The French justice issued the sentence on the morning of Thursday 19 December in the trial that shook France and the world, the one on the affair of Gisele Pelicot. Her husband Dominique, 72, was sentenced to 20 years in prisonthe maximum sentence foreseen, because he allegedly drugged and systematically raped his wife for almost a decade in their home in Mazan, in the south of France. The Avignon court found her ex-husband guilty of aggravated rape and other crimesin a trial that saw others in the dock 50 men accused of having participated in the violence while the woman was unconscious.
The sentence was pronounced in the presence of the victim, their three children and a crowd of supporters gathered outside the court. It is estimated that at least thirty other men participated in the rapes but managed to escape identification. The violence was meticulously recorded and cataloged by Pelicot himself, who hid doses of Tavor in his wife’s water to make her unconscious.
The victim’s testimony
Gisele Pelicotalso 72 years old, has become a symbol of courage for public opinion. He insisted that ithe trial was public and that i video of the violence were shown in the courtroom. “I decided not to be ashamed, I didn’t do anything wrong”he said during his testimony in October as reported by Reuters. “They are the ones who should be ashamed”. The woman challenged her attackers with determination during the nearly four-month trial, rejecting any attempt to portray her as a willing participant.
According to a Reuters report, the judging panel rejected the arguments of some defendants who claimed to have participated in a consensual erotic game. The trial, which began on September 2led to the first sentences today: the main defendant, Dominique Pelicot, was sentenced to the maximum sentence. Together with him they were convicted twenty of the fifty co-defendants. For the remaining thirty defendants, still on trial, the prosecutor’s office has requested sentences ranging from four to eighteen years of imprisonment.
“Man Next Door”
The trial involved fifty-one defendants in total, all men aged between 26 and 74, from different areas of France. Due to the variety of profiles, the French press defined them as “Mr. Everyman”an expression that recalls the stereotype of the classic “man next door”: a wide range of the middle class and the world of craftsmanship paraded at the stand, from the carpenter to the nurse, from the prison guard to the local journalist, passing through the truck driver and IT technician.
