests for almost daily sexual relations, “at 10 p.m.”, taking intimate photos or even naked walks. .
Going so far as to accuse herself, Hien B. feels responsible “for having refused all the time” the advances of her husband, Jean-Luc L., at a time when she was taking care of her sick mother. : “I think that as a man he wanted to look elsewhere.”
Like her, Sonia R., in relationship with Patrice N. for 16 months, only wants to think about “the future”: “I support him and give him my total trust. For me there is a present and there will be an after, whatever it costs, whatever happens, whatever happens.”
“In cases of sexual violence, those close to the accused sometimes have difficulty imagining the violence themselves, because it is beyond their comprehension,” explains Véronique Le Goaziou, associate researcher at the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology and specialist in sexual violence: “And, in certain cases, they do not give credence to the facts reported by the victims: they cannot or do not want to believe it”.
And added: “Sexual violence does not only impact the perpetrators and their victims, […] Entire families suffer the consequences. […] As for (the companions), they are in a form of astonishment.”
