A French man on trial for recruiting dozens of strangers to rape his drugged wife without her knowledge was a “self-centred” manipulator with a split personality, experts have told a court.
Dominique Pélicot, 71, is on trial in the southern city of Avignon for repeatedly raping, and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape, his heavily sedated wife in her own bed over a decade.
Fifty-one other men, aged between 26 and 74, are also on trial for alleged involvement.
The court proceedings – which began last week and will run until December – are open to the public at the request of Pélicot’s ex-wife, Gisèle, 71, who has said she made the request to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.
As the trial entered its second week, experts sought to illuminate the inner workings of a man who, up until the discovery of the abuse in 2020, had been viewed as a caring father and grandfather.
He had meticulously documented the abuse between 2011 and 2020 on his computer, and it was only discovered when police seized it after Pélicot was caught filming under women’s skirts in a supermarket.
Most of the alleged rapes took place in the Pélicot home in Mazan, a village of about 6,000 people in Provence.
Marianne Douteau, a psychologist, described Pélicot as a “quick-tempered” man, “who inspired fear” like the father he despised.
After what she described as “mediocre” results in school, he worked in the nuclear sector before moving on to real estate, where he was only moderately successful.
“The sexuality of Mr Pélicot appears modelled on his character: ordinary in public but within his couple, he had a tenacious sexuality, as seen in the swinging that his wife refused and which he compensated for by using porn chat websites,” she said.
Another psychologist, Annabelle Montagne, described him as being a “self-centred” man who tended to “consider other people as objects to manipulate, to lie to”.
She said he objectified his wife by knocking her out with drugs, and that raping her in such a state of unconsciousness could “be linked to fantasies of necrophilia”.
“Voyeurism was part of his psychosexual dynamic,” she added.
Montagne said a rape that Pélicot claimed a male nurse subjected him to at the age of nine could have caused “a split in his psyche”.
Another expert had on Friday described him as having a “split” personality, drawing a comparison with the eponymous character in the book Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
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Pélicot’s sons David and Florian, his son-in-law Pierre P, and his brother Joel, a retired doctor, were also to give testimony on Monday.
Pélicot, who was excused from the courtroom on Monday over reported abdominal pain, is scheduled to speak on Tuesday afternoon.
Eighteen of the 51 accused are in custody, including Pélicot, while 32 other defendants are attending the trial as free men. The last one, still at large, will be judged in absentia.
Most face up to 20 years in jail if found guilty of aggravated rape.
Lawyers for the co-defendants said on Monday they would be filing legal complaints over people sharing the personal details of their clients online, leading to threats against them and their families.
“Personal information of the accused – their identity, surname, name, profession and sometimes even pictures taken inside the courtroom – have been shared on social media, in defiance of the basic rules of our law,” said the lawyer Isabelle Crepin-Dehaene, representing all their attorneys.
“Children of defendants have been singled out at school. Wives and family members have been insulted. Defendants have received malicious phone calls, with attempts to break into their home,” she added.
A lawyer for the Pélicot family had called on Friday for “the utmost restraint on social media”, saying the case was a “tragedy for all families” involved.