Raped for ten years by dozens of strangers recruited by her husband on the internet, after being drugged with sleeping pills, Gisèle P. will speak for the first time on Thursday morning in Avignon, in front of the 51 men who abused her.
For three days, the main victim of this trial held before the criminal court of Vaucluse had remained stoic and silent, speaking only through his lawyers, who had notably relayed on Monday his refusal to hold a closed hearing so that “the shame would change sides”.
Even though there will be “extremely difficult times”, Mrs P. “believes that she does not have to hide”, that she “does not have to be ashamed”, explained Me Stéphane Babonneau, one of her two lawyers.
Silent, Gisèle P., 72, was nevertheless very attentive to the debates that began on Monday and are scheduled to last four months, until December 20. And the questions to the director of investigation from certain defense lawyers on Wednesday, asking for example if the P. couple was a libertine couple or if it was credible that Mrs. P. had not noticed anything for ten years, apparently affected her.
After these accusations, Gisèle P.’s three children left the room for a moment, outraged. Their mother remained, alone. As if she did not want to miss a single second of this trial from which she is waiting for answers.
“She is obviously outraged,” commented Me Antoine Camus, her other lawyer, on Wednesday, during a suspension of the session: “She would have liked to respond, we could feel her stamping her feet behind us, saying ‘but I want to respond, I want to respond, but I have to respond’. And we answered her, ‘tomorrow!'”
– Infinite “distress” –
Surrounded by her daughter, Caroline Darian (Editor’s note: her pen name for the book she published in 2022, “And I stopped calling you dad”), and her two sons, Florian and David, Gisèle P. will therefore speak for the first time. And give her version of an extraordinary case.
Questioned on Wednesday, Jérémie Bosse Platière, director of investigation on this case and now interdepartmental director of the Hautes-Alpes police, underlined the “distress” of the victim when she learned of the facts, in the fall of 2020, from the police. Her husband had just been arrested for filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping center in Carpentras.
This distress “marked” the investigators, insisted the divisional commissioner.
Victim of her husband’s actions for ten years, from July 2011 to October 2020, first when they lived in the Paris region, then especially at their family home in Mazan, this small town in Vaucluse where they had moved in March 2013, Gisèle P. had never realized that she had been raped, for years. By her husband, from whom she has been in the process of divorcing since the facts were revealed, and by complete strangers, now aged 26 to 74.
For Mrs P., this trial will be “an absolutely terrible ordeal”, warned Mr Camus, also the lawyer for the couple’s three children: she “will experience for the first time, in a delayed manner, the rapes she suffered for ten years”, because she has “no memory of them”, he insisted to AFP.
dac-ol/iw/roc
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