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From this Monday, September 2, the trial of 51 men accused of raping a Mazanaise woman, including the victim’s husband, begins. In the Vaucluse commune, the scene of the horror, the approach of the trial is upsetting.
When she came across the front page of Provence At the checkout of the pastry shop, Rita (1) was shocked. “Mazan Rapes, the Trial of Horror”, headlined the newspaper on Monday, August 26, reawakening a story that the septuagenarian and the town had preferred to forget. In 2021, when a Mazanais was arrested at the Leclerc in Carpentras, a few kilometers away, we talked about it a little at the morning coffee. The sordid revelations that followed – after the discovery of thousands of photos and videos on Dominique P.’s computer, documenting the rapes he had subjected his wife to while under the influence of medication for a decade and involving dozens of men recruited on the Internet – had fueled conversations, mixing shock and disgust. But the end of the health crisis had diluted the subject, as if the village was not concerned. “If it had been historical Mazanais, it would not have been the same”thinks Rita, who is not part of the inner circle herself, like the couple, who have lived in the town since 2013. Dominique P. and 50 other accused are being tried before the Vaucluse departmental criminal court from this Monday, September 2 until mid-December.
This Wednesday at the end of August, there are still a few tourists on the terraces of the two cafés in the town of 6,000 inhabitants, one of the towns growing in the shadow of Carpentras, the capital of Comtat Venaissin. Mazan is not really the Provence of the m
