Dominique Pelicot has pleaded responsible to all the costs in opposition to him, together with aggravated rape and drugging. He’s additionally accused of violating the privateness of his spouse, his daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at instances distributing, intimate images of them. If he’s discovered responsible, he faces as much as 20 years in jail.
He hopes to make use of the trial to clarify himself to his now ex-wife and estranged youngsters, based on his lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro.
Standing at a lectern earlier than the row of judges within the courtroom, Gisele Pelicot by no means confirmed a lot emotion. She referred to her former husband formally, as “Monsieur Pelicot.”
As she advised it, they fell head over heels in love at simply 19 and had been quickly married. They’d had three youngsters and now seven grandchildren. They’d been collectively by some sickness, monetary issues and even at the very least one fleeting affair however they made it by.
Pelicot advised the courtroom she had trusted her husband implicitly and he or she mentioned they’d what she thought-about a traditional intercourse life.
“I believed we had been a powerful couple,” Pelicot mentioned. “We had all the pieces to be joyful.”
After she retired in 2013, they moved from the Paris area to Mazan, a small city in southern France.
There, she mentioned, her husband supported her by an odd, undiagnosed sickness. She was shedding her hair, reducing weight and, most worryingly, shedding her reminiscence of some nights and days, she advised the courtroom. She would generally awake within the morning with no recall of claiming goodbye to her youngsters, watching a film or entering into mattress, she mentioned.
These gaps, which she described as “complete blackouts”, frightened her a lot that she had stopped driving.
“I used to be persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a mind tumour,” she mentioned. She had additionally suffered gynaecological issues.
Her husband drove her to appointments with specialists, one among whom did a CT scan of her mind. She was by no means given a passable rationalization.
“I couldn’t have imagined for a single second that I had been drugged,” she mentioned, although later she recalled he as soon as gave her a beer that glowed mint inexperienced earlier than he threw it within the sink. She mentioned she now believes he was doing “trials” of how to drug her.
The truth of what prosecutors say was occurring was found by probability, after Dominique Pelicot was caught attempting to movie beneath girls’s skirts in a grocery retailer. Gisele Pelicot forgave him, pondering it was a uncommon slip in a 50-year marriage.
Solely later would she study that he had been caught doing the identical factor earlier, in 2010, and was let off with a effective, prosecutors mentioned. It was a warning signal she mentioned she by no means bought to see. She mentioned she would have been extra vigilant had she recognized.
“I misplaced 10 years of my life,” she mentioned. “These are years I’ll by no means get again.”
Dominque Pelicot sat other than the opposite accused males in a separate glass field and forged his eyes down all through his spouse’s testimony. He had met most of these males on a infamous, unmoderated French web site implicated in additional than 23,000 police instances in France. It was shut down in June.
He has argued to the police and thru his lawyer that every one the boys knew his spouse had been drugged into submission, and adopted that they’d the foundations he had established to make sure she didn’t get up. He filmed the scenes, storing greater than 20,000 digital movies and images that the police used to trace down the accused.
A lot of the males on trial have been accused of rape with “many aggravating circumstances”, one being the usage of medicine to place her to sleep. Many have pleaded not responsible. Some say they had been tricked into having intercourse with a drugged lady, lured by her husband for a playful three-way encounter and that they’d been advised she was pretending to sleep as a result of she was shy.
Within the days after assembly the police and seeing among the stunning images that her husband had stored, Pelicot mentioned she contemplated suicide. However with the assistance of her youngsters and mates, she started to slowly collect the shards of her damaged life and id. She offered most issues within the dwelling in Mazan and moved elsewhere.
She has divorced her husband, and whereas she is maintaining her married identify for the trial, she intends to take up her maiden identify as quickly as it’s over, she mentioned.
Notably, because the day she stepped into the police station, she mentioned she has not had a single blackout.
Whereas she appeared robust and described herself as like a boxer who repeatedly stood again up after being knocked down, she additionally advised the courtroom, “inside, there’s a discipline of ruins”.
“I’ll attempt to rebuild my life,” she mentioned. “I don’t know the way.”
This text initially appeared in The New York Occasions.