“Twenty years for each! Twenty years for everyone! “, chanted nearly forty women who came to demonstrate this Monday in front of the Avignon court. Around the judicial precinct, several banners demand the same sentence for each of the 51 accused, tried since the beginning of September for having raped Giséle Pelicot, at her home, when she had previously been drugged by her husband.
Twenty years of criminal imprisonment is precisely what Attorney General Laure Chabaud requested against Dominique Pelicot, the main accused in this extraordinary trial. “The keystone of this whole issue”, insisted the magistrate. He was the one who contacted his wife's future rapists on the site coco.fr : “I am looking for a perverted accomplice to abuse my sleeping wife,” he wrote to one of them. The one who gave them instructions when he undressed in the kitchen before entering the bedroom, the one who participated in the rape of his wife in the company of these strangers while filming certain scenes with a handheld camera.
“Twenty years is both a lot and too little. A lot because it's twenty years of a life, whatever its age (Dominique Pelicot is 71 years old), it's not nothing. Too little considering the seriousness of the repeated facts,” explains the magistrate. Who insists on the fact that this seemingly good father did not act on impulse: with each rape, “He has time to think about it.” Twenty years is in any case the maximum possible sentence.
And it was no surprise for his lawyer, Me Béatrice Zavarro: “His personality was presented in a caricatured manner. There is still a life story which explains what he committed. she begins. She could plead this Wednesday.
No accused victims
After Dominique Pelicot, the two attorneys general began to list the requisitions concerning the fifty other defendants. They broke through “the ill-fitting costume of the accused victims” who would not have known that Gisèle Pelicot had been drugged and that she did not consent. Firstly because the ex-husband always claimed to have informed these men that his wife was asleep. Which some of them recognize.
But above all, upon noticing Gisèle Pelicot's comatose state and snoring, these men nevertheless took action. This is the case of this accused who called himself “Marc, panty lover” on the networks. “He realized, as his actions progressed, that the victim was not pretending to be asleep,” reports the general advocate, Jean-François Mayet. But was he really worried? He “asked Dominique Pelicot if his wife was not likely to wake up”, continues the magistrate. Who requires ten years in prison, like many other defendants.
One by one, the attorneys general endeavor to demonstrate the absurdity of the arguments put forward by these men. A 60-year-old accused defended himself by explaining that he had accepted “to sleep with Gisèle Pelicot because he then wanted to have a homosexual relationship with her husband […]. But Dominique Pelicot had made it clear that he was not bisexual. continues the accusation. Or this accused who did not think he had committed rape because “rape is necessarily violent”. The requisitions continue this Tuesday.
