Wednesday, October 9, 2024, 7:38 p.m.
What if Dominique Pelicot was a manipulator and a compulsive liar? The lawyers insisted on this argument from the beginning of the trial at the Avignon Court of the 50 unknown men who raped Gisèle Pelicot for almost a decade at the behest of her husband, Dominique, who drugged and put her to sleep. The judicial reporters did not give it great veracity, considering that it was part of the defense strategy. Two witnesses, however, have highlighted this week this alleged character trait of the instigator of this major plot of sexist violence. They are Joël Pelicot, Dominique’s older brother, and the expert psychiatrist François Amic.
“Why don’t you give any credence to what your brother says about the traumatic events he suffered during his childhood and adolescence?” the lawyer general asked Joël Pelicot, 76 years old. «Because Dominique has not stopped lying for 30 years. “He lies based on his needs and circumstances,” responded this retired doctor about one of his three brothers, who has become one of the most well-known sexual offenders in France today.
«The penetration of pornography»
During his testimony on Tuesday, Joël Pelicot, who is not charged in this case, contradicted several of the explanations that Dominique had given to justify the atrocious acts he committed on his wife. He denied, in fact, that Pelicot had suffered sexual assault by a nurse when he was a child. “That night there was a nurse,” Joël recalled, referring to the version they were given from the hospital. According to the brother, what motivated him to recruit dozens of men – at least 83 – and record all those rapes was not any childhood trauma, “but the penetration of pornography into their daily lives.”
That same day, journalist Pierre P., the husband of Caroline Darian, one of the children of Gisèle and Dominique, who divorced in August, appeared. This editor-in-chief of the BFM TV network also reproached the main defendant for some of his lies. Specifically, she denounced the “perverse thesis” that she used to justify the dizziness and chronic fatigue that Gisèle suffered between 2011 and 2020 due to the very powerful sleeping pills that her husband gave her, without her knowing. Dominique told her daughter and son-in-law that this was because Gisèle spent too much time taking care of her grandchildren.
Until he was arrested in the fall of 2020 for filming women upskirt in a supermarket, no doctor or family member intuited the real reasons for his dizziness. On the stand of the Court in the southeast of France, Pierre P. acknowledged having been abducted by the charisma of Dominique Pelicot, whom many considered an irreproachable family man. When one attends hearings, in fact, one is surprised by the emphatic tone of the voice and the self-confidence of the aggressor.
“I find it hard to believe that I would have informed them”
Several defendants referred to this, stating that they felt “dominated” and “manipulated.” The lawyers insisted on that manipulative side. However, these arguments are contradicted by videos of the rapes in which the alleged attackers are seen touching, kissing and penetrating the victim, who is literally snoring. Furthermore, they falter due to another no less minor fact: 15 of the 50 accused admit their guilt. And they claim that Dominique told them that he supplied Gisèle with sleeping pills.
Despite this, one of the psychiatrist experts surprised this week by coming out in defense of the lie and manipulation thesis. «I really think what I wrote. “Several elements make me think that Mr. A. had his consciousness modified,” François Amic said on Monday about one of the accused, who presented himself as homosexual and claimed to have been drugged by Dominique. “After my (psychological) examination, I think I can affirm that Mr. S. had no intention of raping,” he added about another of the alleged attackers. “I find it hard to believe that Pelicot would have informed his alleged accomplices that his wife was on drugs,” Amic concluded. With his words, he gave wings to a hitherto undervalued version of events.
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