Mazan rapes: a “testament for future generations”

Invite “all of society to become aware”: for the lawyers of the civil parties, the Mazan rape trial will be a “testament for future generations”, on the questions of consent, chemical submission and more generally male-male relationships. women. Thanks to these debates, the next generations “will discover Gisèle Pelicot, her courage, the price she paid to change society,” said Stéphane Babonneau, one of the lawyers for the civil parties, on Wednesday.

Drawing a parallel between this “Avignon trial”, an illustration of “rape culture”, and that of Aix-en-Provence in 1978, where the lawyer Gisèle Halimi had rape recognized as a crime, he placed the court, which will deliver its verdict no later than December 20, before a “societal choice”: ensuring that this trial makes it possible to “change the idea, anchored in a masculine imagination, that the woman’s body is an object of conquest.

Because “how, in France, in 2024, can a woman still suffer what Gisèle Pelicot suffered for at least 10 years? How can we find 50 individuals in France, but in reality 70 (Editor’s note: several have never been identified and will therefore never be tried)men”, to come and take advantage of an unconscious woman, Antoine Camus, the other lawyer of Gisèle Pelicot, had questioned before him, drugged and raped for a decade by her husband and dozens of men he recruited on the Internet.

Opening the second phase of this trial, that of the pleadings, on Wednesday morning, Mr. Camus recalled the videos of the facts, carefully recorded, captioned and stored by Dominique Pelicot, where Ms. Pelicot was so inert “that one would believe her to be dead” .

“By this almost political gesture of renouncing the closed session”, on September 2, at the opening of this extraordinary trial before the criminal court of Vaucluse, Ms. Pelicot “invited all of society to ask questions, to become aware , to change mentalities, for a future that would finally break with a violence that we would like from another age,” he said.

For an hour, without fanfare, the lawyer asked that “justice and truth” be rendered for this family, this woman, her daughter and her two sons and her grandchildren, “buried for four years under the rubble” after the “explosion” of the revelation of the facts, in the fall of 2020.

But he did not dwell on Dominique Pelicot, this “split personality”, with his “A side” of “good husband, grandfather, friend, neighbor”, and his “B side” when, mainly at night, he would drug his wife with anxiolytics so that he could then dispose of her and hand her over to strangers.

In fact, the main accused recognizing his role as “conductor” of the approximately 200 rapes recorded over a decade against his ex-wife, at their marital home in Mazan (Vaucluse), half of which were committed by himself, it seems It is difficult to imagine that he would escape the maximum penalty provided for, of 20 years of criminal imprisonment.

Me Camus therefore focused on the 50 co-defendants. “Everyone had free will,” he insisted. “Everyone at their own level contributed to this monstrosity and allowed the ordeal of a woman to continue,” “this is the banality of Hannah Arendt’s evil.”

“They explain an “accidental” rape, an “involuntary” rape, an “altruistic” rape or even now an “irresponsible” rape, continued his colleague Stéphane Babonneau, referring to the arguments put forward by many accused who maintain having been “manipulated » by Dominique Pelicot and having believed that they were participating in the scenario of a libertine couple.

In this way, the lawyer also responded to the request of around ten defense lawyers who, on Wednesday morning, filed a subsidiary request to the court concerning 33 of the 50 co-defendants, citing a possible “alteration of discernment” of their customers. For Me Camus, the trial will also have shed light on the question of chemical submission, “this diabolical modus operandi” which “is nothing other than the modus operandi of the perfect crime”.

After the pleadings, the president of the court officially suspended the trial until Monday. The floor will then be given to the public prosecutor, for an indictment which could last until Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning, questioned for the last time, Dominique Pelicot tried again to apologize to his family, arousing the anger of his daughter Caroline: “You will end up alone, like a dog!”

Convinced that she had also been sexually assaulted by her father, who had posted naked, sleeping photos of her on social networks, taken without her knowledge, and frustrated at not having obtained a confession from him, she was left in tears in front of her box, at the end of the hearing, screaming: “You were two and a half months old!”