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full screen Gisèle Pelicot, who for ten years was drugged and raped by various men at the instigation of her ex-husband, in a picture taken in connection with the trial in southern France’s Avignon. Photo: Lewis Joly/AP/TT
Gisèle Pelicot was drugged and raped over 200 times by 70 different men her husband recruited online.
Now CNN has obtained access to police reports containing thousands of messages between Dominique Pelicot and the other defendants in the case that shook France.
“I’m looking for a perverted accomplice to prey on my sleeping wife.”
“I’m putting her to sleep now. Plan to get here around 03.”
“Must be clean”
The messages come from Dominique Pelicot’s chats on a forum called “without her knowledge” on a now defunct site. The statements show how he drugged his wife for years and meticulously planned the abuses to avoid her suspecting any trouble afterwards.
“You must be clean and no aftershave, no long dirty fingernails,” reads one of Pelicot’s messages to an accomplice.
“She’s free now,” he continues a moment later.
The intended perpetrator responds with a question:
“Has the sleeping pill started working?”
In several messages obtained by CNN, the men express admiration for Dominique Pelicot and say they want to do the same to their own partners.
“I don’t know how you manage, but I dream of doing the same thing to my wife and sharing hers with accomplices like you,” writes one.
Judgment on Thursday
Pelicot also shared explicit photos and videos of his wife, several of them in connection with previous rapes.
A man seems concerned about venereal diseases.
“Do you test her from time to time? Are you sure she is clean?”, he writes.
72-year-old Dominique Pelicot and the 50 or so co-defendants whom the police have managed to identify are expected to receive their verdict on Thursday. The youngest is today 27, the oldest 74.
All the men on trial in Avignon live less than five miles from the Pelicots’ former home in the village of Mazan.
FACTS The case that shook France
For several years, Gisèle Pelicot (who today changed her last name) had strange memory lapses and other health problems and thought she had Alzheimer’s.
In 2020, she learned from the police that her husband Dominique Pelicot, also the father of her three children, had secretly given her large doses of sedatives, raped her and invited dozens of strangers to the couple’s shared residence to participate. The crimes had been going on for nearly a decade and had been meticulously documented and cataloged by the husband.
The husband was caught more or less by accident in 2020, after filming under women’s skirts in a local supermarket. The documentation of the abuse led the police to 50 suspected perpetrators who could be identified, one of whom is still at large.
Dominique Pelicot had also photographed his daughter and his sons’ wives without their knowledge, as well as published nude pictures of them on social media along with pornographic photo montages.
The case has sparked shock and anger in France and other parts of the world. Gisèle Pelicot has been hailed as a feminist icon for her decision to hold an open trial and her refusal to be ashamed of what she suffered.
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