A firefighter, a journalist, a shopkeeper, a simple pensioner, a delivery man or a prison officer. Some were wonderful fathers, attentive husbands and even loving grandparents. The rules, that was the only rule, were clear when they went to that house: park at a nearby school, enter quietly, avoid the smell of perfume or tobacco, undress in the kitchen to avoid forgetting clothes in the bedroom and warm your hands on the radiator so as not to wake her. All of them, 72 men between 21 and 68 years old, participated separately or jointly in the rape of a woman whose husband drugged her for nine years so that she would be sexually assaulted – up to 92 times – in their own home while he recorded the sequence or participated in the assault. The woman, despite having gone to the psychiatrist for the memory lapses caused by the medication she was unconsciously taking, only found out what had happened to her the day she received a call from the police.
The trial for one of the most sinister and important cases of sexual assault in French history – due to the number of defendants – began in Avignon on Monday. The five judges have put 51 men in the dock and rarely in a trial of this type is the evidence so clear about what happened. A story that the police discovered almost by chance when on September 12, 2020, security guards at a supermarket in Carpentras (southern France) arrested Dominique P., a 68-year-old pensioner. The man had placed a mobile phone hidden in a bag to record under the skirts of women who were shopping at the time. When the police searched his home, they turned on his computer and found a folder titled “Abuses” containing more than 20,000 photos and videos that the pensioner had meticulously catalogued with a date, a name or nickname, and a pornographic title. The files contained the rapes he had committed against his wife, to whom he had been married for 50 years and had three children.
The woman discovered at the police station that since 2011, her husband, whom she described as “a great guy” before being aware of the facts, had handed her over to dozens of men while she slept under the effects of drugs such as benzodiazepines, a sleep that left her with no memories and that plunged her into a sort of coma. Her children, in fact, insisted that she visit a psychiatrist thinking that she might suffer from the beginnings of Alzheimer’s that caused her memory lapses. “I feel disgusted, I feel dirty, defiled, betrayed. It’s a tsunami, it’s as if I had been run over by a high-speed train,” she told the judge upon learning of the facts, according to the AFP agency.
Dominique P., a supposedly model family man and lover of cycling, advertised the possibility of raping his wife in a chat forum titled “Without her knowledge”. According to the newspaper The Worldonly two of those 72 people – some of whom raped her up to six times – refused to take part after her husband’s offer. One of them, a fan of swingers’ clubs and so-called debauchery, spoke for days with the accused who tried to convince him to take part in the abuse. Finally, he explained, he refused because he considered it to be rape. Despite this, he did not alert the police.
Most of the accused told the police that the victim pretended to be asleep and that this was, in fact, the point of the alleged game: a “delusion of a libertine couple,” they described it. Like this 54-year-old construction worker, who spoke of “a fantasy,” without feeling either the intention or the impression of committing rape, but obeying, “disconnected,” the instructions of Dominique P., whom they describe as an “orchestra conductor.” “His game consisted of his wife pretending to be asleep,” according to one of them.
The testimonies it collects The World The atrocity of the story is underlined by a 55-year-old electrician who defended himself: “It is not rape because it was her husband who suggested it.” A retired man, now 68, even spoke of “an involuntary rape.” Some, such as an ex-soldier, admitted to being aware that the woman was in a state of chemical submission. He knew that “he was drugging his wife, who did not agree to have sexual relations with other men.” None of them suffers from any significant psychological pathology, but all of them, according to forensic experts, have a feeling of “omnipotence” over the female body.
The victim Gisèle P., aged 72, arrived at the court, surrounded by her lawyers and her three children, for the start of the trial in Avignon, which will last until 20 December. She will attend the testimony of the 51 defendants, of whom only 18 are in pre-trial detention. Gisèle P. will now have to relive, on a delayed basis, the rapes she was subjected to for 9 years and of which she was never the slightest bit aware.
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