“When we take a case, we are not gendered, we are lawyers”

Portrait As the so-called “Mazan” trial enters its twelfth week, Marseille lawyer Béatrice Zavarro will plead this week. It is she who has the difficult task of defending, alone, Dominique Pelicot, the ex-husband of Gisèle Pelicot, suspected of being one of the worst sex criminals of recent decades.

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“Mr. Pelicot, it's you and me against the rest of the world.” » This is how Béatrice Zavarro presented her client with her four-month trial, before it started. It was last September 2, her 55th birthday, her only lawyer, the only one to defend the man some call “the monster” – a term she refutes. Dominique Pelicot, 71, is on trial by the Vaucluse departmental criminal court for having drugged his wife to the point of unconsciousness, having raped her and having handed her over to fifty other men for almost ten years. When she says these words, she does not yet know that Gisèle Pelicot, whom she now greets every morning, will refuse to go behind closed doors, creating a real shock wave. “It’s very courageous of himunderlines the lawyer. It's not her place to hide. And this allows us to open the societal debate. »

In this room of the Avignon courthouse, next to the forty lawyers of the other accused, Béatrice Zavarro can appear isolated, at the end of the first bench. She stands with her back to the glass box where her client sits, “conductor” of this appalling criminal case, when the other defenders face the court. And we almost forget her, with her small size and her discreet appearance, when she scrutinizes her computer or rereads her…

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