At last, the man at the center of a rape trial that has shocked France and drawn attention around world spoke in court.
Dominique Pelicot explained how his wife had saved him from a childhood haunted by a sexual assault he said he had suffered in a hospital at the age of 9, and a gang rape he witnessed while working as an apprentice electrician on a construction site as a teen.
“She didn’t deserve this, I recognize that,” he said in tears from the stand, his voice so weak the court strained to hear him.
Mr. Pelicot, 71, is accused of drugging Gisèle Pelicot, his wife of 50 years, over almost a decade in order to rape her while she was comatose. Then, the police say, he invited dozens of men to come into their house and join him in raping her.
Some 51 men, including Mr. Pelicot, are on trial together, mostly on charges of the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot. One has pleaded guilty for similarly drugging his own wife to rape her and inviting Mr. Pelicot to their home to rape her while she was drugged.
His appearance on Tuesday came as a surprise. Just one week into the trial, Mr. Pelicot fell so ill that he missed four days of court, until the head judge finally postponed the hearing. Mr. Pelicot was diagnosed with kidney stones, a kidney infection and prostate problems.
After dispatching medical experts to assess him on Monday, the Avignon court’s head judge, Roger Arata, ruled Mr. Pelicot was well enough to attend — in an amended fashion, with breaks every 15 to 20 minutes and a comfortable chair.
The accused are a cross-section of working and middle class rural France, ranging in age from 26 to 74; they include truck drivers, soldiers, a nurse, an IT specialist and a journalist. Most are accused of going to the retired couple’s house in the town of Mazan and raping Ms. Pelicot once. A handful are accused of returning and raping her repeatedly.
More than a dozen have admitted their guilt, including Mr. Pelicot. But lawyers for many others have argued that their clients did not intend to rape Ms. Pelicot. The lawyers for several have said that they were tricked into believing that they were joining a sexual threesome among consenting adults and that she was only pretending to sleep.
Over the past two weeks, many of the more than 40 lawyers in the courtroom have painted Mr. Pelicot as a master manipulator — overseeing the bedroom scene like a film director, coaxing the men, lying to them and urging them on.
“Without the intention to commit it, there is no rape,” Guillaume De Palma, a lawyer representing six of the accused, said last week in court. “My clients were totally duped, fooled, tricked and trapped by Mr. Pelicot.”
Mr. Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, has said that he has maintained from the moment he was arrested in late 2020 that he had informed all the men that his spouse was drugged and did not know what was happening to her.
Prosecutors pieced the case together after the police discovered more than 20,000 videos and photos on Mr. Pelicot’s computers and hard drives, many of them dated and labeled, in a folder titled “abuse.” Mr. Pelicot was arrested in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of women shopping in a grocery store. The police seized his electronic devices and a laptop from his home, discovering a first batch of videos and photos, which led to his arrest that November for the broader crimes.
Some of the videos are expected to be shown during the trial as evidence.
Ms. Pelicot, who has divorced her husband and has renounced her former surname but is using it in court during the trial, was entitled under French law to remain anonymous and have the case tried privately. Instead, she made the relatively rare decision to ask that it be public.
She wanted to shift the shame to the accused, her lawyers said, and she stated that she hoped her story would help other victims of drugging and abuse.
During her own harrowing testimony, Ms. Pelicot described her former husband as the love of her life. They met at 19 and soon built a life together, having three children and then seven grandchildren, who often visited. She said she had no idea that she had been drugged or abused, let alone by the man she trusted most in the world.
She had, however, suffered disturbing symptoms for many years that led her to fear she had a brain tumor or was developing Alzheimer’s: hair and weight loss, and large gaps in her memory, with whole days and nights blacked out.
As a result of her decision to testify, she has become a feminist icon and hero of sexual assault survivors in France. Thousands of women rallied in support of her over the weekend at events across France.
Entering the courtroom on Monday, Ms. Pelicot stopped briefly to acknowledge the support.
“Thanks to all of you, I have the strength to fight this battle to the end,” she told a battery of cameras and outstretched microphones. She offered a message to victims of sexual violence around the world.
“Look around you,” she said. “You are not alone.”
The post ‘She Didn’t Deserve This’: Husband Accused of Raping Wife Testifies in French Court appeared first on New York Times.
