At the Vaucluse departmental criminal court,
What pushed Jérôme V., now 46 years old, to go six times in the space of three months to Dominique and Gisèle Pélicot to rape the latter? Standing in the dock, this man with a bald head and frail figure goes back through his life to try to explain how he, the former volunteer firefighter who dreamed of being a teacher, father of two children who are his “reason to live”, turned into a “detestable being” during the confinement of spring 2020.
The first contact with Dominique Pélicot dates back to March. France is then confined, and he has just separated from his last partner. Jérôme V. is one of the fifteen accused who admit to the rapes; he is also one of those who say that when he walked through the door of the Pélicot pavilion, he was informed that Gisèle Pélicot had been drugged without his knowledge. “I didn’t go back because the rape mode suited me but because I couldn’t control my sexuality,” he tried to justify this Wednesday, his arms dangling in the box.
“I was less careful”
According to him, his trips to Mazan are the consequence of “his addiction”. For a little over two hours, the man who was employed in a convenience store before his incarceration recounts a life guided by sexual impulses. Relationship after relationship, he deceives his partners who cannot “respond to [ses] demands”, experiments with ever more extreme practices to break with “monotony”. How to analyze your excessive porn consumption? “She refused me that so it was videos that allowed me to compensate,” he explains. What about rape videos? “It was very ad hoc. »
For him, sex, conquests, and especially different experiments are above all a “challenge”. “I think that over time and because of my addiction, I was less and less careful about what I expected from my partners,” he explains, without realizing the scope of certain of his words.
“I couldn’t find myself there”
He swears, however, that he found no pleasure in these visits to the Pélicots. “Between Madame’s aphasia, Monsieur’s insults and Madame’s repeated movements, I couldn’t find my way,” he insists. How can we explain, then, that he returned there so many times? And what should we think of the numerous videos extracted by the investigators which show him in the process of increasing the abuse, for example hanging clothespins on the private parts of Gisèle Pélicot?
According to Jérôme V., Dominique Pélicot used his addiction to bring him back. He explains that after each meeting, the main accused lured him by sending him photos of his wife. “For a profile like mine, it had an impact,” he insists under the nonchalant gaze of Dominique Pélicot. “I wanted to get out of all that,” he swears, while recognizing that he “did nothing to make her understand that[il] wanted it to stop. »
All the information on the Mazan rape case
This is the whole duality of these confessions: Jérôme V. recognizes his actions but almost blames others. His lack of empathy, for example, would be linked to his mother, a “devaluing and infantilizing woman”. “This is why I have a lot more difficulty than an average person in representing the suffering of others,” he assures. He claims to have needed the trial to “humanize the civil parties”. “I said to myself: ‘you really hurt a person who seemed pure’,” he swears. Gisèle Pélicot, immutably seated behind her lawyers, listens impassively, not seeming to believe for a moment in her remorse.
