A 46-year-old man appeared before the Toulouse Court of Appeal in southern France on Wednesday on charges of sexually assaulting his wife after drugging her, a case that has attracted attention amid another trial over serial rapes.
The defendant is suspected of having sexually assaulted his wife between 2019 and 2022, after having previously drugged her with Zolpidem, a powerful sleeping pill, and of having filmed these assaults.
At first instance, he was sentenced in June to four years in prison and three years of socio-judicial monitoring by the criminal court for “sexual assault with administration of a substance to the victim and “invasion of privacy” by recording images.
The same sentence was requested at the appeal hearing by the attorney general, who considered the first instance judgment “totally consistent” with the facts alleged.
The appeals court’s decision is expected on October 9.
“I had no control over anything”
“My client is a person who has been the victim of physical and psychological violence for years at the hands of his own wife,” his lawyer Nelly Magendie had stressed before the hearing, specifying to AFP that the woman had “admitted to hitting him.”
Speaking hesitantly in court, the man explained Wednesday afternoon that “at the very beginning” he had ordered sleeping pills to “be at peace” at home.
He admitted to then undressing and fondling his sleeping wife. “I didn’t control anything at home, at that point I felt like I was in control of something,” he said.
Comparison with the Mazan rape trial?
According to his lawyer, despite the common point of chemical submission, his client’s case is not comparable with the so-called Mazan rape trial currently underway before the criminal court of Vaucluse (south of France), where Dominique Pelicot is accused of having drugged his wife with anxiolytics and then raping her and having her raped by dozens of men recruited on the internet.
The defendant tried in Toulouse “unfortunately found only this means to try to have physical contact” with his wife, according to Me Magendie for whom “there is no rape, no attempted rape, just caresses.”
The facts were discovered during a hearing of the latter in the context of another case, the rape of a prostitute for which the husband was finally sentenced to three years in prison, one of which was suspended with probation.
The wife had mentioned feeling unwell, found traces of orders for sleeping pills in her husband’s emails and filed a complaint against him in spring 2023.
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