Even after 23 years, her memories of the brutal sex attack remained undimmed.
The slightest smell of chemicals or glint of a kitchen knife could take her back to the apartment where she was ravaged and trigger a crippling panic attack.
Now ‘Marion’, as she wishes to be called, had been brought face to face with the monster. The man who held a box-cutter to her throat, sedated her with an ether-soaked gag and tore off her clothes.
Yet, there were no tears when she saw Dominique Pelicot again after almost a quarter of a century. She was in such a heightened state of tension that she couldn’t even weep.
‘It was as if she had been electrocuted,’ says Marion’s lawyer, Florence Rault. ‘She seemed to be paralysed by the shock of being in the same room as him again. Every muscle in her body had tensed up.’
Dominique Pelicot has been dubbed ‘the Monster of Avignon’ after he admitted drugging his wife and allowing strangers to rape her in their martial bed
The moment Mme Rault was describing to me is known in French law as ‘the confrontation’ – a term that captures the melodrama and highly charged emotion of the occasion.
In a British criminal investigation, there is nothing remotely like it. It comes towards the end of the probe, when the suspect and victim are brought together so the examining magistrate can question them and compare their stories.
In October 2022, when Marion was obliged to confront Pelicot, who had admitted to attacking her, he was just another unknown sex offender.
Today, he is surely the most reviled husband in France, and perhaps the world.
As everyone following his astonishing trial in Avignon will know, he is the beast who took pleasure in watching his drugged wife being raped by dozens of strangers.
For Gisele Pelicot, who divorced him last month, there was at least one small mercy: unconsciousness spared her from seeing her attackers and physically experiencing their perversion.
Yet Marion, whose lawyer exclusively told me her full story this week, is the only woman known to have been defiled by Pelicot while she was awake.
Gisele Pelicot divorced her husband last month after she learnt the devastating truth that her former husband had been drugging her and allowing other men to assault her for years
The only woman who can bear witness to the terrifying madness that consumes him when his lust for somnambulistic sex takes grip.
I say ‘known’ woman because, as Pelicot’s dark fetish was clearly taking shape many years before he began to lace his wife’s dinner with tranquillisers, French police fear many more victims may yet emerge.
Indeed, according to a well-placed source, French cold case investigators are probing the possibility that he may have committed a string of unsolved violent sex attacks dating back decades.
As the number of recorded rapes in France multiplied eight-fold between 1971, when Pelicot was 18, and 2010, when he was first arrested (for taking photographs up women’s skirts), and detection rates remain low, there are many crimes where the culprit hasn’t been found.
The rapes of his ex-wife apart, however, the attack on 44-year-old Marion – whose true identity is known to the Mail – is the only one to which Pelicot has so far confessed.
Now a middle-aged mother, she remains so fragile that she refuses to follow news reports of the Avignon trial. Only her husband and a handful of friends know how Pelicot destroyed her life.
It happened on May 11, 1999, when Marion was 19, and a few months into her first job as an estate agent in a quiet residential suburb in the north-east of Paris.
Mme Pelicot and her lawyer Stephane Babonneau at Avignon courthouse during the trial of her former husband Dominique Pelicot
At that time, Pelicot and his wife Gisele rented a large, detached house seven miles away, in Noisy-le-Grand.
Then aged 46, he was still a dark-haired, powerfully built man of 6ft; barely recognisable from the shambling, grey-haired prisoner who hobbles into court each day with a walking-stick.
Having quit his job as an electrician, Pelicot, whose three children were barely out of their teens, had embarked on a career in property sales.
Not very successfully, one might add, for as his daughter Caroline recounts in her memoir, during the 1990s they fell on such hard times that bailiffs removed all their furniture.
A few years after this indignity, Pelicot attacked Marion.
The office where she was based looks much the same today as it did then. With its big bay-window, it is easy to see how, as Mme Rault describes, Pelicot slyly parked beside it and picked out the prettiest young woman on view.
Posing as a potential buyer, and giving his name as M. Rigot, he then approached Marion saying he was looking for a flat.
‘Ah, I’ve got just the thing,’ she told him, thinking of a one-bedroomed apartment that had come on the company’s books, in a modern, beige-walled block in the nearby suburb of Villeparisis.
However, when she tried to fix a viewing sometime later, Pelicot said he was in a rush to purchase – ‘otherwise I’ll be homeless’ – and insisted that they should see the flat straight away.
Since he seemed personable, spoke well and was dressed smartly in a suit and tie, she agreed.
Pelicot suggested they should go in Marion’s Peugeot 104, but said he first needed to fetch something he’d forgotten from his car.
As she later discovered, the ‘forgotten’ item was his rape kit: a black bag containing short lengths of rope, a box-cutter, a cloth and a container filled with ether to knock her out.
The unfurnished apartment was small and windowless but for a skylight in the bedroom.
Marion recalls how Pelicot seemed perfectly plausible, browsing around and posing routine questions about the neighbourhood before asking her to measure the length of a wall.
It was as she took out her tape-measure and crouched down that he pounced on her.
Marion struggled free and tried to run for the stairs, but he caught her. Though the petite 19-year-old fought tigerishly, he punched her in the face and stomach and overpowered her.
Putting the box-cutter to her neck, Pelicot turned her on to her stomach, tied her hands behind her back and clamped the ether-soaked cloth over her nose and mouth, making her go limp ‘like a rag’.
As she lay helpless, he gagged her, pushed up her T-shirt, pulled down trousers and removed her shoes.
Police noticed similarities between the attack on ‘Marion’ and a crime that had gone unsolved since 1991: the rape and murder of another Paris estate agent, Sophie Narme, 23 (pictured)
He also took off his own pants, folding them carefully and placing them on the carpet beside her precisely placed shoes, with the same obsessive neatness he demanded years later from the men who visited his home to rape his wife.
‘He was very meticulous,’ says Mme Rault. ‘If he had really acted on impulse (as he later claimed), he wouldn’t have done it like that. Everything he did was very calculated.’
Well, not quite everything. Fatefully, Pelicot had failed to hold the ether over Marion’s face long enough to render her completely unconscious.
And as he groped her, she had the presence of mind to ‘play dead’, then grab his testicles.
As he recoiled in pain she locked herself in a store cupboard, where she cowered in terror for four hours, never knowing whether he had left the flat – or was waiting silently for her to open the door.
It was only when she failed to return home, and her boyfriend alerted the estate agency, that her boss went and found her.
Since France’s national genetic fingerprinting database did not become operational until 2000, the year after the attack, there was no way of tracing her attacker via DNA found in blood smeared on the carpet and Marion’s shoes.
Yet though the incriminating DNA match was discovered in 2010, when Pelicot was arrested for taking photographs up the skirts of female shoppers in a Paris supermarket, it would be a further 11 years before authorities reopened Marion’s case.
Pelicot remained free to refine his chemical rape technique and turn it against his wife.
Sophie Narme was lured to an appointment by a bogus buyer in Paris, where she was chemically anaesthetised and repeatedly stabbed before being strangled
During that time, police had noticed striking similarities between the attack on Marion and a notorious crime that had gone unsolved since 1991: the rape and murder of another Paris estate agent, 23-year-old Sophie Narme.
As with Marion, Sophie was lured to an appointment by a bogus buyer, this time in a vibrant quarter of north-eastern Paris, where the chic young woman was chemically anaesthetised and repeatedly stabbed before being strangled with her Chanel belt.
And as with Marion, she was forced on to her stomach and had her hands tied behind her back.
This may be telling given that Pelicot has claimed in court to have been traumatised as a boy by seeing his father abuse his mother with her hands similarly bound.
Amid the chaos of the blood-spattered apartment, Mme Rault tells me, Sophie’s shoes were also placed neatly together by her killer.
Shockingly, DNA samples found in Sophie’s case have been lost. However, Pelicot has been charged with her murder as well as attempting to rape Marion using a weapon.
I understand that he may not be tried for those crimes for years, until the conclusion of investigations into all the other attacks of which he is suspected.
Pelicot was formally accused of attacking Marion while on remand in Marseille, awaiting trial for the multiple rapes on his wife.
He at first denied the attack, but his DNA had at last been run through the database and the resulting match left him little choice but to admit it.
Even then he tried to play down Marion’s ordeal, claiming he held his car key to her throat, not a box-cutter, and that he ‘only’ intended to gaze at her as she lay unconscious, not rape her.
They were claims that Pelicot continued to make during the dramatic confrontation with his victim, at the cold case unit’s offices in Nanterre, just outside Paris.
Marion was given psychological help beforehand, and every effort was made to minimise her distress, her lawyer told me.
An e-fit based on witness testimonies in the 1999 case was said to ‘bear a strong resemblance’ to Dominique Pelicot
She was accompanied by her husband and entered the magistrate’s office first to avoid walking past Pelicot, because she couldn’t bear to look at him.
Yet nothing could prepare her for the ‘dreadful’ experience of being cooped up in the same small room, says Mme Rault.
She contrasts her client’s anguish with Pelicot’s demeanour.
As he gave his self-serving version of events, he seemed serene and in control. ‘It was almost as if he was telling you about his holidays,’ she says.
Mme Rault grilled Pelicot for four hours that day and again a few days later by video-link.
‘He recognised what he had done but tried to play it down. He said it wasn’t his fault. It was these “impulses”, and he asked Marion to pardon him.
‘He told her: “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hurt you. I had no bad intentions.” Marion didn’t reply.
‘She is the one woman who has seen what Pelicot is like when he has his so-called “impulses”, and gave her own account of what he did to her.’
To evade her questions, Pelicot played cunning games. ‘When he replies to you, he never quite gives you an answer. He’s like a snake and tries to wriggle out of it.
‘But he will use a word or phrase that doesn’t fit with the rest of what he is saying. It’s his way of putting you on to a lead and you must be alert to it. It’s all very calculated.’
As for feeling any genuine sympathy for Marion, Mme Rault says that Pelicot’s only pity was for himself – a trait we have seen in court these past three weeks.
‘He complained of feeling unwell and about his tough life in prison. It was all “poor me”.’
So how does the veteran lawyer think Pelicot’s alleged attempted rape of Marion links in with his unspeakable betrayal and debasement of his wife?
While the crimes may seem very different on the surface, she surmises, they actually have similar hallmarks.
‘He did the same [to Mme Pelicot] as he did to Marion, but it was easier to do it in his own house with his wife, using drugs that have no smell. There was less risk.
‘You have the same chemical submission, the same wish to dominate woman and use them as his “things”.’
As she attempted to bring Marion some form of closure, had she encountered the worst imaginable kind of misogynist?
‘No,’ said the woman who plumbed the darkest corners of Dominique Pelicot’s twisted mind. ‘What I saw was a psychopath.’
Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland