“Neither before nor after, did they ask themselves the question of Gisèle Pelicot’s consent”

When on September 12, 2020, the prosecutor Jean-François Mayet, on duty at the Carpentras public prosecutor's office, was informed of the arrest of a certain Dominique Pelicot, caught in a supermarket filming under the skirts of customers, he did not did not imagine that, four years later, alongside his colleague Laure Chabaud, he would stand up to demand in front of the local, national and international press, against fifty-one defendants at the trial of the Mazan rapes. Monday, November 25, on the first day of this two-voice indictment, the tense bodies of the two representatives of the prosecution, their sometimes haphazard speech, their gazes glued to the typewritten sheets placed on the desk, spoke of the common dismay felt in the face of the the magnitude of the task incumbent upon them.

No doubt they lacked that element of breath that we had the right to hope for from the words of the public prosecutor, speaking in the name of society. The pleadings, the previous week, of the two lawyers of Gisèle Pelicot, M^es Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau had set the bar high, both in form and substance. It has not been crossed. But the studious austerity of the two attorneys general was, basically, like this hearing, dominated from start to finish by the civil party. To Gisèle Pelicot, Jean-François Mayet also reserved his first words, greeting the “admirable burst of resilience” with which she imposed the publicity of the debates, against the initial opinion of the public prosecutor.

“It was in a protective approach that we requested the closed session, he justified himself. But this was without knowing your strength of character, undoubtedly increased tenfold by the violence of the crimes. And you were right, Madam. » “This trial, continued the attorney general, comes to shake up our society in our relationship with others. It highlights the shortcomings of certain human beings when it comes to their needs, their desires, and when it comes to understanding the desires of others. It reveals the inability of some men to be in symmetry with women. Everyone who is here went to Mazan to have an easy sexual relationship, to respond to a need, a desire in which the place of the other was non-existent. Neither before nor after, they asked themselves the question of Gisèle Pelicot's consent. »

A hundred aggravated rapes

The role of opening the requisitions against the fifty accused (the fifty-first is on the run), gathered in the courtroom, then fell to the attorney general, Laure Chabaud. Or rather, against these forty-nine plus one, Dominique Pelicot, “keystone of this file”. Around a hundred aggravated rapes, spanning from 2011 to 2020, “committed alone, others in co-action” and testifying to“a desire to submit, to degrade the one who is perhaps the person he cherishes the most”. But also, she recalled, a “perversion that goes beyond his relationship with his ex-wife” and allows Dominique Pelicot to also be prosecuted for possession and dissemination of images violating the privacy and integrity of his daughters-in-law and his daughter, Caroline.

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