The investigating judge on the grill at the Mazan rape trial

Was the investigation into the Mazan rapes exhaustive? Was it only dependent? The investigating judge in this sprawling case was questioned at length on Friday, with defense lawyers citing possible failings.

“On a case of this magnitude, we can easily do 10 years of investigation. We wanted to be pragmatic and efficient so that Mr. Pelicot could be judged within a reasonable time,” replied Gwenola Journot immediately before the Vaucluse criminal court.

Called to testify by a defense lawyer, Me Isabelle Crépin-Dehaene, who since the start of the trial has sometimes provoked the anger of the civil parties and in particular of Gisèle Pelicot for her questions leaving open the possibility of complicity on her part, the magistrate calmly explained the choices of her investigation.

Opened in November 2020, it was closed in June 2023: summarizing 31 volumes of investigation, the 370-page indictment order sent 51 men to trial: Dominique Pelicot, the husband, described as “the leader orchestra”, and his 50 co-defendants whom he had recruited on the internet to come and rape his wife at their home in Mazan after he had drugged her with anxiolytics.

The tension rose crescendo Friday morning in Avignon, with the volley of questions from Me Crépin-Dehaene, lawyer for two co-defendants. What about the thesis according to which the accused were also drugged without their knowledge by Dominique Pelicot, as some put forward?

“I don’t remember having considered it, because none of the accused appears sedated on the videos,” retorts the magistrate. Raised on this point, the judge assures that according to one of the accused himself, “this thesis had been advised to him by another indicted”.

“Why did it take 18 months to use the site’s data? Coco.fr?,” where Dominique Pelicot had met his wife’s future attackers, the lawyer responds. “It is a great regret. I made a requisition myself by registered mail and I never heard back from the site,” regrets the magistrate.

Why was Dominique Pelicot’s third phone not exploited? “I don’t remember the number of Mr. Pelicot’s telephones,” replied the judge.

“Why not use Madame’s telephone line?” then insists Me Crépin-Dehaene. “I didn’t see the point in it,” retorted the magistrate, wondering if the lawyer was not still “in the thesis of Gisèle Pelicot’s complicity”. “I am not in favor of anything at all. I have no accusation against anyone,” defends the lawyer.

Another lawyer, Me Caroline Beveraggi, counsel for an accused, asks why the doctor who delivered so many anxiolytics to Dominique Pelicot for a decade was not heard. “He would have refused to answer: you cannot force someone to speak. And that is not the subject of this case,” says the judge.

Why, during the investigation, did you “use the term rape” with the accused, which could have influenced them, then reproaches Me Emile-Henri Biscarrat, counsel for two accused? “When you look at the videos, objectively, it’s rape. Afterwards, that does not mean at the investigation stage that they are rapists,” replies Gwenola Journot.

Me Antoine Camus, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, wondered why the investigation had not tried to deepen the investigations into the possible attacks suffered by Caroline Darian, Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter. Photomontages of her, naked and sleeping, were in fact found in her father’s computer files and the forty-year-old still wonders if she too would not have been raped by the man she now calls her “father”.

“We know that she was the subject of immodest images. On the two sleeping photos, we did not have an explanation from Mr. Pelicot. This is the only point where we didn’t have an explanation. It was denied outright,” explains the judge. Denials that Dominique Pelicot has maintained since the start of the trial on September 2.

His colleague Stéphane Babonneau finally mentioned these men filmed by Dominique Pelicot, but not identified by the investigators. They would be between ten and twenty. Don’t you have “a taste of unfinished business”, he asks the judge?

“At one point, in consultation with the judicial police, we decided to stop the investigations. We have certain people who we saw very blurry and we couldn’t get a photo of them,” explains Gwenola Journot: “Yes, there is frustration, but we still think we have done the most we can.”