In France, 51 men there is the judgmentafter the case of a women that was drugged on multiple occasions to be raped.
On September 2, in Avignon, a small town in the south-east of France, the Vaucluse Criminal Court held one of the most disturbing trials in the country’s recent history.
This comes after Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old man, appeared before the court along with 50 other men, who were accused of participating in the systematic rape of Giséle Pelicot, a 72-year-old woman, who for almost 10 years was drugged and offered to dozens of strangers, while she remained unconscious in her own home.
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The defendants form a mosaic of French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and labourers, a prison guard, a nurse, a computer expert working for a bank and a local journalist, whose ages range from 26 to 74.
According to reports, some of the suspects, who were identified through photographs, videos and online messages found on her computer, sexually abused Giséle up to six times.
According to the husband, “everyone knew” that his wife was drugged without his consent. According to the investigation, “every individual had free will” and could have “left” upon realizing the situation.
On the other hand, it was detailed that the accused do not suffer from major psychological pathologies, although they have a feeling of “omnipotence” over the female body, according to experts. Many claim that they believed they were participating in the fantasies of a libertine couple.
Gisèle, a nightmare life for almost a decade
The man, a former employee of the electricity company EDF, was giving his wife strong anti-anxiety drugs such as Temesta and Zolpidem, and the men, contacted on the dating site coco.fr – now closed – were ordered not to wake her.
Other instructions included not smelling of perfume or tobacco, warming your hands with hot water and undressing in the kitchen to avoid forgetting clothes in your bedroom.
However, Gisèle P. found out about the terrible situation she was experiencing at the age of 68, after she had been losing hair and weight for years and had begun to forget entire days and sometimes seemed to be in dreamlike trances, so much so that even her children and friends came to believe that she had Alzheimer’s.
But at the end of 2020, after being summoned to a police station in the south of France, she received terrifying news.
Dominique Pelicot, her husband of 50 years, had been mixing sleeping pills into her food and drinks to put her into a deep sleep, before raping her by strangers.
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Faced with this, the victim, who claims to have no memories of what happened and will have “very difficult moments” during the trial, but “believes she has nothing to hide” or “to be ashamed of,” divorced her husband and has changed her surname since her arrest.
However, he will testify on Thursday, while the magistrates will question the main defendant on September 10, as even the cold case unit implicates the defendant in two others: a murder with rape in Paris in 1991, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, which he admits after his DNA was identified.
CSAS
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2024-09-09 11:49:28