Dominique Pélicot, the man who drugged his wife for a decade and handed her over to dozens of men to rape her in the bedroom of his house in Mazan (southern France), had a studied method that made him fully aware of his actions. So much so that he created a certain school and managed to convince another man to apply his methods to his wife, whom he also raped. Jean Pierre Maréchal, who was 53 years old at the time, gave the same tranquilizers to his wife, with whom he had been married for 30 years and had three children, and raped her up to 12 times with Pélicot himself. On Thursday, while the main accused was still absent due to illness, it was the turn to analyze the personality of his clone.
The five judges enter the Avignon courtroom at nine o’clock on Thursday morning and the entire courtroom rises. The defendants too, 12 of them – those arrested – in a glass fishbowl, and another 32 spread out around the room. Their faces are grey, dull with shame. Only a few look defiantly at the press, which scrutinizes them, exposed to the public gaze. Just what Gisèle Pélicot was looking for when she asked for the trial to be open, so that the press could be present and report minute by minute what is happening inside the courtroom. So that shame, as her lawyer said, would change sides.
Gisèle is not in the courtroom this Thursday. Nor is her ex-husband, who remains hospitalised due to kidney complications and whose expected testimony has been postponed until Monday. A fact that delays the whole process, because the children do not intend to testify without their father present. They want him to listen to what they have to say. Everyone must wait. Also another defendant, whose wife, perhaps the only one capable of truly understanding Gisèle P, testified the day before, speaking of the horror she had also suffered. This is Jean Pierre Maréchal, a man to whom Pélicot taught his methods and convinced him to rape his wife by giving her the same tranquillisers that he himself gave her.
Maréchal, who came to explain his defense on Thursday, was a trick by Pélicot. The two met in Coco.frthe forum for sexual encounters frequented by the main defendant and which the police closed down last June. Pélicot first tried to convince him to rape his wife, as he did with the other 51 defendants. Maréchal, who was hiding on the forum under the alias Rasmus, decided not to do so. In exchange, he agreed to let Pélicot reveal all the secrets about how he managed to make his wife unaware of the rapes and convinced him to make Maréchal apply them. Both men raped Maréchal’s wife and mother of his children up to 12 times.
There is no doubt about Maréchal’s case either. “He admits the facts, says he is guilty and deserves a heavy sentence. He is not here to say that his wife is lying or that she consented to those encounters. Not at all. His wife was assaulted, she was raped. But now Maréchal’s personality must be exposed in court: someone who was raped, abused, who witnessed orgies in his home…”, Patrick Gontard, Maréchal’s lawyer, explained to EL PAÍS outside the courtroom where this case will be judged until December.
Maréchal, who spent the last years of his life as a manager for an agricultural cooperative, was the second-to-last of ten siblings. Retired when the incident was discovered, he grew up in a very poor family that owned a farm in the south of France. His mother, his lawyer explained, was an alcoholic and his father extremely violent. “The children were beaten many nights by being tied to a tree on the property. They took refuge in the rabbit cages to escape from their father.”
The defense of Pélicot’s student is based on seeking some mitigating factor in the traumas that, according to his lawyer, would be at the base of acts that he had never committed before meeting Pélicot. “He was raped by his father, as were his brothers and sisters. One of them, in fact, could not bear it and committed suicide. It is true that he lived 45 years without showing a reaction to these problems, but there was a catalyst that caused everything to come to light: the meeting with Pélicot. That is how he fell into the perversion that he had seen at home, because he had never done anything like that,” says Gontard. “He entered into a context in which he not only wanted to do the same as Pélicot, but to do it with him. And that makes one think that Pélicot had a very important role in his actions. Experts say that Maréchal was very easily influenced and I believe that he manipulated him.”
Maréchal’s wife, Cilia M., 53, has not filed a complaint against him. She testified in tears in court on Wednesday. “I don’t want my children to suffer any more. They are so unhappy now that I prefer to protect them. He was such a wonderful man that I can’t forget those years. I don’t understand anything.” Like Gisèle Pélicot, she also described a peaceful and happy life with her partner. “With my husband, everything was wonderful. Everything was always great, he was a very protective father. It’s inconceivable that he did this. He has completely destroyed us,” she told the judge before meeting him, the first time they had seen each other since his arrest.
The rapes with Pélicot continued until Cilia M. woke up one day in the middle of an assault. One night in June 2020, she opened her eyes to find a burly stranger in her room, next to her husband. Dominique Pélicot had fled. Her husband tried to justify it by explaining that the stranger wanted to see her underwear (Maréchal is bisexual). “I didn’t believe him, but from there I suspected it was because of rape. No, it was unthinkable,” she explained. She did so only when the police broke into her home at six in the morning and took her husband away. Investigators had found dozens of photos of Cilia M. naked in her bed on Pélicot’s computer – of her, who always went to bed with some kind of clothing on.
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