Husband ‘drugged his wife and invited dozens of men to rape her over nine years at home in south of France’

2 September 2024, 15:31

A French man is accused of drugging his wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious.

Dominique Pelicot, 71, is accused of organising online for the strangers, aged between 26 and 74, to come to his home in the southern French village of Mazan to rape his wife, Gisele Pelicot.

He is said to have filmed the assaults, which took place between 2011 and 2020.

Prosecutors said some 92 rapes took place, carried out by 72 men.

A total of 51 men are on trial and are being tried alongside Pelicot, who is a former employee of EDF, France’s state-owned electricity company.

A lawyer for the victim, who is now aged 72, said the trial would be a “horrible ordeal” for his client, who married her husband in 1973.

“For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over ten years,” he said.

“She could have chosen a trial behind closed doors, but “that’s what her attackers would have wanted,” said the lawyer, Antoine Camus.

Ms Pelicot will be present at the trial alongside her children.

She said: “He disgusts me, I feel dirty, soiled, betrayed. It’s a tsunami, I’ve been hit by a high-speed train.”

Before the investigation began, Ms Pelicot had started to believe she had some kind of illness because of her frequent unexplained tiredness.

Pelicot’s alleged crimes first came to light when he was caught upskirting women at a shopping centre.

Police said they checked his computer and found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife being assaulted, while clearly unconscious.

Officers also said they found an online chat where Pelicot invited the strangers to his house to take part in the assaults.

He admitted giving his wife a tranquiliser.

Prosecutors have claimed that the abuse started when the couple lived in Paris, and continued when they moved to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people near Avignon in south-east France.

Pelicot took part in the rapes and encouraged the other men using degrading language, prosecutors said. No money was involved in the arrangement.

The men accused of taking part in the mass rapes include a journalist, a forklift truck driver and a firefighter. They ran the gamut from single to married to divorced.

Some are said to have taken part just once, while others went back multiple times.

The men’s defence has been that they were unaware of the victim’s drugged state and thought they were helping a consenting couple carry out their fantasy.

But Pelicot said all of the men were aware that his wife was drugged.

He is said to have a tragic history himself, claiming that he was raped by a male nurse when he was nine.

He is also accused of a rape and murder that took place in 1991, which he denies. He admitted a rape in 1999.

His lawyer said he was “ashamed of what he has done, it’s unforgivable”.

She said that his crimes were “a form of addiction”, adding: “My client’s line of conduct is that he recognises what he has done and that has not been in dispute one iota since the beginning.”