Gisele Pelicot, along with her family, has arrived to witness justice being served to her husband, Dominique Pelicot – known as the Monster of Avignon, who is expected to receive a 20-year jail sentence for allegedly masterminding the mass rape of his wife.
Today, the perpetrators of France’s most infamous sexual assault case, involving the 72-year-old grandmother who was raped by multiple men after being drugged by her husband, will face their destinies as judges commence the verdict process.
The 50 individuals, coming from various backgrounds, are looking at a total of over 600 years in prison for their roles in Dominique Pelicot’s disturbing decade-long scheme, during which he allowed his wife to be mistreated while she was unconscious from potent sedatives.
Pelicot, 72, who has failing health, has accepted that he will die behind bars, with his daughter yelling at him during the trial: ‘You will die alone like a dog and caught out in lies!’
His 50 accomplices – all of whom are expected to be found guilty – face terms between four and 18 years each.
Each of the defendants is allowed to bring one relative into the court to learn their fate. One woman was seen breaking down in tears as she kissed her partner – probably for the last time for several years, as he is expecting to go to jail.
Other women could not hold back their tears as they sat in the court annexe where the verdicts will be broadcast.
The trial – which has gathered international attention – has gripped France and the world since its outset in September.
Some 180 journalists from across France and the globe queued outside the Avignon Criminal Court before dawn this morning to hear the verdicts.
Feminist campaigners have been protesting in the street outside the courthouse waving placards demanding ‘Christmas in jail’ and ‘Easter behind bars’ for Pelicot and the other defendants.
Supporters of Mme Pelicot have welcomed her with flowers, applause and words of encouragement throughout the more than three month trial, and this morning was no different, with the mother-of-three breaking into a smile as she was cheered by the crowds gathered outside.
Bus loads of other protesters are expected to join a mass demonstration in support of Gisele Pelicot who has stood proud in to face down her vile abusers over the four month trial that has shocked the world.
The bravery of Madame Pelicot in allowing her identity to be revealed – and the dignity with which she conducted herself throughout the trial – has seen the case become a cause célèbre for campaigners against sexual violence.
Mme Pelicot held her head high as she heard and watched films taken by her husband of 50 years in which she was abused some 200 times by strangers he had invited into their home.
Having waived her legal right to anonymity in order to ensure the case received the maximum amount of publicity, the grandmother refused to be shamed – but instead repeatedly directed any shame at her abusers.
As interest in the case grew, Mme Pelicot was clapped and cheered as she arrived at court and left at the end of the day. Graffiti honouring her bravery was daubed on Avignon’s medieval stone walls and protests in support of her erupted all over France.
Prosecutors have based their sentencing demands to the court for each defendant on aggravating factors including how many times they came to the Pelicot home and the extent of documented sexual contact.
By this assessment the worst offender, for whom prosecutors suggest an 18- year tariff, was a 63-year-old Romain Vandevelde. He was knowingly HIV-positive yet is accused of raping Mme Pelicot on six separate occasions without wearing protection.
Because the incidents were meticulously recorded by Pelicot the defendants have been unable to deny sexual contact with the victim – but most have claimed they were unaware of the circumstances Pelicot had engineered.
French criminal law defines rape as any sexual act committed by ‘violence, coercion, threat or surprise’ but makes no reference to any need for consent – an aspect that campaigners have fixed on as outdated and wrong.
The trial heard in disturbing detail how while outwardly a doting husband, retired electrician Dominique, was secretly engineering what may possibly be the greatest marital betrayal of all time.
Pelicot told the court: ‘I am a rapist like all those accused in this room.’
And as the evidence has been revealed, his 50 accomplices have wriggled and squirmed and repeatedly tried to protest their innocence.
One defendant told police; ‘rape is not possible if a woman’s husband is present’, another claimed a man; ‘can do what he likes with his wife’, while most said they believed they were taking part in a ‘kinky sex game’ in which Madame Pelicot was a willing party.
One defence lawyer, the head of the criminal bar in Avignon, Master Guillaume de Palma, even told the court rape ‘cannot occur’ if the perpetrator did not ‘mean to’. His remarks, in the second week of the trial, prompted outrage across France and added to the growing calls for justice for women.
However, the scores of videos of the unbridled truth, taken by Pelicot over ten years and shown in court to the shame-faced defendants and members of the public who queued every day to watch the real-life drama play out, left very little room for doubt.
Tossed around like a ‘rag doll’, and often snoring, Madame Pelicot, could be seen to be clearly unconscious and unable to give her consent.
In an electrifying 90-minute testimony, she told the hushed Avignon court: ‘I was sacrificed on the altar of vice.
‘My body might have been warm, but I was like a dead person.
‘I was a dead woman, and these men take advantage of me, they defile me, they treat me like a bin bag.
‘They didn’t rape me with a gun or knife to their heads – they raped me in full consciousness.
‘They treated me like a rag doll.
‘It is unbearable, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to get up [off the floor] again.’
Her abusers, most from within a 50-mile radius of the Pelicots’ home, were seemingly ordinary men from all walks of life.
The fact that broadly represented a cross section of French society saw them collectively described as Monsieur-Tout-Le-Monde – or Mr Everyman.
There was veteran chief fireman Christian Lescole, 57, who protested in court at being locked up after spending ‘a lifetime saving people’. Police also found naked pictures of children on his computer following his arrest.
Moroccan-born hospital nurse Redouane El Farihi screamed his innocence before a video of him assaulting Madame Pelicot while she lay motionless was played in court.
There was ‘sexual predator’ Jerome Vilela, a supermarket worker, who was described by his ex-partner as a ‘sex-addict’ and told a prison psychologist he saw sex as a ‘conjugal right’.
Successful builder Thierry Parisis told the court he had fallen into a spiral of depression and alcoholism following the death of his son in a car crash. He added he remembered very little about his encounter with Madame Pelicot.
Retired marine fire-fighter Jacques Cubeau said he was lonely.
There was IT worker Lionel Rodriguez, 44; painter and decorator Husamettin Dogan, 43; odd-job man Mathieu Dartus, 53; motorcycle mechanic and racer Hugues Malago, 39; and farm worker Andy Rodriguez, 37.
And there was Romain Vandevelde, a 63-year-old man with HIV who visited the Pelicots on six different occasions between December 2019 and June 2020 to rape Madame Pelicot and refused to wear a condom.
These are just a handful of the strangers that took part in the mass rape that has put the tiny village of Mazan, that lies in France’s most picturesque region, Provence, on the map.
Retired electrician Dominique Pelicot met each of his accomplices on an internet site for voyeurs called ‘a son insu’ which translates as ‘without her knowledge’.
Over almost ten years he invited strangers – up to three times a week – to come to the couple’s retirement chalet to rape his wife, which he had rendered unconscious by putting powerful sedatives in her dinner and glass of rose wine.
To ensure they weren’t seen, Pelicot told the would-be rapists to park well away from the house, avoid wearing after-shave or smelling of cigarette smoke, and ensure they left nothing behind in the bedroom.
He choreographed the multiple rapes of his sleeping wife with such attention to detail that a lawyer described him in court as a ‘perverted Steven Spielberg’.
The potentially fatal doses of sedatives forced upon Madame Pelicot had a devastating effect on her health. She lost weight, her hair fell out and she suffered lengthy blackouts. Her doctor feared she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She also became infected with four sexually transmitted disease. She had no idea how.
The abuse only stopped when Pelicot was arrested in October 2020 for taking pictures of women’s underwear on his phone at his local supermarket – a tacky form of voyeurism known as ‘upskirting’.
A search by gendarmes of his home discovered some 20,000 lurid images and images of his wife being violated in the marital bed on computer files and mobile phones.
The following month, while returning home from Paris where she had been looking after her grandchildren, detectives asked Madame Pelicot to come to the police station.
At first, she did not recognise the woman lying on the bed unconscious being abused in the photograph that the policeman showed her. Then she saw it was her and she had been used by her husband of 50 years in the depraved sex scenes he filmed.
‘That day will be seared in my memory for ever,’ Madame Pelicot told the court.
‘It was a scene of barbarism. I was in a state of shock.
‘I remember asking for a glass of water, then a psychologist came into the room, they said my husband had been detained – and everything just collapsed for me.
‘We were 50 years together, with three children and seven grandchildren, and our friends said we were the ideal couple. I just couldn’t take it in.’
Returning alone to the house where she had been so cruelly betrayed, she called her grown-up children – David, Caroline and Florian – to tell them their father was a monster.
Three days later she arrived in Paris with just two suitcases and her dog, never to return to Mazan.
Asked before the trial court how she reacted on learning how she had been abused by the father of her three children, she replied: ‘He disgusts me. I feel dirty, defiled, betrayed. It was a tsunami. I was hit by a high-speed train.’
Pelicot told investigators he carried out his warped fantasies because he was ‘bored’ and blamed his arrest for ‘disrupting his happy life’. He also hinted that he continued to hold a grudge against his long-suffering wife for a brief affair she had over 30 years ago.
The grown-up children have all disowned their father.
But courageous Gisele – whose divorce from her perverted ex-husband was confirmed in the days before the trial began in September – vowed to keep her marital name during the proceedings to protect her children and grandchildren who are also called Pelicot.
However, the family’s pain did not stop there.
During the four-year police investigation into this most cruel case of betrayal detectives uncovered a file entitled: ‘My Daughter Naked’.
In it were photographs of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, as a young woman, lying asleep on a bed, dressed in lingerie and partially naked.
The pictures were taken at the family home in Villiers-sur-Marne, near Paris, before 2013 when Pelicot retired and moved to Mazan in the south of France.
Caroline Darian has written a book about the trauma she suffered after learning her father, who she had idolised, was serial sex attacker, entitled: ‘I No Longer Call You Daddy.’
At different stages of the long trial Caroline Darian confronted her father about whether he had sexually abused her – as well as her mother – storming out of court several times in distress.
But in his final statement Pelicot admitted to the court that he was a sex addict but denied drugging his daughter Caroline and taking photographs of her semi-naked on a bed dressed in her mother’s lingerie.
Turning to his daughter, he said: ‘Caroline, I never did anything to you.’
But in a furious outburst Caroline Darian screamed: ‘You are lying!
‘You’re not telling half the truth, even about your ex-wife!
‘You will die alone like a dog and caught out in lies!’
However, under questioning from his lawyer, Pelicot accepted he would ‘die like a dog’ in jail for the crimes he had committed, but refused to give his beloved daughter the truth she needed.
And while France’s worst husband knows he has seen his family for the last time, he is expected to appear in court again, as Pelicot faces further allegations of rape and murder after France’s cold case bureau in Nanterre linked him with at least six hitherto unsolved crimes.
Pelicot has admitted the rape of a young estate agent in the Paris suburb of Villeparisis in 1999 but denies being involved in the murder of another estate agent Sophie Narne in another suburb of the capital eight years earlier and other similar cases.
The Pelicot case in terms of number of defendants is not the largest sex crime case in French history – in that regard it is eclipsed by the child-sex rings that operated in the city of Angers in the early 2000s.
But the globally high-profile trial has meant that it is almost certainly the most notorious.
