Dominique Pelicot could face 20 years in prison for raping, drugging and offering his wife to dozens of men to sexually assault her over 10 years.
This is the sentence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office for Gisèle Pelicot’s ex-husband taking into account the seriousness of the acts and that they were repeated for a long time.
The prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Avignon (southeast France) Laure Chabaud requested that maximum penalty “with the greatest conviction”, and he justified it by the psychology of Dominique Pelicot, whom he described as a perverse, egocentric, disturbed man, with multiple sexual deviations that he wanted to satisfy his desires without setting “any limits” and without the consent of the victim.
“Twenty years is a long time. (…) No matter how old you are, it is not a short time. It is both too much and too little. “Too little considering the seriousness of the acts committed and repeated,” said Chabaud.
Pelicot has sat in the dock alongside the other 51 men who also raped Gisèle when she was unconscious. While Dominique Pelicot does acknowledge the facts of which he is accused, the rest of the accused – the majority – deny the rapes, arguing that they thought the victim agreed.
But prosecutor François Mayet wanted to make it clear from the first moment of his request that “Gisèle Pelicot was reduced to an object. “Consent was not present before or during the act.”
The Public Ministry also recalled that there are 20,000 visual documents recorded by the main defendant that highlight the “extreme violence of the crimes.”
In a first reaction to the prosecutor’s request before the press, Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer, Isabelle Zavarro, said that she expected the maximum penalty to be requested, but expressed her surprise at the motivations, specifically at the description made of her client. .
“It seems to me that the Prosecutor’s Office has decided get away a little from the personality of Dominique Pelicotwhich in my opinion can explain some things,” he commented, implying that he intends to use some elements of his biography in his defense, such as the alleged abuses that he says he himself suffered when he was a child and adolescent.
The Prosecutor’s Office, on the other hand, demanded a sentence of 17 years in prison for aggravated rape against Jean-Pierre Maréchalthe man who imitated Domninique Pelicot’s methods of drugging and raping his own wife with sleeping pills.
Maréchal, who confessed to the facts and recognized himself as a “criminal rapist”, secretly administered sleeping pills to his wife between 2015 and 2020, approximately a dozen times, to sexually abuse her, along with Dominique Pelicot, who came to the home. of the couple.
The rapes stopped one day when Dominique Pelicot was at Maréchal’s house to rape the woman and the victim woke up.
The events that have been tried in Avignon since last September 2 They happened between July 2011 and October 2020first in the Paris region and later in the house to which the Pelicots had moved when they retired in the town of Mazan, near Avignon.
Dominique Pelicot contacted other men on an online platform and invited them to his home, after administering large doses of anxiolytics to his victim, which left her unconscious, which allowed them to abuse her without keeping any memory.
It all ended in September 2020 when he was arrested for record under the skirts of some women in a supermarket in Carpentras and when searching his computer files, investigators discovered thousands of videos and photos in which the rapes to which he subjected the victim appeared.
The main accused is accused in two other cases of gender violence, one for the rape and murder of a woman in 1991 and the other for an attempted rape with a knife in 1999.
