The lawyer, the first to stand up on the defense bench before the Vaucluse criminal court, delivered an atypical plea in favor of Dominique Pelicot, against whom the maximum sentence, twenty years of criminal imprisonment, was requested on Monday by the public prosecutor.
But what could she say to defend the man some call the monster of Mazan, this rapist whose darkness remained unfathomable, despite 55 long days in court?
“Despite myself, I became the devil’s advocate” recognizes this Wednesday, November 27 at the Vaucluse criminal court, Me Béatrice Zavarro, Dominique Pelicot's lawyer.
Twenty years required for the accused on Monday
On Monday, the prosecution requested the maximum sentence, twenty years, against the septuagenarian who raped and had his sedated wife raped for more than ten years.
Coincidence: this Wednesday, he celebrates his 72nd birthday. As a gift, she offers him an atypical pleading, neither technical nor polemical. “In the oath that I took, there is the humanity that makes me turn to you, Ms. Pelicot, to tell you how much I respect the dignity and the measure that you have demonstrated at this bar.” She mentions their “love at first sight at 19. They will be in love and will have three beautiful children.
Growing up in a harmful family climate
And it is in the words of Dominique Pelicot that the lawyer weaves the thread of her remarks. “He wrote to me: she made me forget everything, she made me become someone, and today, I have become nothing again, as before.”
Before, in “this deleterious family climate” in which he grew up, with this mother, successive wife of two brothers and victim of a perverted husband. This father whom he hates and who repays him, of whom he thinks in the evening of his life in a strange mirror effect.
Images of rape burned into his head
“In November 2023, he wrote to me, history repeats itself”continues the lawyer. “My children will not come to pay their respects at my grave. I did no better than the one I hated” Hated, after these images of the abuse he imposed on his wife, which remained engraved in his head, like those of the rape he says he suffered at the age of 8 in the hospital. And the other, a collective in which we would have liked to have him participate at 14 years old, on a construction site.
Dominique Pelicot said it, psychiatric experts confirmed it: “We are not born perverse, we become one.” And the lawyer highlights the paradoxes. “He doesn’t want violence and he himself is very violent.”
Chemical submission as protection?
Gisèle's chemical submission? “Perhaps a form of protection to spare the one he loves. Films are necessary to engrave things.” His fantasy? “He spoke” continues the lawyer, who quotes him again. “It’s seeing her having fun with someone else, seeing her touched by someone else.”
Today, “he plunged into solitude and had the courage not to be a coward, otherwise he would no longer be here.”
And the lawyer quotes it again when addressing Gisèle and her family. “He waited 1,000 times to ask for forgiveness. I don't know if you will hear it but he asks for it again. Keep in mind this first Dominic, forget the one for whom I pleaded, keep the one who pampered you, pampered you and deeply loved.”
A final poem for Gisèle
A man who is perhaps his most lucid judge. “One day, he told me, I went to the end of myself to see that there was no one there” concludes the lawyer. She finally reads a poem that he wrote to Gisèle and which ends like this: “I know that one day somewhere else we will see each other again, we will hopefully be able to talk about all that again.”
A final proof of love, or of perversity? Gisèle's eyes are red, but she grits her teeth and doesn't shed a tear.
