The Prosecutor’s Office is asking for 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence in France for the crime of rape, for Dominique Pelicot, for having abused his wife for 10 years, whom he drugged with sleeping pills and whom he offered to dozens of men to also They will abuse her.
The prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Avignon (southeast France) Laure Chabaud requested that maximum sentence “with the greatest conviction”, and justified it by the psychology of Dominique Pelicot, whom she described as a perverse, egocentric, disturbed man, with multiple sexual deviations who wanted to satisfy their desires without setting “any limits” and without the consent of the victim.
In the trial of the 51 men accused of having raped Gisèle Pelicot over a decade, the Prosecutor’s Office in the trial in Avignon insisted this Monday in its argument that the woman did not give her consent at any time and that she was reduced to “an object” by the aggressors. “Gisèle Pelicot was reduced to an object. “Consent was not present either before or during the act,” said prosecutor Jean-François Mayet at the beginning of his complaint before the Avignon Criminal Court, in the southeast of France.
Mayet denounced the “humiliating degradation” that Gisèle Pelicot suffered over almost 10 years, the time in which her husband at the time, a 71-year-old confessed rapist, drugged her with sleeping pills to leave her completely unconscious and inert so that he could sexually abuse her. of it and offer it to dozens of men. The representative of the Public Ministry pointed out the “extraordinary” nature of this process that began on September 2, in which facts of “unimaginable gravity” are being judged.
Hell from 2011 to 2020
Dominique Pelicot, who acknowledges the accusations, took thousands of photos and videos of the rapes, documents that have become the key evidence to convict these men, most of whom deny the facts. In total, there are 20,000 visual documents, the prosecutor recalled, which show the “extreme violence of the crimes.”
The events being tried lasted between July 2011 and October 2020, first in the Paris region and later in the house to which the Pelicots had moved when they retired in the town of Mazan, near Avignon.
Dominique Pelicot came into contact with other men on an online platform and invited them to his home, after administering large doses of anxiolytics to his victim, which left her unconscious, allowing them to abuse her without her retaining any memory.
It all ended in September 2020 when he was arrested for recording under the skirts of some women in a supermarket in Carpentras and when searching his computer files, investigators discovered thousands of videos and photos in which the rapes to which he subjected the victim appeared. .
Dominique Pelicot explained in his last statement last Tuesday that the reason he drugged his then wife to rape her and offer her to numerous men for ten years was that he wanted to “subdue her without making her suffer.”
“Subduing an unsubmissive woman was my fantasy,” said this man who is also accused of the rape and murder of a woman in 1991 and another attempted rape with a knife in 1999.
During the trial, Gisèle Pelicot said she felt “completely destroyed” after discovering that she was a victim of systematic rape for almost a decade. “I don’t know how I’m going to get up. “I don’t know if my life will be enough to understand everything that has happened to me,” he admitted on October 23. The 71-year-old woman is already an authentic symbol for global feminism, after deciding that this trial would be public “so that shame changes sides” and that the victims will never again be singled out for having been raped, but rather the aggressors. .
This Saturday, new demonstrations took place throughout France, bringing together thousands of people in support of Gisèle Pelicot and all victims of sexist violence. In total, 35,000 people gathered in the main cities of the country, according to the police, although the organizing entities raised the figure to 100,000 attendees.
“Thanks to all of you I have the strength to take this fight to the end. I dedicate this fight to all the people, women and men who are victims of sexual violence in the world. To all those victims, I want to say today, look around you, you are not alone,” said Gisèle Pelicot at the beginning of this trial, after a first mobilization in her support.
The French Government plans to announce this Monday, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, new measures to combat sexist violence suffered by women.
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