Dominique Pélicot, who was behind the Mazan rape case, first drew attention to himself for having filmed under the skirts and dresses of several customers in a store.
The images are disturbing, surreal in light of the facts that have since come to light. In a video released by Paris Match Friday, September 13, we can see the arrest of Dominique Pélicot, which occurred four years earlier, on September 12, 2020, in a supermarket. The man is now accused of having organized the gang rapes of his wife, whom he drugged, but is also suspected of the rape and murder of a young woman who was showing her apartment in Paris in 1991, and of sexual assault and attempted rape on another woman, also in the Paris region, in 1999, whose apartment he had also visited.
Originally, the man who had been under the radar for three decades had been arrested that day in September 2020 for filming with his phone hidden in a bag under the skirts and dresses of several customers at the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras. It was the store’s security guards who spotted Dominique Pélicot’s scheme before one of them caught him red-handed. The security guard then seized the man’s phone, who continued to film the scene, as revealed in the images released by Paris Match. “He’s taking good pictures of your phone!” the security guard first says, before informing the victim: “He was filming under your dress! […] Madam, I am counting on you to file a complaint.”
Here are the exclusive images of the arrest of Dominique Pelicot when he was filming under the skirts of customers in a supermarket, on September 12, 2020 in Carpentras.
Without the intervention of the security guard, that day, the so-called rape case would have ended. #Mazan would have pic.twitter.com/nV89DRlQm1
— Paris Match (@ParisMatch) September 13, 2024
Dominique Pélicot was handed over to the police immediately afterward. It was this arrest that allowed the police to analyze his phone and search his home. Searches that brought to light the decade of filmed and photographed rapes suffered by the woman’s wife, Gisèle Pélicot. Since September 2, and until mid-December, the so-called Mazan rape trial is taking place. Dominique Pélicot, along with 50 men aged 26 to 74, are on trial in Avignon. Most of them are being prosecuted for aggravated rape, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.