This Wednesday, November 27, Dominique Pélicot’s lawyer took the stand to defend her client. She tried to present another side of the main accused.
This Wednesday, November 27, the attorneys general ruled on the latest requisitions against the 51 accused in the Mazan rape trial. With one exception, the sentences requested against the accused are equal to or greater than 10 years in prison. Two days earlier, 20 years of criminal imprisonment were requested against Dominique Pélicot for having drugged, raped and delivered his wife to strangers. The defense arguments began this Wednesday afternoon. They will last until December 13 before a verdict expected around December 20.
Me Béatrice Zavarro notably pleaded for Dominique Pélicot, who celebrated her 72nd birthday on November 27. “I hope I found the right words,” she said before entering the courtroom. She then took the stand, introducing herself as “the devil’s advocate.” “I fully, fully assume the defense of Dominique Pélicot because he placed total and mutual trust in me,” she clarified as reported Midi-Free.
“The other Dominique”
His objective during this pleading: to highlight “the other Dominique Pélicot”, understand the man that the accused was before committing the crimes with which he is accused, by emphasizing his career. She thus returned to the latter’s childhood and the traumas he faced. Me Béatrice Zavarro notably cited “a rape in the hospital at 8 years old” and a “construction site rape at 14 years old”. She also spoke of the violence suffered by her mother before her eyes. “The images are those of his mother with her arms tied behind her back, forced by her father to perform fellatio and undergo sodomy,” she described.
The lawyer then mentioned Dominique Pélicot as her husband. “Mrs. Pélicot, with an accuracy that must be given to her, would say that she was dealing with a man who was good, who was a good husband, a good father, a good grandfather. Indeed, she could not reproach Dominique Pelicot for anything. at that time,” she insisted. She also insisted on the sincere love that Dominique Pélicot felt for his wife, before he committed the unthinkable. “From 2010/2011 you have two beings who will evolve on very different terrains. Madam [Pélicot]who will devote himself to his activities as a grandmother and he who will take refuge in his fantasies and who will give birth to his criminal pattern,” she said.
The shift into perversity
The lawyer also tried to explain her client’s actions. She reported that Dominique Pélicot had explained that he liked “seeing his wife take pleasure with someone else, to see her touched by someone else”. Me Béatrice Zavarro also says she spoke with a sexologist who, faced with the evolution of Dominique Pélicot’s behavior, affirmed that “sex in a man is proof of the persistence of his virility. As he ages, he has deviances which are increasing. An argument put forward as a possible explanation for the accused’s actions. The lawyer continued in this direction, concluding with a sentence that did not go unnoticed: “Isn’t this presence, this file in fact his last erection? [Dominique Pélicot] knows very well that he will not be able to do anything in the future.”