Last Updated on 06/09/2024 by Arun jain
If the sight of dozens of men accusing her of raping her, including her husband of decades, upset Gisele Pellicott, she didn’t let it show. She entered the packed courtroom Thursday with a steely demeanor, her face composed, her eyes dry under sunglasses. His grown children followed behind him.
Afterward, she took the stand and told the court how the life she had built over five decades was quickly unraveled one morning in late 2020, when police called her to a station in southern France. There, they told her that the man she believed to be the love of her life had been drugging her for nearly a decade and inviting strangers to their home to join him in raping her while she was unconscious.
Under French rules, Ms. Pellicote, 71, could have avoided letting the trial play out in the public eye and preferred to keep it behind closed doors. Instead, she decided it was important for all of France to hear her story and shame the accused men instead.
“So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they will probably remember Ms. Pellicott’s testimony,” she said in a quiet, controlled voice. “No woman should be a victim of drugs and victimization.“
“We must address this scourge,” she added.
The trial in Avignon, which has just started and will take four months, is already there France was shaken. Everything about it seems almost too shocking to absorb—how long Dominique Pellicote is accused of drugging his wife, how normal and loving the couple seemed in retirement, and how many men are accused of raping her.
There are so many men on trial that the court had to build another glass box in the courtroom for those in custody. They include firemen, soldiers, truck drivers, IT specialists. Their age ranges from 26 to 74. Many people are in stable relationships and have children.
Mr Pellicott has pleaded guilty to all charges against him, including aggravated rape and drugs. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording and sometimes distributing intimate photos of them. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison.
According to his lawyer, Beatrice Zavero, he hopes to use the trial to explain himself to his ex-wife and estranged children.
Standing and lecturing before a row of jurors in the courtroom, Ms. Pellicott never showed much emotion. She addressed her ex-husband formally as “Monsieur Pellicote”.
As she said, they fell madly in love at just 19 and got married soon after. They had three children; seven grandchildren. They were together through some illness, financial problems, and at least one fleeting affair, but got through it.
Mrs Pellicote told the court she trusted him completely and said he believed he had a normal sex life.
“I thought we were a strong couple,” Ms Pellicote said. “We had everything to be happy.”
After she retired in 2013, they moved from the Paris region to Mazan, a small town in southern France.
There, she said, her husband supported her through a strange, unknown illness. She was losing her hair, losing weight and, most alarmingly, she lost her memory of some nights and days, she said in the courtroom. She said she sometimes doesn’t remember to say goodbye to her children in the morning, watch a movie or go to bed.
These blackouts — which she described as “total blackouts” — scared her so much, she stopped driving.
“I was told I had the onset of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor,” she said. She also had gynecological problems.
Her husband took her to appointments with specialists—one of whom performed a CT scan of her brain. She was never given a satisfactory explanation.
“I couldn’t imagine for a second that I had been drugged,” she said, though she later recalled that he once gave her a beer that glowed mint green before throwing it down the sink. She said she now believes he was “trialling” ways to drug her.
Prosecutors say the reality of what was happening was discovered by chance, when Mr. Pellicott was caught trying to film under women’s skirts in a grocery store. Mrs Pellicote forgave him, thinking it a rare slip in 50 years of marriage.
Only later did she learn that Mr. Pellicott had previously been caught doing the same thing in 2010, and had been let off with just a fine, prosecutors said. It was a warning sign she said she never saw. She said she would have been more vigilant if she had known.
“I lost 10 years of my life,” she said. “Those are years I’ll never get back.”
Mr. Pellicott sat in a glass box separate from the other accused men and lowered his eyes during his wife’s testimony. He found most of those men on a notorious, unregulated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases closed in France in June.
He has argued to the police and through his lawyer that all the men knew was that his wife had been drugged into submission, and followed the rules he established to ensure she did not wake up. He filmed the scenes, storing more than 20,000 digital videos and photographs that were used by the police to track down the accused.
Although one of her lawyers previously told The New York Times that she would watch the video for the first time during the trial, Ms. Pellicote said in court that she had gathered the strength to watch the video in May, which will be used as evidence. in the trial. After that, she decided, she needed to keep the trial open.
Most of the men on trial are accused of rape with “many aggravating circumstances”, one being the use of drugs to put her to sleep. Many have pleaded not guilty. Some say they were tricked into having sex with a drug-addled woman, lured into a playful three-way encounter by her husband, who told her she was feigning sleep because she was shy.
“They knew exactly what they were doing and what shape I was in,” Ms Pellicote responded to those statements in court. She noted that one of the accused was diagnosed with HIV, although she later tested negative.
She described her bedroom as a “torture chamber”.
“I don’t know how I survived,” she said. “I ask myself how I stand before you.”
In the days after meeting the police and seeing some of the shocking photos her husband kept, Mrs Pellicote said she thought about killing herself. But with the help of her children and friends she slowly begins to gather the pieces of her broken life and identity. She sold most of the household items in Mazan and moved elsewhere.
She is divorced from her husband and while she is keeping her married name for trial, she plans to settle on her maiden name soon, she said.
Notably, since the day she stepped into the police station, she said she has not experienced a single blackout.
While she appeared strong, and described herself as a boxer who often gets back up after being knocked down, she also told the court, “Inside, there’s a field of ruins.”
“I will try to rebuild my life,” she said. “I don’t know how.”
Post Woman in France testifies against husband accused of bringing men to rape her appeared first New York Times.