Paris, France.– Béatrice Zavarro, of small stature, could go unnoticed in court, but on her shoulders she carries the heavy defense of Dominique Pelicot, one of the worst sexual criminals of recent decades in France.
“My mission is to help understand, even if he is hated,” how he could commit “these despicable acts,” explains the lawyer, confident in her duty to “try to restore the truth,” even if it is with the defense of a man perceived as “ liar and manipulator.”
With a calm and serene tone, Zavarro has defended Pelicot since September 2, tried along with 50 other men for secretly drugging his then wife Gisèle Pelicot between 2011 and 2020 to rape her along with dozens of strangers.
Before the Avignon court, in the south of France, the main accused, 71 years old, acknowledged the facts and wants the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. And he hopes not to fall alone: “Everyone knew,” he said in response to the denials of the rest of the accused.
His lawyer faces an unusual situation. Despite defending the main accused, he supports the arguments of the victims’ lawyers, even at the risk of assuming an unexpected role as a prosecutor.
“His position is not obvious, but he exercises it with great subtlety. He has to avoid reducing the ‘monster’ to his crimes and having his B side eclipse his A side. The two coexist in this double personality,” admits Antoine Camus, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyer.
The lawyer, 55 years old and with unmistakable red glasses, rejects the label “monster” and considers herself only “the lawyer of someone who committed something monstrous.”
“In a rule of law, everyone has the right to be defended,” he adds.
Although he has not received direct threats and is not on social media, his office receives many malicious calls. “You should be careful…” a passerby suggested in early September, with an ambiguous tone.
“I decided to defend Dominique Pelicot because he asked me to. He placed his trust in me,” explains Zavarro, whose fees are paid by the State through the financial aid provided for defendants without sufficient income.
One of her former clients recommended her to Dominique Pelicot when the two men met in a prison in Marseille, in the southeast of France, explains the woman, who acknowledges that she “underestimated the global media impact” of this case.
Black novel and white glove
This daughter of merchants, a lover of crime novels, entered the Marseille Bar Association in January 1996, the “magnificent city” in which she has always lived, although she admits that “paradoxically she hates arguing.”
“I was very interested in criminal law. I wasn’t necessarily destined for this field. My height, my voice or being a woman could have stopped some people,” says the lawyer.
But “to do this job you have to like people” to “give them back a little dignity,” adds Zavarro, who in the past represented the father of Madison, a five-year-old girl kidnapped and murdered by a man in 2006.
“She takes on her cases with force, but with white gloves,” according to Myriam Gréco, who then defended Madison’s murderer and for whom her professional partner is a woman who “knows how to pull out her claws, but without showing off.”
A description that seems to correspond to his personality. Both her patched lawyer’s robe and her faded office in the heart of Marseille attest to her rejection of grandiloquence.
In Avignon she found accommodation in a working-class neighborhood for the four months of trial and, twice a day, she walks the two kilometers that separate her from the court, together with her husband Édouard, who is sometimes mistaken for her bodyguard.
For the lawyer, this trial constitutes an “essential chapter” in the matter of rape: a “first stage” was Gisèle Halimi, a lawyer who in 1978 contributed to its recognition as a crime, and a “second stage” will be “Gisèle Pelicot.”
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