Mannat Saini, Pune
New details have emerged in the trial of Dominique Pelicot, accused of drugging and raping his wife over a decade and luring around 72 men to sexually abuse her. The details include nude photographs of both Gisele Pelicot, his wife, and their daughter, drugged similarly. The authorities have also found a series of online chats and conversations of the 71-year-old accused, Dominique, recruiting men to sexually violate Gisele Pelicot.
The trial is ongoing in the French state of Avignon and involves 50 other men who were recruited by Dominique to perform sexual abuse.
What is the case?
Gisele Pelicot and Dominique Pelicot had been married since they were both 18 years old. In accordance with Gisele, they had an ordinary marital life, having three children together over the years.
In 2020, Dominique was caught filming under the skirts of women at a local supermarket. Upon investigation, the police located a file named “abuses” on his computer containing 20,000 images and videos of his wife drugged and being raped almost 100 times.
According to Gisele, her “world fell apart” in November 2020 when the police confronted her in a meeting she thought was a formality for the minor incident at the supermarket. She refused to recognize herself in the images and videos and was deeply disturbed by them. She told the court, “When you see that woman drugged, mistreated, a dead person on a bed – of course, the body is not cold, it’s warm, but it’s as if I’m dead.”
The authorities have claimed that Dominique crushed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medications into the meals or wine of Gisele at their home in Provence. Once she was asleep, he recruited men in online forums to violate and abuse her while he filmed the instances. These men were instructed not to wear perfume or smoke a cigarette in the house and to immediately flee if she were to move even the slightest.
Gisele has since admitted that she was unaware of the abuse lasting from 2011 to 2020. She presumed that her forgetfulness and weakness were a sign of Alzheimer’s disease and feared getting on the local bus by herself, lest she was to forget her stop. She has also experienced a series of gynecological issues, including two if not more, sexually transmitted diseases.
The judge has found that Dominique was drugging Caroline Darian, his daughter in a similar way as her mother, to take nude photographs of her. The authorities claim to have found a folder titled “Around My Daughter Naked” that contains nude images of Caroline partially dressed in her mother’s clothes.