On the narrow streets of stone houses with pastel-blue shutters, residents of Mazan were appalled that this picturesque village in Provence, surrounded by vineyards and fruit trees, was being referred to in the media as “the village of the rapists”.
France has been shaken to its core this week by the trial of Dominique Pelicot, a former estate agent, who had moved from the Paris area to this southern village in retirement, where he is accused of drugging his then wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and recruiting men online to rape her when she was unconscious in her bedroom over a period of nine years between 2011 and 2020.
Fifty other men are on trial for alleged rape alongside Pelicot. They are accused of travelling to commit rape at night at the Pelicots’ house, which sits tucked away on a dead-end lane at the edge of the village, with a swimming pool in its garden. Aged from 26 to 74, the men include a prison warden, a journalist, a nurse, a fire officer, a soldier, truck drivers and shop workers. Many lived in the southern département of Vaucluse within a 20km drive of Mazan, but some came from further afield and Pelicot, who admits the drugging and rape, said he never had any problem recruiting men to rape his wife when she was in a “deep coma” state. Another 30 suspects were not able to be identified from videos. Some of the men admit rape but say they had not intended to do it, others deny the charges, saying they believed they were taking part in an organised game by the couple.
“The absolute horror of it,” said a retired teacher, 76, who was born in Mazan to a family of cherry farmers and who had taught at the local school. “How could so many people have been involved without anyone knowing it was happening?”
She said that as a teacher and a local resident, she usually knew all villagers. But in the community of 6,400 people in Mazan, which includes those who commute to the city of Avignon for work or retire from Paris, the Pelicots were not well known and were not active in local associations. Dominique Pelicot was sometimes seen riding his bike at weekends, occasionally with a little dog in the basket, and sometimes played the ballgame pétanque, but generally kept to himself. The couple had retired to the village in the shadow of Mount Ventoux for a quiet life.
Gisèle Pelicot was 57 when her husband started crushing drugs into her dinners on a regular basis and the alleged rapes began. She often had unexplained memory lapses, moments of extreme fatigue and wondered if she was experiencing early-onset Alzheimer’s. She also had unexplained gynaecological problems but never imagined what was happening to her at night, which she described in court as “torture” and being treated like an inanimate doll or a “garbage bag”.
Life in the village changed when Dominique Pelicot was stopped by a security guard for filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in the nearby Vaucluse town of Carpentras one afternoon in September 2020. French feminists say that filming up skirts is sometimes not treated with the seriousness it deserves but in this case the security guard acted fast and contacted police, and the women pressed charges. The security guard and the women who filed police complaints are now considered to have saved Gisèle Pelicot’s life. Police seized Dominique Pelicot’s computer equipment and launched an investigation, discovering videos of the alleged rapes. The specialist police investigators said in court that without the security guard’s action “it might still be going on today”.
It later emerged that one of the alleged rapists had worked at a supermarket in Carpentras. Others had been invited by Pelicot to come and observe his wife while doing the weekly shop to see if they found her attractive. This week in court, the supermarket worker, 44, admitted the charge of rape, apologised and said he had not intended to commit rape. Another local man told the court he was “naive” and denied he had taken part in rape.
Gisèle Pelicot, who divorced her husband after his arrest, did not know the alleged rapists identified by police. She told court she had recognised only one of them, a man who had come to discuss cycling with her husband at their home in Mazan. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me,” she said.
In Mazan, the mayor, Louis Bonnet, said: “What happened here is very serious and cannot be minimised. Everyone here is absolutely disgusted.” He said that no one who is part of the trial still lives in Mazan, including Gisèle Pelicot. He believed that two accused men had lived there in the past. Bonnet said that unfortunately the court hearings had shown the wide-scale nature of the crimes, which, he said, could have happened anywhere.
The case has raised serious questions in France about consent, online chatrooms, pornography and the scale of sexual violence. Some of the men had argued during police questioning that “if the husband was present it wasn’t rape” and “it’s his wife, he can do what he wants with her”. Gisèle Pelicot, now 72, told the court she could not have consented as she was in a comatose state. She waived her right to anonymity for the case to be heard in public in order to raise awareness of the issue of drugging and rape and sexual abuse.
In court in Avignon, where five judges are trying the case, women have come to support Gisèle Pelicot on the public benches, applauding her as she enters and leaves court. Among them, Martine, 68, a retired administrator from the Gard, said: “I’m here to show solidarity to Gisèle Pelicot, a brave woman. Things have to change – there is too much violence against women and girls. This case is so beyond comprehension that I wanted to come to court to try to understand it.”
Thousands of women have attended street demonstrations across France in support of Gisèle Pelicot. Feminist graffiti in Avignon read: “Ordinary men, horrible crimes.”
In Mazan, one woman working in the tourism industry said: “It’s really important that this case is talked about across the world and gets as much coverage as possible. We have to wake up to the reality of sexual violence.”