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French prosecutors have demanded that Dominique Pelicot be jailed for 20 years, the maximum sentence, for having drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle and inviting at least 70 strangers to rape and abuse her over a decade.
Assistant state prosecutor Laure Chabaud said the sentence was “at the same time, long but not long enough given the gravity of the facts that were committed and repeated”.
“His search for pleasure was reflected in a desire to subjugate his wife, to humiliate and even degrade through his actions and words, the person he cherished most in the world,” Chabaud told the court in Avignon where Pelicot and 50 other men have been on trial since September.
Dominique Pelicot has admitted the charges. Most of the others have admitted abusing Gisèle Pelicot but denied rape, suggesting they thought they were taking part in a couple’s fantasy.
The lawyers for 33 have made a special plea that their clients were acting under diminished responsibility.
On the 50th day of the marathon hearing, the lead public prosecutor, Jean-François Mayet, said the case “has shaken our society in terms of our relationship with others”.
“This is not about conviction or acquittal but fundamentally changing the relationship between men and women.”
Gisèle Pelicot has become an international feminist icon for waiving her anonymity and allowing the hearing to be held in public and for the videos her husband made of her rape and abuse while she was unconscious to be shown. She has said she hopes the trial will change society’s macho attitude towards the sexual abuse of women.
Entering the court to applause on Monday – as she has every day of the trial – she said: “It’s very emotional.”
Launching into her summing up for sentencing, Chabaud told the hearing: “It is obvious that Mme Pelicot was not in a normal conscious state. She was in a state of torpor closer to a coma than sleep. The reactivity of a subject plunged into a coma didn’t seem to dissuade the participants.”
The court heard how Dominique Pelicot, who will be 72 on Wednesday, obtained a total of 700 pills for the drug Temesta, a tranquilliser often prescribed as anti-anxiety medicine and for sleep problems, with prescriptions from his local GP.
“The risk was considerable. She [Gisèle] could have died,” Chabaud said.
Chabaud added that Pelicot’s arrest owed much to the security guard at the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras who had stopped him filming under the skirt of four women in September 2020 and removed his phone on which 300 photos and films of the abuse of his wife were found. Police found a total of 20,000 videos and photos on phones and hard drives at the couple’s rented home at Mazan, where they had lived for more than a decade after retiring.
Earlier in the hearing, the court was told Pelicot had continued inviting men to rape his wife, via an online chatroom, called A son insu (without him/her knowing) after being interviewed by police in September then released, and before he was taken into custody in December, two months later. On three occasions during this period men allegedly raped his wife and he filmed the abuse.
Asked why he had continued, Dominique Pelicot said last week: “I had to maintain the rendezvous. I realised I was finished so I went ahead with them as arranged.”
On Monday, Chabaud said: “The images speak a thousand words.”
She said Gisèle Pelicot, who told how she had faced suspicions that she was drunk, a libertine or had been complicit in her own abuse or – by one defence lawyer – that she was under the malign influence of her husband, clearly knew nothing of her abuse and criticised attempts to suggest she did.
“You only find what you look for and there was no reason [for her] to look. Should we add on top of the trauma of betrayal, the guilt of seeing nothing?” she said.
Chabaud said reducing Pelicot to a man of two faces was “reductive” and he was “capable of declaring his love for Gisèle Pelicot and saying that he has a great deal of respect for her, yet he does not suffer from any mental pathology and is therefore fully responsible.”
She added his level of criminal dangerousness had been judged “high” because of his lack of “sufficient introspection, lack of empathy, psychologically rigid and cold in relationships. We have to question his sincerity.”
After requesting the maximum prison sentence for Dominique Pelicot, prosecutors addressed jail terms for the other accused men, aged between 26 and 74, nearly all of whom are charged with the rape of Gisèle Pelicot with aggravating circumstances and as part of a group.
Chabaud pointed out that none of the 50 accused had had any direct contact with Gisèle Pelicot before allegedly abusing her – when she was unconscious – and none had sought her consent. She added that arguments that Gisèle Pelicot had somehow “implicitly consented” or that her husband had consented on her behalf, could not be allowed.
“We cannot say in 2024, because she said nothing she agreed. That is from another age … the absence of consent cannot be ignored.”
Gisèle Pelicot has told the court she believes she may have been raped up to 200 times between 2011 and 2020 at her home and her daughter’s second home.
The couple’s three children, David, Caroline and Florian, were in court last week to give statements. Caroline, who believes she was also drugged and abused by her father after photos of her asleep were found in files in his computer, angrily accused him of lying when he denied laying a finger on her. “You will die alone like a dog,” she shouted in tears.
The 11th week of the trial, which will continue until 20 December, when verdicts will be delivered by the panel of magistrates, continues with the public prosecutor’s demand for sentences of each accused for the next three days. Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, will then begin her summing up.
