The sun rises gently over Mazan, casting a soft glow over the cobbled square where three patients wait outside a doctor’s office. The sound of church bells fills the air as the doctor they are here to see emerges from his black Vauxhall Zafira.
With thinning hair and a middle-aged appearance, he carries a leather bag on the shoulder of his jacket, looking like any typical French small-town doctor starting his day.
Uninvolved in the high-profile court case unfolding in Avignon, located 40 miles away, he will not be involved as a witness in the highly publicized rape trial.
Nor has Dr Daniel Turturica been interviewed by investigators, for when police raided the hilltop surgery that he shares with his wife and seized the medical files of the chief defendant, Dominique Pelicot, he maintained his silence, citing patient confidentiality.
Indeed, until I tracked down the Romanian-born GP and spoke to him last week, he had managed to remain faceless and anonymous. Yet the 369-page file presented to the court by the investigating magistrate reveals him to be an integral figure in the case.
For it was this local doctor whom Pelicot – feigning chronic insomnia – duped into prescribing the tranquilisers that he used to render his wife, Gisele, unconscious, so that strangers could sneak into their house and rape her.
In truth, Pelicot suffered from sleep apnoea, a condition that would have made it dangerous for him to take the sedatives he secretly fed to her: zolpidem and lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug branded Temesta in France.
However, he kept this from Dr Turturica and for years deceived the doctor into prescribing him hundreds of these benzodiazepines, which he stockpiled and crushed into Gisele’s evening meals. Thereafter she slid into unconsciousness and her husband welcomed strangers into her bedroom to rape her.
David Jones talks to Dr Daniel Turturica outside his surgery in the town of Mazan
David Jones tracked down the Romanian-born GP and spoke to him last week
So these powerful pills served as Pelicot’s evil elixir: as vital, in his chosen form of chemically induced rape, as a knife is to the brutal sex attacker who sets upon his victim in some darkened back-alley.
Without obtaining them freely, in huge quantities, he could not have sent Gisele into such a deep coma that he was able to carry her to bed, remove her nightclothes and garb her in lingerie for the rapists’ twisted pleasure, all without her knowing.
Without these pills she would surely have woken up as the men who violated her – 50 of whom are now on trial – treated her like a rag doll. She was so deeply asleep when one man attacked her that he thought she might be dead.
Pelicot has also admitted giving some of the drugs to three of the rapists so that they could abuse their partners in the same way.
It follows, then, that the doctor who prescribed this despicable man with the most crucial weapon in his armoury sits at the heart of this grim story, unwitting as his role may have been.
Had Pelicot been on trial in Britain, the court might well have decided to overrule Dr Turturica’s right to medical confidentiality, given the gravity of the charges.
His professional body might also have required him to account for his actions – for in parts of the court file it is claimed that this doctor acted unlawfully in prescribing zolpidem for so long by way of a repeat prescription.
This ‘Z-family’ sleeping pill is highly addictive and the French medical authorities state that it should only be dispensed for 28 days without a fresh consultation.
But on March 3, 2020, investigators allege, Dr Turturica signed off three boxes of the drug to Pelicot, and his prescription was renewable three times, which ‘was not legally possible’, investigators claim. They also allegedly found proof that the doctor wrote Pelicot scripts for at least 780 Temesta pills, at the maximum strength of 2.5mg, but they have extrapolated that he might have received as many as 1,520 of these tablets.
Dr Turturica issued the first prescription on October 8, 2013, just six months after the Pelicots – then in their early-60s – moved from the Paris region to their retirement chalet in Mazan.
He handed out Pelicot’s final prescription on October 28, 2020, six weeks after he was arrested for taking mobile phone photos up women’s skirts in a grocery shop, prompting the investigation that revealed him to have been drugging and filming his wife being raped.
Dominique Pelicot used tranquilisers to render his wife, Gisele, unconscious, so that strangers could sneak into their house and rape her
Gisele Pelicot was the victim of her husband’s crimes for years – he would stockpile the tranquilisers and crush them into Gisele’s evening meals
Additionally, Dr Turturica was found to have given Pelicot 193 Viagra pills at a strength of 100mg – five times the recommended dose. As we now know, he used these to boost his libido before joining in the attacks.
Investigators say that Pelicot’s medical records did not explain why these drugs were dispensed.
When questioned, he told them Temesta had been recommended to him as a strong and reliable sedative by a nurse, whom he met in one of the perverted chatrooms where he recruited men to abuse Gisele.
Toxicology tests using strands of his hair established that he hadn’t taken the sleeping drugs himself. However, when samples of Gisele’s hair were analysed, she was found to have ingested them in dangerously high doses.
When Pelicot was interviewed by investigators for the first time, he admitted to crushing ten Temesta tablets into her food before the rapes were perpetrated: a dose of 25mg.
Experts from France’s National Institute of Scientific Police (INPS) say this ‘massive intake’ could have proved fatal.
Mindful, perhaps, that his admission had laid him open to even more serious charges, Pelicot subsequently revised his story, claiming he had drugged Gisele with only three Temesta tablets at a time. He therefore felt he ‘had not put her life at risk’.
Whatever the truth, it might have assisted the court to learn more about his acquisition and use of these drugs – some of which were found hidden in one of his walking boots in the garage – from the man who prescribed them.
As this landmark trial is awakening France to the spiralling prevalence of chemical rape, and prescription drugs are being used in many of these attacks, Dr Turturica’s testimony could also have been in the public interest.
Instead, we are left with the brief exclusive interview he allowed me last week, when I approached him at his surgery.
The clear purpose of this was to exonerate himself. In the immortal words of French songstress Edith Piaf: ‘Je ne regrette rien.’ ‘Yes, M. Pelicot was my patient and came to my surgery for his problem [insomnia] but for such a request we don’t have the possibility to check whether it’s genuine,’ he said, his Romanian accent still heavy after 30 years in Mazan.
‘If someone comes and says they have a sore throat, how can I know whether that’s true? If someone asks for sleeping pills, I can’t verify whether he has insomnia or not.
‘I’m obliged to prescribe medication in the doses recommended. Insomnia is generally chronic and can last for many years. The prescriptions were within the valid limits. Zolpidem is not limited in time. No, no! It’s not illegal.’
He paused and shrugged. ‘Anyway, if I don’t prescribe [these drugs] he just gets them from a psychiatrist or someone else. It might be a case in a million – or 30 million – where someone uses medicine for this purpose. It’s unique.’
The Pelicots’ home in the village of Mazan in France. It has been branded a ‘house of horrors’
While Dr Turturica has not appeared in court, among Mazan’s 4,000 residents – who are served by only three family doctors – his involvement in the case is well known.
How, then, do locals in this insular little town regard him? Kindly and respectfully, he assures me, nonchalantly remarking that some of the people who attend his surgery have relatives among the 50 accused rapists.
Dr Turturica’s online 36 patient reviews are decidedly mixed and his rating is only 2.5 stars out of five, below those of Mazan’s other two doctors, one of whom gets top marks. ‘Makes you wait for an hour to tell you in 30 seconds that he can’t help you,’ writes one patient, Salome Richaud, who consulted the doctor when suffering depression because she couldn’t conceive.
Now recovered and the mother of a baby boy, Ms Richaud, 24, tells me the doctor suggested she should ‘adopt an animal’ to ease her suffering. She refused to pay his fee.
However, an anonymous new patient praises Dr Turturica as an ‘old school doctor’ who ‘takes the time to listen’. Another says that while he can ‘seem a little cold at first’ he has always been ‘a big help’.
Whatever his pluses and minuses, he certainly proved very helpful to Dominique Pelicot.
Before he hurried away, I asked him whether he thought it strange that a self-proclaimed insomniac in his mid-60s had also requested fistfuls of super-strength Viagra.
With a disquieting grin he replied: ‘Excuse me, it’s not necessary to have sex at night. It’s possible during the day.’
As Pelicot’s lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, told me during a court recess on Thursday, in French law Dr Turturica’s right to silence prevented the parties in this case ‘going after him’.
But in any case, she would not have done so, because it would not have helped her case.
Mme Zavarro lays no blame at the doctor’s door. ‘It’s not a question of irresponsibility,’ she said. ‘These drugs were not compatible with Dominique Pelicot’s sleep apnoea.
‘He [Dr Turturica] didn’t realise that – and he didn’t try to find out. But a doctor can’t guess if a patient doesn’t tell them.’
The prosecution file states that, under questioning by investigators, Pelicot ‘affirmed that the doctor had not been his accomplice’.
Nobody has suggested such a thing. Nonetheless, the ease with which he was deceived concerns Dr Bernard Arbomont, president of the Vaucluse department Ordre des Medecins, the body that oversees the department’s doctors.
‘I did ask myself the question as to how this gentleman procured the medicine,’ he told the Mail, affirming that under French guidelines zolpidem should only be prescribed for four weeks without the patient being re-examined.
But he said the task of monitoring doctors for possible over-prescribing fell to CPAM, the social security organisation that manages French health expenses, and in Pelicot’s case it appeared not to have been flagged up.
‘This is not a frequent occurrence – but I think that unfortunately it was not an isolated case,’ Dr Arbomont said worryingly, adding that where doctors were reported to his organisation they would be called to account.
Among close observers of the trial, there are those who believe that ought to have happened here. ‘I don’t know how Pelicot got past the doctor, the pharmacist, the whole chain. It’s incomprehensible,’ said an 80-year-old woman named Aline, who regularly sits in the court overflow room with dozens of onlookers, including sexual abuse victims and campaigners.
‘Normally this type of medical professional is very vigilant. I think this aspect of the case should be investigated.’
Assuming Dr Turturica’s records are accurate, Madame Pelicot attended his surgery just once during her seven years in Mazan, after injuring her ankle.
Given that her body and mind were slowly being destroyed by her husband’s pills, we might wonder why she didn’t consult him more often.
Perhaps she simply preferred to see a different doctor, but as the abuse wore on and her condition worsened, she was referred to specialists. Totally losing her memory for protracted periods, descending into robotic trances when dining with friends, afraid to drive or even catch a train unaccompanied, she feared she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
She lost more than two stone, felt anxious and perpetually exhausted, and was inexplicably diagnosed with four sexually transmitted diseases.
By late October 2020, when a sharp-eyed security guard spotted Pelicot pointing his phone up the skirts of female shoppers, her health was in tatters.
As we have seen these past three months, Gisele Pelicot is possessed of enormous courage and strength. But who knows how long she would have survived had her plausible husband continued to dupe his doubtless well-meaning, but seemingly gullible, doctor?
