Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old man, has admitted at the Avignon court to raping his wife, Gisele Pelicot, 71, alongside 50 men he allegedly recruited for the heinous act.
In multiple reports by international news media, Mr Pelicot, alongside 50 men, went on trial on September 2, after Mrs Pelicot was helped by a police station in southern France to discover that her husband had been “crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep.”
Police said Mrs Pelicot’s husband of 50 years, used the sleeping pills to rape her and as well, ushered dozens of men into her home to film them raping her, too. This sexual abuse had lasted nearly a decade before discovery, police added.
The discovery came at the height of curiosity, following Mrs Pelicot’s children finding that she was forgetting days and losing hair and weight.
Using Mr Pelicot’s photographs, videos and online messages, the police spent the next two years identifying and charging those other suspects, amounting to 50.
According to the New York Times, Mr Pelicot testifying at the Avignon court for the first time, admitted that “he is a rapist,” like many others (the 50 men) in the court. The main defendant added that his wife didn’t deserve such treatment.
“I am a rapist like the others in this room. They all knew they cannot say the contrary,” Mr Pelicot said. “She did not deserve this.”
The mass rape case has shocked France and drawn attention around the world, as this would probably be the first time in a decade.
Mr Pelicot has told a defensive story, pointing at a traumatic psyche to have likely sparked such an act. He said he had once experienced a sexual assault in a hospital at the age of 9, and a gang rape while working as an apprentice electrician on a construction site as a teen.
Mr Pelicot had been diagnosed with kidney stones, a kidney infection and prostate problems. Yet, he will be standing alongside a cross-section of working and middle-class rural France, ranging in age from 26 to 74, including truck drivers, soldiers, a nurse, an IT specialist and a journalist, for trial. Most are accused of going to the retired couple’s house in the town of Mazan and raping Mrs 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 Mrs 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.
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