Mazan rapes: “Like a monk” – 51 tried and convicted, but how many unidentified?

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 the 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 Ms. 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.

“Like a monk”

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 get a photo,” 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.

The first of these strangers invited by Dominique Pelicot to their home in Mazan, this town in Vaucluse where the couple had moved to retire in early March 2013, “Richard” was never identified either. He came on the night of September 25, 2013.

Likewise, “Black Villiers”, “Ludo de Villiers”, “Cédric”, “Pascal”, “Serge” or even “Olivier” will never be found. No more than “Michel”, who wore sandals, “a little bit like a monk”, according to Dominique Pelicot’s details to investigators.

Then there are these possible rapists who have slipped through the cracks of justice due to lack of images. Like the truck drivers to whom Dominique Pelicot told two of his co-defendants, Christian L. and Patrice N., that he had handed over his wife to motorway rest areas, before retracting this before the investigators. The facts allegedly took place during a return from vacation on the Ile de Ré, in May 2019, and during a return from Normandy.

Among the files found on Dominique Pelicot’s computer equipment, but without images, the investigators had notably detected a file entitled “routiers du November 24, 2018”, “routiers” in the plural therefore. A person who ultimately would not have come, he had justified himself.

“You like rape mode”

Symbolic to the extreme of sexual violence, this trial of the Mazan rapes has above all brought into the public arena the question of chemical submission and attacks on unconscious victims.

The police thus found 11 men contacted by Dominique Pelicot on Skype who “clearly did the same thing with their partner”, confirmed to AFP the divisional commissioner Jérémie Bosse Platière, director of investigation into this affair while he was at the PJ in Avignon.

“You’re like me, you like rape mode,” says Dominique Pelicot to a certain JF LUNA, commenting on the photos of his naked and sleeping partner.

Mr. Pelicot had planned to go and rape several of these unconscious women, in conversations with “Eric Dover”, “PCMF 77” or “Morgane 667”, where he mentioned “a 37-year-old hairdresser in Lyon” who therefore had to undergo the same fate as his wife Gisèle. But these projects would never have come to fruition, according to him.

If some of these men have been arrested and should be tried in other jurisdictions, most are still unknown: “It is one of the most painful aspects for me, knowing that other women can still suffer this kind of actions,” declared Mr. Bosse Platière, now director of the interdepartmental police (DIPN) of Hautes-Alpes, during his testimony on the third day of the trial, October 4.

One certainty in any case for this police officer: crimes like those committed by Mr. Pelicot would be “impossible without the internet, (because) social control makes it impossible in real life”. “There is a community rapprochement of perversity made possible by the Internet.”