Woman in French Court Testifies How Her Husband Drugged Her and Brought Men to Rape Her
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Gisèle Pelicot spoke of the horror of being told by the police that they had evidence her husband had drugged her for years and brought men into their home to join him in raping her.
Her Husband on the other hand in French Court Cried and apologised to her as if that was going to bring solace. He blamed it on some injuries to his head he had as a young kid. If that were true I will be abusing and raping one or several sex partners, since I have had more than one accident or incident in which I was hit in the head I know thAT IS NO EXCUSE. You can see this woman above at 71 and looking much older, You can tell she did not have the best of lives. As I was reading the testimony of her husband in court I felt no sympathy for him but just wondered how he could do that to his wife and now he talks about accidents he had in his youth. I don't know what makes a person bring pain and dishonor to supposedly a loved one, But I know that at the point in her husband's case in court blaming something else shows he still has not change. I don't understand how in our mists some people rejoice in others' suffering while others don't care about inflicting suffering and pain. Adam Gonzalez
Catherine Porter
By Catherine Porter
Catherine Porter reported from the courthouse in Avignon, France
If the sight of dozens of men accused of raping her, including her husband of many decades, upset Gisèle Pelicot, she did not let it show. She swept into a packed courtroom on Thursday with steely poise, her face composed, her eyes dry beneath sunglasses. Her adult children trailed behind her.
Then, she took the stand and told the court how the life she had built over five decades had quickly unraveled one morning in late 2020 when the police summoned her to a station in southern France. There, they told her that the man she considered the love of her life had been drugging her for almost a decade and inviting strangers to come into their home and join him in raping her while she was comatose.
Under French rules, Ms. Pelicot, 71, could have avoided letting the trial play out in the public eye and chosen to keep it behind closed doors. Instead, she decided it was important for all of France to hear her story and to place the shame on the accused men, rather than on her.
“So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pelicot,” she said in a calm, controlled voice. “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized.”
She added, “We must address this scourge.”
The trial in Avignon, which has just started and is scheduled to take four months, has already shaken France. Everything about it seems almost too shocking to absorb — how long Dominique Pelicot is accused of drugging his wife, how ordinary and loving the couple seemed in their retirement, and how many men are accused of raping her.
There are so many men on trial that the court had to build a second glass box in the courtroom for those in custody. They include firemen, soldiers, truck drivers, and an IT expert. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many are in stable relationships and have children.
Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, including aggravated rape and drugging. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at times distributing, intimate photos of them. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
He hopes to use the trial to explain himself to his now ex-wife and estranged children, according to his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro.
Standing at a lectern before the row of judges in the courtroom, Ms. Pelicot never showed much emotion. She referred to her former husband formally, as “Monsieur Pelicot.”
France Confronts Horror of Rape and Drugging Case
A Harrowing Testimony: Gisèle Pelicot spoke of the horror of being told by the police that they had evidence her husband had drugged her for years and brought men into their home to join him in raping her.
A Daughter’s Torment: Caroline Darian, Pelicot’s daughter, said in court that she was traumatized not only by what prosecutors said happened to her mother, but also by fear that she herself might have been abused.
51 Men Go on Trial: A man is accused of drugging his wife and then inviting dozens of men to rape her over almost a decade. The questions raised by the case have unsettled the country.
As she told it, they fell madly in love at just 19 and were soon married. They’d had three children; seven grandchildren. They’d been together, through some illness, financial problems, and even at least one fleeting affair, but made it through.
Ms. Pelicot told the court that she had trusted him implicitly and said they had what she considered a normal sex life.
“I thought we were a strong couple,” Ms. Pelicot said. “We had everything to be happy.”
After she retired in 2013, they moved from the Paris region to Mazan, a small town in southern France.
There, she said, her husband supported her through a strange, undiagnosed illness. She was losing her hair, losing weight, and, most worryingly, losing her memory of some nights and days, she told the courtroom. She would sometimes awake in the morning with no recall of saying goodbye to her children, watching a movie, or getting into bed, she said.
These gaps — which she described as “total blackouts” — frightened her so much, she stopped driving.
“I was persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor,” she said. She had also suffered gynecological problems.
Her husband drove her to appointments with specialists — one of whom did a CT scan of her brain. She was never given a satisfactory explanation.
“I could not have imagined for a single second that I had been drugged,” she said, though later she recalled he once gave her a beer that glowed mint green before he threw it in the sink. She said she now believes he was doing “trials” of ways to drug her.
The reality of what prosecutors say was happening was discovered by chance, after Mr. Pelicot was caught trying to film under women’s skirts in a grocery store. Ms. Pelicot forgave him, thinking it was a rare slip in a 50-year marriage.
Only later would she learn that Mr. Pelicot had been caught doing the same thing earlier, in 2010, and was let off with just a fine, prosecutors said. It was a warning sign she said she never got to see. She said she would have been more vigilant had she known.
“I lost 10 years of my life,” she said. “Those are years I will never get back.”
Mr. Pelicot sat apart from the other accused men in a separate glass box and cast his eyes down throughout his wife’s testimony. He had met most of those men on a notorious, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France that was shut down in June.
He has argued to the police and through his lawyer that all the men knew his wife had been drugged into submission and followed the rules he established to ensure she didn’t wake up. He filmed the scenes, storing more than 20,000 digital videos and photographs that the police used to track down the accused.
The trial, one of her lawyers said, would be the first time she would be viewing the videos with some of the men accused present. Ms. Pelicot said in court that she had gathered the strength to watch videos in May that would be used as evidence in the trial. It was then, that she decided, that she needed the trial to be open.
Most of the men on trial have been accused of rape with “many aggravating circumstances,” one being the use of drugs to put her to sleep. Many have pleaded not guilty. Some say they were tricked into having sex with a drugged woman, lured by her husband for a playful three-way encounter, and told she was pretending to sleep because she was shy.
Ms. Pelicot responded to those statements in court saying, “They knew exactly what they were doing and what shape I was in.” She noted that one of the accused was diagnosed with H.I.V., though she later tested negative.
She described her bedroom as a “torture chamber.”
“I don’t know how I survived,” she said. “I ask myself how I am standing before you.”
In the days after meeting the police and seeing some of the shocking photos that her husband had kept, Ms. Pelicot said she contemplated suicide. But with the help of her children and friends, she began to slowly gather the shards of her broken life and identity. She sold most things in the home in Mazan and moved elsewhere.
She divorced her husband and legally changed her surname before the trial, but she said she would use her married name for the trial.
Notably, since the day she stepped into the police station, she said she has not had a single blackout.
While she seemed strong and described herself as a boxer who repeatedly stood back up after being knocked down, she also told the court, “Inside, there is a field of ruins.”
“I will try to rebuild my life,” she said. “I don’t know how.”
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris. More about Catherine Porter
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