(Marseille) At the Mazan rape trial, in the south of France, 51 men were convicted on December 19 for having raped Gisèle Pelicot, drugged and delivered to these strangers by her husband for a decade. But how many others have done it without ever being identified?
Posted at 7:32 a.m.
Olivier LUCAZEAU and David Courbet
Agence France-Presse
“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, made available the body of his wife, stunned with anxiolytics and completely unconscious, 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, 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 lived near Paris, 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 rape sequences, 72 perpetrators are visible.
Around fifty were finally tried by the criminal court of the Vaucluse department, in Avignon, and convicted. Seventeen have appealed and are expected to be retried between September and December 2025.
“Like a monk”
But several escaped justice. Two died before the trial, and the others could not be identified.
“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 this extraordinary trial of almost four months, widely reported by the national and international press.
For others, images were sometimes usable, but did not correspond to any photo already recorded by the courts or could not be associated with a 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.
There are also 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 that he had delivered his wife to motorway rest areas, before retracting this before the investigators.
“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, who was director of investigation into this affair.
“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 where he mentioned “a 37-year-old hairdresser in Lyon” who was therefore to suffer 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,” Mr. Bosse Platière declared during his testimony on the third day of the trial, October 4.
