This Monday, November 25, the public prosecutor requested the maximum sentence, i.e. twenty years of criminal imprisonment, against Dominique Pelicot for his “despicable actions”. He is accused of having drugged, raped and had his wife raped by dozens of men recruited on the internet over a decade.
2 mins
“ Twenty years is a lot because it’s twenty years of a life, whatever its age, it’s not nothing. But it is both a lot and too little. Too little considering the seriousness of the acts that were committed and repeated », insisted Laure Chabaud, second representative of the public prosecutor to speak this Monday morning before the Vaucluse criminal court, in Avignon. “ His responsibility for the acts committed is therefore full and complete. “, she estimated.
This sentence was expected since Dominique Pelicot, 71, has never hidden his responsibility. In mid-September, he described himself as “ rapist » and said: “ I am guilty of what I did. […] I ruined everything, I lost everything. I have to pay. »
Also readMazan affair: “You chose the depths of the human soul”, says Gisèle Pelicot to her ex-husband
“ The search for his pleasure is found in a desire to submit to his wife, to humiliate or even degrade by his actions, his words, the person he cherishes most in the world. “, accused the assistant prosecutor.
Reminder of the facts
For ten years, from July 2011 to October 2020, the septuagenarian had hit his wife with anxiolytics and then raped her and delivered her, at their marital home in Mazan (Vaucluse) to dozens of men, now aged 26 at 74, whom he had recruited via the site Coco.fr, now banned. These 50 co-defendants are being prosecuted most of them for aggravated rape, facts for which they also face 20 years of criminal imprisonment.
Pulling the rug out from under arguments sometimes put forward by certain defense lawyers since the start of this trial on September 2she also assured that it was “ it is not possible that Gisèle Pelicot could have voluntarily ingested these anxiolytics “. Eighteen of the 51 accused, including Dominique Pelicot, appear detained. Thirty-two others appear free, the last, on the run, being tried in absentia.
During his last speech, on November 19, Dominique Pelicot, unanimously described as the “ conductor » of this decade of repeated rapes against his now ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicothad explained that “ subduing a rebellious woman was (his) fantasy “.
The verdict of this emblematic trial of sexual violence and chemical submission is expected no later than December 20.
Also readMazan rape case: the Pelicot children describe “a family destroyed” by the “devil himself”