Béatrice Zavarro, Dominique Pelicot's lawyer, tried in her pleading, Wednesday November 27, to explain the reasons which led her client to become the “conductor” of the rapes of Mazan (Vaucluse), while recalling the humanity of “the other Dominique”the “good father and grandfather”. “Isn't Dominique Pelicot's worst enemy Dominique Pelicot? »she asked herself, proposing to the court to move away “some of what the prosecution demanded most strongly”namely the maximum sentence, of twenty years of criminal imprisonment, requested Monday by the public prosecutor.
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For a little over an hour, Mme Zavarro recalled the traumas Dominique Pelicot went through in his childhood before he plunged into “perverseness”, “this gear” which led him for ten years to drug, rape and have his now ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, raped at their home by dozens of strangers recruited on the Internet.
“Criminal scheme”
Repeating a phrase used by his client during his first interrogation before the Vaucluse criminal court – “we are not born perverse, we become one” –, she considered that “this formula makes the other Dominic, the one for whom [elle] plead (…)the one who is divisive ». “This other Dominique is endowed with a certain perversity, but before that there is a man. »
Mme Zavarro thus recalled the “three facts that will mark him forever” : “the deleterious family climate” where he grew up, with a father “tyrannical” ; the rape he says he suffered by a nurse during hospitalization when he was a child; and what he describes as his forced participation in the rape of a young woman on a construction site when he was an apprentice.
The lawyer also highlighted that the couple's move to the south of France and the fact that Gisèle Pelicot “could satisfy all his fantasies” could have been triggering elements “his criminal pattern”.
She concluded her argument by reading the passage from a letter from her client to Gisèle Pelicot, their three children and their grandchildren: “Without you, I am nothing. » “I know we’ll see each other again somewhere else. We can, I hope, talk about all that again”she then continued.
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