The legal process against a pensioner, accused of sedating his own wife so that was sexually assaulted by strangers for at least a decade in southern Francebegan on Monday in a high-profile case with a hundred defendants.
According to the criteria of
The affected person, Gisèle P., 72 years old, She arrived at the court accompanied by her lawyers and her three children. for the start of the trial in Avignon, which will run until December 20.
Facing her, 51 men aged between 26 and 74, including her ex-husband Dominique P., face sentences of up to 20 years in prison. Eighteen of them are in pretrial detention.
The defendants are men with diverse backgrounds: firefighter, craftsman, nurse, prison officer, journalist, electrician… single, married, divorced.
“There is no standard profile of a sexual aggressor. Any man can be a sexual aggressor,” Véronique Le Goaziou, a researcher at the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology, which specialises in sexual violence, told AFP before the start of the trial.
The former EDF employee gave his wife a powerful sedative.
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Most of those involved only visited the main suspect’s residence in the town of Mazan, in southern France, once. Ten of them returned on several occasions.spending up to six nights in some cases. The individual did not ask for money in return.
The accused do not have significant psychological disorders, although they do express a feeling of “omnipotence” over the female body, according to specialists. Many claim that they believed they were participating in the fantasies of a liberal couple.
However, according to the husband, “everyone knew” that his wife had been sedated without her consent. According to the investigation, “each person had his or her own opinion” and could have “withdrawn” when he or she realized what was happening.
Detectives have identified 92 sexual assaults since 2011, when the couple lived in the Paris region, but mainly since 2013, after they moved to Mazan, until 2020.
The former EDF employee supplied a powerful sedative to his wife, and the men, contacted through the dating site coco.fr, now closed, They were instructed not to wake her up.
Other instructions included not using fragrances or tobacco, warming hands with hot water and undressing in the kitchen to avoid leaving clothes in the bedroom.
No memories
Gisèle P. learned of the events at the age of 68, when all the assaults came to light after Her husband was discovered in 2020 in a shopping center recording under the skirts of clients.
Investigators later found numerous photos and videos on his computer of the victim, visibly unconscious, being sexually abused by dozens of strangers.
For the woman, the trial promises to be “something completely devastating,” says Antoine Camus, one of its defenderswho also represents his three children and five grandchildren.
The cold case unit li
nked the accused to two other incidents.
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“For the first time, she will experience in retrospect the sexual assaults she suffered over a period of ten years” because “she has no memories,” Camus told AFP before the start of the judicial process.
The victim will give her testimony on Thursday, while the judges will question her ex-husbandwho claims to be ready to “face his wife and his family,” according to his lawyer Béatrice Zavarro, on September 10.
Following his arrest, the cold case unit linked the defendant to two other incidents: a rape-murder in Paris in 1991, which he denies, and an attempted sexual assault in 1999, which he admits after his DNA was identified.
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*This content was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on information from AFP. It was reviewed by a journalist and an editor.
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