Gisèle Pélicot always believed that Dominique was a “great guy”. At least that is how she described her husband at the police station, answering the police’s persistent questions just seconds before discovering that the man she had been married to for half a century had drugged her for a decade to hand her over to dozens of men who raped her in their own marital bedroom. That great guy, with his ups and downs, had been in the eyes of his family and friends a good father, a loving grandfather and an honest worker. The accused is called to testify this Tuesday before the Avignon court that is judging one of the most important and difficult cases of sexual assault in France. And on the verge of that testimony and after hearing the opinion of psychiatric experts on Monday, his normality no longer seems so obvious.
The first expert to testify on Monday, psychologist Marianne Douteau, stressed Pélicot’s “angry” character, inspiring a climate of “fear”, “lies and secrets”, according to Agence France Presse (AFP). “Mr. Pélicot’s sexuality reflects his personality: it is ordinary in public, but within his relationship it is obsessive, as in matters such as swinging, which his wife opposed and whose lack he compensated for by using pornographic forums.” “A man with two faces,” psychologist Annabelle Montagne summed up, as quoted by The Dauphiné Freed. “He presents himself as a stable person, a respected and appreciated family man, but at the same time he is dissembler, with a propensity for transgression in his sexuality.” Gisèle “was used as bait here,” stressed another psychiatrist, who described her husband’s criminal dangerousness as “high.”
The character that Pélicot had created for years is now crumbling. According to the police investigation, the accused could be a serial rapist. After his arrest in 2020, investigators implicated him in two other cases. In the fall of 2022, already under arrest, he was charged with the rape and murder in 1991 of Sophie Narme, 23, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. He denied the accusations brought by the cold case unit, dedicated to serial or unsolved crimes and based in Nanterre. These are accusations “based solely on conjecture,” denounced his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro. But Pélicot was also charged with an attempted rape in Seine-et-Marne in 1999. In this case, his DNA was found at the scene and he acknowledged the facts, but denied having used a weapon. modus operandi It was always the same: two women drugged with ether “during a visit to an apartment; both victims were real estate agents,” according to the Nanterre prosecutor’s office. Dominique P. was also involved in the buying and selling of apartments.
Anxiolytics hidden in a hiking shoe
Suspicions about previous crimes only emerged when the police began investigating the case on 2 September 2020, when the accused was caught in a supermarket in Carpentras (Vaucluse) filming up the skirts of several women with his phone. But it was not the first time either. On 31 July 2010, in another shopping centre in Seine-et-Marne, he was also arrested for similar acts using a hidden camera in a pen. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine of 100 euros. Nothing more.
Right after that episode, as I explained FranceinfoPélicot began visiting Coco.fr, a website known for its sexual and illegal content – now closed – where he began offering his wife’s lifeless body to dozens of people who paraded through his house to rape her. The first photos found date from the night of July 23-24, 2011, and go back to 2020, when he was arrested. “The police saved my life,” she said in the first session of the trial. No one in the family suspected anything. But Gisèle’s testimony to investigators also relates that during the following nine years she woke up startled a few times while her husband was raping her, probably also under the effects of some medication. The accused used a powerful anxiolytic for years, the pills of which he hid in a hiking shoe kept in the garage of the house.
The story of the Pélicots took place over 40 years in the Ille de France, the Paris region. They met in 1971 and two years later they married in Indre, three hours from the capital. Dominique had lived a somewhat turbulent youth. According to the New Public RepublicThe man abandoned his studies early to pursue a degree in electricity that did not serve him much in life, because he ended up working first in the nuclear industry and then in the real estate sector. But, above all, he had grown up in a family environment “with disturbed references and marked by certain secrets” and an incestuous climate, according to the conclusion of the personality investigation that was carried out on him when he was arrested. In addition, he himself said – and this is one of the keys to the mitigating circumstance that his defense is now pursuing – that at the age of nine he was raped by a nurse while he was hospitalized.
Dominique Pelicot spoke of the rape to her family. But her daughter Caroline Darian, who wrote a book telling her story—she called it I’ve stopped calling you dad— and created a foundation to fight against cases of sexual assault using chemical submission, does not believe in “this story”. In her statement, she said that her father is “a person who lies a lot”. The daughter is also among the victims of her father, who took photos of her when she was unconscious in her underwear. The images were found on his computer and are part of a branch of the case that is also being tried, as is the case of taking photos of his two granddaughters naked in the bathrooms.
When Gisèle met her husband, she was unaware of many details of his biography. Over the next few years, they had three children: the last, Florian, in 1986. The youngest of the family described his childhood as “normal” and said that his father “was always there for his children”, was “rather polite and respectful” towards women. She also admitted that she understood, “when she grew up”, that her father hid money problems from his wife. In 2001, the couple divorced for financial reasons, but continued to live together and remarried in 2007 under a more favourable regime. In 2013, when they retired, they decided to move to the south of France, where most of the rapes took place. “Moving and retirement could weaken the defensive barriers in the victim’s psyche,” said one of the psychiatrists.
During an interrogation before the investigating judge, Pelicot, who claims not to have received money in exchange for raping his wife, explained that he got “pleasure from seeing her touched by another person” and spoke of an “addiction that prevented him from stopping.” An expert psychiatrist detected in him a “paraphilic deviation,” that is, an inclination for sexual acts with non-consensual people, which includes “voyeurism and somnophilia.” “The fact that his wife is inert increases his feeling of control,” said the psychiatrist. Experts, after several psychiatric examinations carried out during the investigation, believe that the accused does not suffer from “any mental pathology or abnormality” that could influence his actions.
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