At the Vaucluse criminal court,
“It’s you and me against the whole world.” Having become “in spite of herself the devil's advocate”, Me Béatrice Zavarro, counsel for Dominique Pelicot, begins her pleading this Wednesday at the Mazan rape trials. She turns to her client, prostrate. He will keep his head in his hands during the hour and a half that his defense will last.
The lawyer confides her loneliness experienced during these twelve weeks of hearing. Then she details and highlights “the cracks” of Dominique Pelicot, who risks up to twenty years of imprisonment. She sketches the outline of an explanation, summarized by this formula repeated both by the accused and by the experts summoned: “We are not born perverse, we become one”. And it is by summoning “the others” that she pleads her client’s lost cause. “The others are first and foremost his deleterious family climate”, made up of domestic violence, including sexual violence, incestuous relationships, dispossession. “The others are the traumas,” she continues, returning to the two rapes of which Dominique Pelicot says he was a victim when he was 8 and 14 years old. “There is no resilience in Dominique Pelicot, because he did not evolve in a good environment,” says his defense.
The others, finally, are his accomplices. Me Béatrice Zavarro does not go that far. “I am looking for a perverse accomplice to abuse my sleeping wife by my care”, connects the lawyer from the “announcement” that Dominique Pelicot placed on the site coco.fr, “The big absentee from this trial. Without this network, this file does not exist, Dominique Pelicot does not exist,” she maintains. “Visitors” for whom the lawyer does not seek an excuse: this is the line held by her client throughout the trial, while many of his co-accused pleaded manipulation, control, threats, or even, in turn, chemical submission for 33 of them.
An impossible plea
Based on the testimonies of two men who refused to go to the Pelicots after learning of the “offer”, Me Zavarro continues: “These two confirm to me that Pelicot is neither a liar nor a manipulator. “. Before listing: “Was Pelicot threatening? No. Violent ? No. Is the door locked? No. Is he responsible for everyone's state of mind? No. Don't let anyone tell me that he had control over these men,” says Béatrice Zavarro.
To support her speech, the lawyer explains that she consulted a sexologist who reminded her that erections, in men, were constitutive of their virility. “Take advantage of it before our bodies age,” said Dominique Pelicot during the debates, comments recalled this Wednesday by Me Béatrice Zavarro. “Through all these men, Dominique Pelicot delegated his power of virility. And, you'll forgive me, isn't this whole file, in fact, his last erection? », dares the lawyer, summoning Freud among other authors and psychiatrists. She tries to bring her client back to relative normality: “The average, common rapist is a good Frenchman, sadly ordinary, not a psychopath.”
Dominique Pelicot saves his words for the end
In this ultimately impossible pleading, Béatrice Zavarro concludes by evoking the end of Dominique Pelicot's “criminal path”, with an arrest that she describes as “voluntary”. “This September 12, 2020, I believe that it is a voluntary stop. Because Gisèle Pelicot tells us that this man had become angry. That his friends describe the nervousness in him. […] Didn't Dominique Pelicot say in police custody: “I thank you for taking this weight off me” and “it was time for everything to stop because it was becoming difficult to control”? “.
Our file on the Mazan rape case
While the court will hear the pleadings of the lawyers of his co-defendants for three weeks, Dominique Pelicot cannot conclude “his” trial without having the last word. This is why he entrusted his lawyer with two poems, written in detention. He repeats his regrets and his hope of being able to speak again to his ex-wife and his family.
Dominique Pelicot is “very naive to think that reconciliation with the past = healing”, warned Me Béatrice Zavarro a little earlier today
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