After more than three months of trial, the Vaucluse departmental criminal court delivered its decision this Thursday, December 19, on the fate of Dominique Pelicot and the 50 men accused of having raped his ex-wife under chemical submission.
Since the beginning of September, the Vaucluse departmental criminal court has tried 51 men aged 27 to 74, from all social backgrounds, for “aggravated rape” – or sexual assault for one of them – on Gisèle Pelicot. At the head of this sprawling system of sexual violence under chemical submission, her former husband, Dominique Pelicot. For almost a decade, the main accused, now 72 years old, recruited these strangers online to rape his wife, whom he had previously drugged.
Despite the damning videos filmed by Dominique Pelicot, virtually all of the co-defendants denied having wanted to commit rape, claiming that they were unaware that Gisèle Pelicot was under the influence of medication. Many claimed to have believed they were participating in a consented libertine scenario and to have been fooled by Dominique Pelicot. The latter has continued to repeat, since his arrest in 2020, that all the participants knew that Gisèle Pelicot had been drugged. The maximum sentence of twenty years of criminal imprisonment was requested against him. Sentences of ten to eighteen years in prison were given to 49 of his co-defendants, one last, prosecuted for sexual assault, faces four years. At the time of the verdict, Liberation profiles these 51 defendants in a historic trial.
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