“What punishment to inflict? » asked Laure Chabaud, general counsel, this Monday morning. The second representative of the public prosecutor to speak before the criminal court of Vaucluse, in Avignon, requested the maximum sentence against Dominique Pelicot, i.e. twenty years of criminal imprisonment, for his “despicable actions”: having, for a decade, been a drug user , raped and had his wife Gisèle Pelicot raped by dozens of men recruited on the Internet.
“Twenty years is a lot because it’s twenty years of a life, whatever its age, it’s not nothing. But it is both a lot and too little. Too little given the seriousness of the acts that were committed and repeated,” insisted Laure Chabaud. “His responsibility for the acts committed is therefore full and complete,” she said.
Dominique Pelicot called himself a “rapist”
This sentence was expected since Dominique Pelicot, 71, has never hidden his responsibility. In mid-September, he called himself a “rapist” and said: “I am guilty of what I did […] I ruined everything, I lost everything. I have to pay.”
“The search for his pleasure is found in a desire to submit to his wife, to humiliate or even degrade through his actions, his words, the person he cherishes most in the world,” accused the deputy prosecutor.
All our articles on the Mazan affair
For ten years, from July 2011 to October 2020, the septuagenarian had hit his wife with anxiolytics and then raped her and delivered her, at their marital home in Mazan (Vaucluse), to dozens of men, now aged 26 to 74 years old, whom he had recruited via the site Coco.fr, now banned. These 50 co-defendants are mainly being prosecuted for aggravated rape, acts for which they also face twenty years of criminal imprisonment.
Pulling the rug out from under arguments sometimes put forward by certain defense lawyers since the start of this trial on September 2, she also assured that it was “not conceivable that Gisèle Pelicot could have voluntarily ingested these anxiolytics “.
The verdict expected no later than December 20
Eighteen of the 51 accused, including Dominique Pelicot, appear detained. Thirty-two others appear free, the last, on the run, being tried in absentia. During his last speech, on November 19, Dominique Pelicot, unanimously described as the “conductor” of this decade of repeated rapes against his now ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, explained that “subduing a rebellious woman was [son] fantasy”.
The verdict in this emblematic trial of sexual violence and chemical submission is expected no later than December 20.
