Anger or denial among the companions of those accused of the Mazan rapes

Anger, incomprehension, but also compassion, even total denial: at the trial of a husband who drugged his wife to have her raped by around fifty strangers over a decade in France, feelings are shared among the partners or ex-partners co-defendants, some going so far as to take responsibility for these acts.

For Vanessa P., who “no longer has any consideration for” her ex-partner, the anger was cold. Like around fifty other men, aged 26 to 74, Quentin H., 34, then a prison guard, had responded to Dominique Pelicot’s invitation to come and rape his wife, at their marital home in Mazan, in the south of France. “When we see what he is accused of, we can doubt everything”, “he is a manipulator”, added this auxiliary childcare worker, without glancing at her former partner.

“Manipulator”, a qualifier also used by Emilie O., 33 years old, about Hugues M., 39 years old. Their union ended in November 2020, when the facts targeting Dominique Pelicot and her husband were revealed. Along the way, she discovered the multiple extramarital affairs of the man who shared her life.

“I thought I was living a peaceful and fulfilling life, but I was wrong.” Since then, she has lived with the doubt of having herself been a victim of chemical submission, like Gisèle Pelicot, doused with anxiolytics and raped for ten years by her husband and these fifty men he had recruited on the internet.

A doubt that Cilia M. no longer has: between 2015 and 2018, her husband, Jean-Pierre M., 63 years old, and Dominique Pelicot, 71 years old, raped her around ten times by reproducing the process used on her on Gisèle. “He was a wonderful person. He destroyed us,” she testified, specifying that she would “never forgive” her ex-husband, whose name she however kept and against whom she refused to file a complaint, to “protect their five children” .

Others still wonder, even if it means finding excuses for their ex-companions. “He was always respectful: when it was no, it was no. He never insisted. I absolutely do not understand why he is here today,” lamented Corinne M., already separated from her husband, Thierry P., at the time of the acts with which she is accused. Their relationship had been broken up by the death of their son in a road accident, following which Thierry P. had fallen into alcoholism.

Samira T. has been looking for “answers to (her) questions for three and a half years” about her companion, Jérôme V., accused of having raped Gisèle Pelicot six times in 2020. But she has not not left and she persists in “supporting” him: “If we met, it’s not by chance, I had this mission.”

“He had no reason to look elsewhere,” added, in tears, the woman who had nevertheless accepted his requests for almost daily sexual relations, “at 10 p.m.”, taking intimate photos or even naked walks.

Going so far as to accuse herself, Hien B. feels responsible “for having refused all the time” the advances of her husband, Jean-Luc L., at a time when she was taking care of her sick mother. : “I think that as a man, he wanted to look elsewhere.” Like her, Sonia R., in relationship with Patrice N. for sixteen months, only wants to think about “the future”: “I support him and give him my total trust. For me, there is a present and there will be an after, whatever it costs, whatever happens, whatever happens.”

“In cases of sexual violence, those close to the accused sometimes have difficulty imagining the violence themselves, because it is beyond their understanding,” explains Véronique Le Goaziou, associate researcher at the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology and specialist in sexual violence: “And, in certain cases, they do not give credence to the facts reported by the victims: they cannot or do not want to believe it.”

And added: “Sexual violence does not only impact the perpetrators and their victims, it is entire families who suffer the consequences. As for the companions, they are in a form of astonishment.”

“I don’t see him as a rapist at all. It’s not him,” assured Lucie B., Grégory S.’s common-law partner for seven years, from whom she is expecting a third child. After the facts, in 2017, “he told me that it was mainly a delusion of the husband and his wife. That she was drunk.”