Gisèle Pélicot rape case: ‘Every detail is more horrific than the last’
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Dominique Pélicot is accused of drugging and raping his wife, along with more than 72 other men, in the French village of Mazan between 2011 and 2020.
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Read time: 6 mins
In brief…
- Dominique Pélicot is accused of inviting more than 72 men to rape his heavily sedated wife between 2011 and 2020. She had no knowledge of the attacks.
- It took her a year to be able to speak about the case, and requested the trial be made public in order to raise awareness of what she had experienced, and rape culture more generally.
- A reporter who was in court for the case says its details are like something from a “horror movie”.
What's the background in the Pélicot case?
It’s a story so unfathomable it’s been described as something out of a horror movie.
Dominique Pélicot, 71, is accused not only of drugging and raping his wife, but also of inviting 51 other alleged men to rape her whilst she was drugged and unconscious. The crimes took place in the small French village of Mazan between 2011 and 2020.
Gisèle Pélicot, 72, bravely made the request that the trial be open, in order to raise awareness about drug use in instances of sexual abuse.
Mr Pélicot's crimes were only uncovered when police seized his computer, after he was caught taking photos up a woman’s skirt in a supermarket. Police found 20,000 images and videos of his wife being raped in a file labelled "abuses" on a USB drive attached to the computer.
He is accused of mixing crushed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety pills into his wife's food or drink, before contacting men in online chatrooms to visit the family home and commit rape when she was unconscious.
Peter Conradi, Europe editor of The Times newspaper, was in court covering the trial, and describes the details of the alleged crimes as like something from a “horror film”.
“She would go to bed every evening in her pyjamas. She would wake up the next morning in her pyjamas in exactly the same place, and would not have any knowledge of what had happened in the intervening eight or nine hours, in which she had been asleep.”
Conradi praises the police for their “perseverance”, saying that had they not investigated the upskirting crime fully, he may have gotten away with a minor punishment.
“It took her a year or so before she was ready to do this,” he says.
“They then showed her video footage that her husband had taken of these men raping her.”
“At first she didn't recognise who this woman was lying in a bed.”
Ms Pélicot has said that police "saved" her life when they uncovered his alleged crimes, and is being supported by her three adult children during the trial.
Most of those accused could face up to 20 years in jail if they are convicted of aggravated rape. They include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a prison guard, a police officer, soldier, firefighter and civil servant, and were aged between 26 and 73 when arrested.
France's shocking mass rape case: Why isn't it on the front page?
What happened in court?
“It doesn’t get any darker,” Conradi tells Emily and Lewis Goodall on The News Agents.
He describes her appearance in court as an "extraordinary performance", noting how she never once broke down, and never once raised her voice while being questioned on the stand over several hours.
“She faced an awful lot of very, very intrusive questioning from defence lawyers – asking her details of her sex life, what form of contraception she used, all manner of very, very invasive questions,” he adds.
“Their aim was clearly to prove that she was somehow complicit in this.
“But you know, they're having an awfully difficult time proving her complicity, because she was very, very heavily sedated the whole time with very strong sleeping tablets.”
The wider implications of the case
The trial has raised other issues around France and its handling of rape cases.
"This case has again brought to the fore this debate about rape, and also, more broadly, the use of of date rape drugs, which is a problem, clearly, not just in France, but in in Britain and everywhere else," he continues.
Usually, Conradi says, cases involving date rape drugs involve "casual encounters”.
“Campaigners are trying to use this case also to point out that there is this use, probably not very widespread, but a number of awful cases of date rape drugs actually within relationships when one person, as in as in her case, doesn't actually realise that they've been used at all, which makes it even more horrific.”
He adds that had this been a case in the UK, it would have been on the front page of every newspaper, but in France it has been relegated to inside pages, saying the French press finds the story too "grubby" for a front page.
He believes there has been a "reluctance to draw broader lessons" from this horrific case.
“The most interesting thing, which again, the media here are not really talking about, is not really why Dominique Pélicot would do it, but how easy it appears to have been to find other men who were prepared to come from quite a wide distance away, to drive to this village in France and to accept someone's invitation to rape their sleeping wife.”
It also ties into a long debate going on in France about the definition of rape.
“Emmanuel Macron himself has said on consent, you should explicitly have to give consent before having sex,” Conradi says. “That has yet to find itself into legislation, in part because we haven't had a government here until a couple of days ago for about several months.”
What’s The News Agents’ take?
Lewis Goodall says the more you learn about this case, the harder it is to “get your head around it”.
“Every single detail that has been reported seems more horrific than the last,” he says. “The woman involved ended up with four sexually transmitted diseases as a result of this. One of the men that her husband invited to come around was HIV positive. They were never told, never asked to wear condoms.”
Emily says it’s interesting to see who has spoken up in France about the case, and who hasn’t.
“We heard from Peter that Macron has actually sort of stepped in this debate and said, ‘You have to give consent before sex’,” she says.
“Only one politician from the assembly has actually come out so far and called this out as horrendous.”
That politician is Sandrine Josso, who has herself been the victim of date rape spiking.
Emily says that if this had happened in the UK, she would hope that a “legion” of female – and male – MPs would have condemned this case in the strongest way possible.
She says there’s only one thing that needs to be done: “Ban date rape drugs already”.
If you have been affected by any of the issues in this story, you can contact Rape Crisis on 0808 500 222, or contact NHS services for support.
Listen in full on The News Agents.
