Gisèle Pelicot is French, he lives in Mazan, in the south of Francewhere she moved with her husband Dominique Pelicot when they both retired. They met in 1971, Gisèle and Dominique, and not even two years later they decided to get married. Soon his children arrive, two boys and a girl, but also financial troubles: Pelicot loves to live beyond his means, which makes him go into heavy debt, until he has to bankrupt his company that worked in electricity to confirm. sectoral. The couple divorced to protect their assets from creditors, but they remarried in 2007. Because, as Gisèle Pelicot says today from a courtroom where one of the the most mass rape trials ever followedin these fifty years of life together she felt above all “lucky” to have “the perfect husband” by her side. Love is worthy of the greatest trust.
Of course, like all couples, the Pelicots also had their problems: she admitted that she had an affair, but he himself was not always faithful to her, nevertheless the two chose to continue together and, she recalls today with Gisèle’s disappointment. , mutual love. Until 2020 the police stopped Dominique for filming with a small camera up the skirts of some women at the local supermarket. They seized his phone, computer and various hard drives and then police found thousands of exchanges that took place on a free dating site, Coco.fr, and a separate chat room called “His son in them”, “Unbeknownst to him”. In this conversation the men talked about what they themselves defined as sexual relations. but that was really rape: carnal relations with their partners without their knowledge. In 2024, after an 18-month investigation spanning Europe, the site was closed and its owner arrested.
By reading this conversation, the police discovered that from July 2011 and up to the beginning of the investigations, so for about ten years, Dominique Pelicot had regularly given some Tempesta tablets to his wife at dinner time and grind them into food. , the drug sold in Italy as Tavor, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety and insomnia. He then allowed the men from the conversation with whom he had previously made arrangements to enter the house, allowing them to rape his unconscious wife. He filmed everything. On a USB stick investigators found a folder called “ABUS”. Hundreds of videos were cataloged by date, the name of the rapist as it appeared in the conversation and the number of rapes. There were 128 files present in this folder and 92 were the rapes apparently committed against the woman. The names of 83 rapists were on the list. The police, during the two years of investigations that followed, identified 51 of them, who were then arrested. Although you can ask to remain anonymous and have a closed door trial, as French law allows in cases of sexual violence, Gisèle Pelicot decided to have a public one so that her story and her words would reach as many people as possible. “I wanted to do this as a media event because I want society to change”he said.