Romain V., the accused who came to the Pelicots six times in search of “social connection”

When he was born in 1961, Romain V. was called Jean-Marie, like his father. He changed his first name in 2013 because he could no longer bear that of this man who had made his childhood a never-ending nightmare. We should also start by saying that his father is perhaps not only his father, but also his brother: according to a sister of Romain V., the latter would in fact be the son of their grandfather, who would have slept with their mother. So much for the foundations of an existence where everything that could go wrong went wrong.

Before the Vaucluse criminal court, Tuesday November 5 and Wednesday November 6, this accused, a scrawny 63-year-old, described a childhood made up of chores, humiliation and abuse, lived in the permanent terror of a violent father and an accomplice mother. As an adult, he will experience a fleeting desire for fatherhood; he will judge it better not to have children, “for fear of reproducing the family pattern”.

On the stand, Romain V. also recounted the rape he suffered in his childhood by a stranger (“in a field, then [qu’il cherchait] grass for rabbits ») and the recurring sexual touching of a priest, a family friend, within the parental home, where he remained until he came of age, “not another day”.

“Ocean of Abominations”

What followed was hardly happier. His marriage, at age 20, lasted only three months, the time his wife met another man while he was away doing his military service. His occupational illness, “the forklift driver’s disease”made him unemployed in 2011 and has meant he has been living on disabled adults' allowance ever since. His journey made him a fragile man, withdrawn into himself, alone. He cried throughout the story of his life, presented at the bar by the personality investigator, who herself confided that she had never met in her career an accused who had accumulated so much misfortune.

The list of charges against Romain V. is long: he is one of the four repeat offenders in the case, who came to Mazan six times – between December 2019 and June 2020 for his part. Aggravating circumstance at first sight: he has been HIV positive since 2004 – which he had not told Dominique Pelicot – and never wore a condom during the numerous penetrations imposed on Gisèle Pelicot, for whom learning this constituted, according to his lawyers, “a high point in this ocean of abomination”.

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