At the Mazan rape trial, 51 men were tried, found guilty and sentenced by the Vaucluse criminal court. But how many others have also raped Gisèle Pelicot without ever being identified, due to lack of images or saved by photos that are too blurry? “Laurent du Vaucluse”, “routier” or even “Luc Pizza”: hidden behind these nicknames, these men had also been lured by Dominique Pelicot on the site coco.fr. To them too the sixty-year-old, now 72 years old, had handed over his wife, knocked out with anxiolytics and totally unconscious, for ten years, between July 2011 and October 2020. Like the others, he had photographed and filmed them, then carefully storing these images on his computer or various hard drives.
Despite the meticulous work of investigators, praised by Gisèle Pelicot herself at the hearing, an identity could never be associated with these files. As for the photos of the first referenced rape of Gisèle Pelicot, the night of July 23 to 24, 2011, when the couple was still living in the Paris region, in Villiers-sur-Marne. Or for the video of his last attacker, “the biker”, the night of October 22 to 23, 2020, in Mazan.
In total, some 200 rapes against Gisèle Pelicot were recorded by investigators, based on videos and photos taken by her now ex-husband, including more than a hundred by Dominique Pelicot himself. For the other proven sequences of rape on Gisèle Pelicot, 72 perpetrators are visible. Around fifty were finally tried by the Vaucluse criminal court, in Avignon, and sentenced on December 19. Of which 17 have appealed and should be retried, between September and December 2025.
But several escaped justice. Karim K., for example, died before the trial, and when the police came to arrest him, Jean-Pierre H. had just been buried. For the others, it was impossible to identify them. “We have certain people who we saw very blurry and we could not take photos,” explained the investigating judge in charge of this investigation, on November 8, in court, during an extraordinary trial. almost four months.
For others, there were sometimes usable images, but which did not correspond to any photo already recorded by the justice system in the TAJ (Processing of Judicial Affairs) file or could not be associated with any telephone number. And neither facial recognition software nor searches via social networks have been able to give them a name. “In consultation with the judicial police, we decided to stop the investigations at one point. We could have investigated for ten years,” said the magistrate during her hearing, emphasizing the need for a fairly rapid trial, particularly for the victim.
Curious to find out who’s in the news The essentials? Join us on the number 1 business network in Luxembourg!
