A brief spontaneous statement of a handful of minutes addressed to his children interspersed with sobs and protests from his daughter Caroline, and two hours of questions from the lawyers of his co-defendants. For his final hearing, which will continue tomorrow morning, Dominique Pelicot, tried for having drugged his wife and letting her be raped by dozens of people recruited on the Internet, will have revealed nothing more than during these last three months of the trial said of the rapes in Mazan.
For the lawyers of his fifty co-accused, “Mr. Pelicot seeks to dilute his responsibility”. They thus suggest that Dominique voluntarily made them dive, by telling investigators, a month after his first arrest, where to find his hard drive on which he had kept the videos of the abuse but erased the contents of a file entitled “my daughter in hair” and videos shot alone with his ex-wife. “Ultimate perversion” or desire “to still have the power of what will happen to everyone in this story”, for these lawyers.
“I am as much, if not more responsible than them (the co-accused) since I am designated as the conductor. And that without me, they would not be there, and without them, I would not be there,” said Dominique Pelicot, when asked about “his share of responsibility”.
A criminal journey that began twenty years earlier?
“But if you want a percentage, I would say 70% or 60% me and 40% them,” estimates the man who also admitted an attempted rape committed in 1999 in Paris, and who has not yet been judged. Because on the Parisian aspect of the “Pelicot affair”, the investigation continues while the justice system also suspects him of a murder followed by a rape which occurred in 1991 and which presents disturbing similarities with his confessions for 1999, confused by his DNA after initially denying it.
And his Parisian affairs on which Dominique Pelicot refuses to speak in this hearing, there has nevertheless been much discussion by lawyers who endeavor to show the main accused as a sexual predator with a criminal career which did not begin in 2013, the date of the first videos in Mazan, but twenty years earlier.
“What I did is disgusting”
“Wasn’t it the 1999 incident that made you want to redirect your crime series? », asks one of the black dresses. She then evokes the measures that Dominique Pelicot did not take to prevent his accomplices from diving with him: “A final perversion, that of making you enter into criminal history and not just of the last twenty years. » “There was even a lawyer who asked me if I didn't think I was a star. What I did is disgusting, I never congratulate myself on it,” defended Dominique Pelicot, who concluded: “So I would have done all that for a title. Never in life. »
Because ultimately, and as from the opening of the trial, the defense of many co-accused aims to present them as victims of a pervert-manipulator who thought they were participating in a libertine game and who would also have been drugged by Dominique Pelicot. He always supported him: they all knew what they were doing.$
Our articles on the Mazan rape trial
“But then, when 35 accused, without having consulted each other, all tell the same story in custody. For what ? How ? », asks a lawyer. “Perhaps this is the first reflex to save one's skin,” suggests Dominique Pelicot, exhausted after more than two hours of interrogation which pushes the president to suspend the hearing. He will be questioned again Wednesday morning before the pleadings.
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