She had been losing hair and weight for years. She had begun to forget entire days and sometimes seemed to be in dreamlike trances. Her children and friends feared she had Alzheimer’s.
But at the end of 2020, after being summoned to a police station in the south of France, she learned a much more shocking story.
Dominique Pelicot, her husband of 50 years, had been mixing sleeping pills with her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep, police said, and then raping her. She said he had brought dozens of men into their home to film them raping her, in an abuse that lasted nearly a decade.
Based on his photographs, videos and online messages, police spent the next two years identifying and charging the other suspects.
On Monday, 51 men, including Pelicot, went on trial in Avignon in a case that has shocked France and highlighted the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the wider culture in which such crimes can occur.
The defendants represent a kaleidoscope of French middle- and working-class society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and labourers, a prison guard, a nurse, a computer expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many have children and are in relationships.
Most of them are accused of having raped the woman once. A few are accused of returning up to six times to rape her.
The victim, who has divorced her husband and changed her surname since her arrest, is now over 70 years old.
Since his arrest, Pelicot, 71, “has always pleaded guilty,” said his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro. “He does not contest his role at all.”
Other defendants have denied the rape charges, some arguing they had the husband’s permission and thought that was enough, while others said they believed the victim had agreed to be drugged.
When police showed the victim some of the photographs that they say her husband had carefully sorted and stored, she was deeply shaken. She and her husband had been together since they were 18. She had described him to police as a caring and considerate person.
She did not remember being raped, either by him or by the other men, only one of whom she recognized, she told the police, as a neighbor from the village.
The first time she will consciously witness the rapes, according to her lawyer Antoine Camus, will be in court when the video recordings are presented as evidence.
The trial comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of the country’s handling of sexual crimes. Rape is defined in French law as an “act of sexual penetration” committed “through violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” Several feminist lawmakers want to amend that wording to say explicitly that sex without consent is rape, that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and that there can be no consent if sexual assault is committed “by abusing a state that prevents the judgment of the other.”
“In France, there is a kind of naivety about the issue of predators, a kind of denial,” said Sandrine Josso, a lawmaker who headed a parliamentary commission on what is known in France as “chemical submission” — drugging someone with malicious intent. Josso set up the commission after being a victim of chemical submission last year. A senator accused of slipping ecstasy into his champagne is under investigation.
Josso hopes the Avignon trial will draw attention to the use of drugs to prey on women, and also shed light on the broader profile of predators. “They could be your neighbors, without being paranoid,” she said.
Pelicot seemed like your typical boy next door. He was an electrician by training, a businessman and an avid cyclist. His only child, the middle one, Caroline Darian, her pseudonym, described him as a warm and present father in a 2022 book about the case, And I Stopped Calling You Dad. She tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit, “Don’t Put Me to Sleep,” to raise awareness of the dangers of drug-facilitated crime.
Her father, she wrote, was the one who drove her to school, picked her up late from parties, encouraged and comforted her. Her mother was the family’s steady breadwinner, working as a manager at a company in the Paris area for 20 years.
When she retired, they moved to a house with a large garden and swimming pool in Mazan, a small town northeast of Avignon. The couple regularly hosted their three children and grandchildren for summer vacations punctuated by late dinners on the terrace, where the family debated, held dance competitions and played Trivial Pursuit.
“I remember us being happy,” her daughter wrote. “I thought my parents were happy.”
None of them had any suspicions. Then, in 2020, three women reported Pelicot to the police for trying to use his camera to film them upskirts in a grocery store, and he was arrested.
Police seized his two cellphones, two cameras and electronic devices, including his computer, before releasing him on bail.
On the devices, police say they found 300 photographs and a video of an unconscious woman being sexually assaulted by multiple people. They also said they found Skype messages in which the man bragged about drugging his wife and inviting other men to have sex with her while she was unconscious.
Over the course of their investigation, police found more than 20,000 videos and photographs, many of them dated and tagged, in an electronic folder titled “abuse.” The timeline they constructed began in 2011. The list of suspects grew to 83.
Two months after his initial arrest, Pelicot was arrested again and charged with aggravated rape, drug addiction and a list of sexual abuse charges. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and sometimes distributing, intimate photos of them.
If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
During interviews with police officers, details of which were included in a summary of the case prepared by the investigating judge, Pelicot said he began drugging his wife so he could do things to her, and dress her in things, that she normally refused to do. He then began inviting others to participate. He said he never asked for or accepted money.
According to the investigating judge’s report, she met most of the men in a chat room on a well-known, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France alone between 2021 and 2024. It was eventually shut down, and its owner arrested, in June following an 18-month investigation that spanned Europe.
The chat room where most of the men met Pelicot was called “a son insu,” which means “without his knowledge.”
Over the years, Pelicot told police, he drew up rules for visitors to ensure his wife did not wake up: no smoking or cologne; no undressing in the kitchen; warming hands under hot water or over a radiator so that his cold touch would not startle her. At the end of each night, the investigating judge’s report said, he would clean his wife’s body.
Of the 83 suspects, police identified and charged 50.
Only one of them is not charged with rape, assault or attempted rape of Pelicot’s wife. Instead, that man is accused of following the same pattern and drugging his own wife to rape her. Pelicot is also accused of raping the man’s wife while she was drugged.
Five of the men also face charges of possessing child sexual abuse images.
Pelicot is also under investigation for the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991 and the attempted rape of a 19-year-old girl in 1999. According to Florence Rault, a lawyer representing the victims in both cases, Pelicot has admitted to the attempted rape but denies any involvement in the 1991 killing.
The story has prompted some soul-searching among doctors, as Pelicot’s wife had visited gynecologists and neurologists for a host of puzzling symptoms but had received no diagnosis, according to her daughter.
“What I found disturbing for us doctors was that no doctor considered this hypothesis,” said Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, a well-known gynecologist-obstetrician and expert on violence against women. She and a pharmacist, Leila Chaouachi, have now developed training for doctors and nurses on the symptoms that victims of drug-facilitated assault can experience.
Contrary to popular belief, most cases occur at home, not in bars, said Chaouachi, who leads annual surveys on such crimes in France. Most victims are women, according to surveys, and about half of victims do not remember the assault because of fainting, he said.
In the case brought before the Avignon courts, some of the accused admitted their guilt to the police. According to the investigating judge’s report, many claimed to have been tricked into having sex with a drugged woman: seduced by a husband into a threesome and told that she was pretending to sleep because she was shy.
Several said they believed she had consented to being drugged and raped as part of a sexual fantasy. Some said they did not believe it was rape, because her husband was there and they believed he could consent for both of them.
“It is chilling to see the state of affairs in French society,” said Camus, who also represents Darian and many other family members. “If this is the conception of sexual consent in 2024, then we have a lot, a lot, a lot of work to do.”
#France #men #trial #drug #rape #case
