At the Avignon court, the media frenzy has therefore resumed, after a break of a few days. Tired journalists and eager curious people are there in the early morning, all impatient to attend the indictments of the two representatives of the public prosecutor, Laure Chabaud and Jean-François Mayet. The announcement of the sentences required for each of the co-defendants is a step towards the outcome of this long trial. The two magistrates planned to take turns to support the accusation against the 51 accused, until Wednesday, with instructions however to respect the schedule set by President Roger Arata.
A hearing time nevertheless considered too short, by Jean-François Mayet. The attorney general, who speaks first, sets the scene and returns to the extraordinary dimension of this trial in all its aspects. And then, he addresses Gisèle Pelicot directly: “You, Madam, you wanted the debates to be public, you were right, so that the shame changes sides (…) for your children and spouses and grandchildren, all victims of the horror”, saluting “admirable resilience” et “dignity” of the main victim of this trial.
The magistrate returns to the facts and their “unimaginable gravity”supported by “20,000 photos and videos, 200 facts of penetration of an inert body, (…) mind and consciousness [de la victime] being disconnected (…) by general anesthesia to withstand these repeated physical assaults”.
The tone is set.
Laure Chabaud opens this long stage of requisitions with “the keystone” of this file, Dominique Pelicot, presenting her summary of the hearings and the statements of the main accused. She returns to sa personality, born from a“confused family story (…) with troubled landmarks”, udoes not enter into traumatic sexuality, victim according to his statements of sexual abuse and questions “stories invented for the needs of the cause? ”.
For the Advocate General, there is no doubt that the pDominique Pelicot’s personality is structured on “perverse mode (…), the caring husband, complicit grandfather and loving father capable of confidently inflicting unspeakable pain on his wife, and her family, through his actions.” Laure Chabaud, in the marathon reading of her indictment, standing at the microphone, presents the pictures like material proof of the facts, taking as an example this video shot at New Year's Evewhere we see “Gisèle Pelicot lying on a sofa, asking her husband to leave her alone, saying that the light bothers her, that it hurts her, but Dominique Pelicot only hears her thirst for sex and submission and penetrates his wife despite his supplications”. For the general counsel, the absence of consent and chemical submission are indisputable in this case.
She also returns to some conversations “unequivocally” between the co-defendants on the site coco.fr in which the word rape is used, then she reads aloud the names of certain files, highlighting “emotional coldness and psychorigidity” of the husband of Gisèle Pelicot. About her daughter Caroline, the images are named “my slut’s daughter”, “mother and daughter” or “my naked girl“, in “voyeuristic deviance” knowing no limits, not even the family barrier. “The reading of the names of the files by the general counsel is perhaps more violent than the images“, confides an observer present at the audience as she leaves.
According to the magistrate, chemical submission is an aggravating circumstance for the crime of rape. How can we imagine that Gisèle Pelicot didn't realize anything, asks the magistrate before responding, her tone suddenly more serious: “She didn't realize anything! She had numerous physical symptoms (…) pain in the lower abdomen, hemorrhoids, vaginal infections,” recalling that at the time no toxicological investigation had been carried out by doctors.
At the end of her long indictment, Laure Chabaud therefore demands, for the crime of aggravated rape, twenty years of imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence, against Dominique Pelicot. A “ceiling the far“which will serve, she said, as a standard for the sentences of the other co-defendants:”Twenty years between four walls is not nothing, but it's not much “in view of the seriousness of the facts, being considered that the husband of Gisèle Pelicot”n“He suffers from no mental pathology and is fully aware of social prohibitions.”
Sitting behind her two lawyers, Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau, Gisèle Pelicot listens attentively and from time to time nods her head, as if to approve. When the Advocate General asserts that the question of consent was not raised “neither before nor after “, we can read the same words on her lips, at the same time as they are spoken by the General Advocate, as if she knew it all by heart.
