Gisèle Pelicot, her husband Domenique sentenced to the maximum sentence

Paris, Domenique Pelicot he was accused of having drugged his wife Gisèle for a decade, thus causing her to be raped by other men, while the woman was in a state of unconsciousness. The main suspect, the husband, was found guilty by the Avignon court, and was given the maximum sentence of 20 years for aggravated rape and other crimes.

However, he is not the only one to have been tried. In fact, another 50 men have been tried since September 2nd. The 50 men were also convicted, However, it is thought that they are not the only ones involved, and that thirty other people managed not to be identified.

Domenique Pelicot was not only found guilty of raping his wife, but also of recording images of his daughter Carolina and his granddaughters. They were recorded sleeping naked or with only their underwear.

The defendants repeatedly deny being guilty

«I have seen people take the witness stand who denied rape and others who admitted it. I have a lot of problems with the banality of rape. At what moment, when you entered that room, did you have my consent? How could you not stop and report everything to the police? For me this trial is the trial of cowardice. It’s time for the chauvinist and patriarchal society, which trivializes rape, to change. It’s time to change the way we look at rape. My husband had many fantasies, not all of which were achievable with him. But why did it come to this? I think he wanted me and not anyone else. Since I didn’t want to go to a swingers’ club, he thought he had found the solution by putting me to sleep.”

These are Gisèle’s words in front of most of the defendants, who, despite the videos shot by Pelicot, denied being involved in the matter. Many of them claimed that they thought they were participating in a consensual sexual act, and that they had been deceived by Domenique Pelicot. But the husband states several times, denying the other defendants who deny it, that they knew about his wife Gisèle’s condition, namely that she was being drugged with powerful doses of Tavor hidden in the water.

There will be other works coming soon to try to understand how much Dominique Pelicot and the rapists of the Mazan house were an expression of the “banality of rape” and of a more or less widespread patriarchal mentality among men. In any case, Dominique Pelicot and the other co-defendants demonstrated that they had no trait of empathy, failing to understand how one could feel in the victim’s shoes.

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