Jean-Pierre Maréchal, the man who imitated Dominique Pelicot’s methods of drugging his wife so he could rape her unconscious and offer her up for abuse, has admitted to being a “criminal rapist.”
“I regret my actions, I love my wife,” Maréchal said in his testimony at the trial in Avignon (southeastern France), in which he is accused, along with Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men, of raping his wife, Gisèle, while under the influence of anxiolytics.
Maréchal is accused not of raping Gisèle Pelicot, but his own wife, Cilia, to whom he administered drugs that made her sleep on a dozen occasions between 2015 and 2020, following the instructions of Dominique Pelicot, who participated with him in the abuse.
He insisted he deserves prison because he is “a criminal rapist” who committed “horrendous acts” and asked for forgiveness.
“I did something wrong to my wife, it’s very serious,” he replied when asked about statements made during the investigation, in which he said he deserved life in prison, despite the charges against him carrying a maximum of 20 years.
The Pelicot impersonator said he met him on a dating platform, now closed due to several crimes that were discovered, and that he connected “by chance” when he was browsing porn sites and a pop-up window caught his attention.
According to his account, Dominique Pelicot proposed that he rape Gisèle, which he refused on the grounds that he could not rape a woman who was not his. Then, in a conversation between the two, when his interlocutor discovered that he had a wife, he convinced him to drug her so that he could abuse her.
“If I had not met Dominique Pelicot, I would never have committed the act,” Maréchal declared.
Both acknowledged at the hearing that they had live-streamed rape videos that each had recorded on their own.
Of the approximately ten times Maréchal drugged his wife, only four or five times did the anxiolytics have a strong enough effect to render her unconscious enough to allow him to abuse her, according to his account, because he was “afraid of overdosing.”
These practices stopped one day when Dominique Pelicot was at Maréchal’s house to abuse Cilia and she woke up, he reported.
Jean-Pierre Maréchal invented several excuses about the presence of that stranger in her own room that did not convince her, but the woman did not go any further and, even after everything was discovered, she did not want to denounce him and constitute a private accusation, as Gisèle Pelicot did.
Dominique Pelicot was arrested in September 2020, initially for filming women under their skirts in a supermarket in Carpentras.
He then asked Maréchal to delete the footage he had recorded of Cilia’s rapes. However, Dominique Pelicot did not want to destroy the hundreds of videos and photos he had kept of Gisèle’s rapes – he kept them as “evidence”, he said, and that later, when the police seized the material on a hard drive, they formed the backbone of the prosecution’s case in this trial.
Gisèle Pelicot is due to give evidence this afternoon or Thursday before the Vaucluse Criminal Court, after her ex-husband (their divorce was finalized in August), who also admitted all the facts of which he was accused.
Also on Wednesday (18), the images recorded by Dominique Pelicot of Gisèle’s abuse were shown for the first time at the hearing, subject to the presence of lawyers who were absent in the morning.
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