Mazan Rape Trial: “They Didn't Show Pity for a Second” Insists Gisèle Pélicot in Her Shocking Testimony

Gisèle Pélicot a livré à la cour un témoignage étonnant de force et de dignité. Midi Libre – François Barrère

Gisèle Pélicot, 71, gave an impressive testimony of strength and dignity before the criminal court of Vaucluse, where 51 men are accused of raping her between 2013 and 2020, after her ex-husband had made her take sleeping pills without her knowledge.

She went through hell and seems to have come out of it standing, alive, with astonishing strength. “Inside, I am a field of ruins. Only the facade seems solid” she qualifies this Thursday, September 5, before the Vaucluse criminal court, where her ex-husband Dominique Pélicot and 50 other defendants are being tried for rapes committed without her knowledge for more than ten years.

Acts whose existence she discovered at the Carpentras police station on November 2, 2020, when the police officer who had summoned her with her husband took out, after some verbal precautions, photos of a file.

"The image is unbearable. I'm being raped"

"Iput on my glasses, I don't recognize either the guy or the woman on the bed." The policeman : "This is your room ?" So she understands. "L’The image is unbearable, I am in my bed, inert, asleep, and someone is raping me. It is a scene of barbarity. I am in shock. I only want one thing, to take refuge at home with my little dog. For me everything is falling apart."

She speaks without weakening, dignified, precise, with sometimes a hint of anger. Of these videos, which she only found the courage to watch last May. “They are all more atrocious than each other. It is unimaginable what I have been through. Don't come talking to me about sex scenes! There are two, three of them on me. With incredibly vulgar dialogue. I was sacrificed on the altar of vice. I was a dead woman on her bed, and these men are defiling me. They treat me like a trash bag, and I don't know if I'll be able to get back up."

Her ex-husband confesses to her, crying in the kitchen

Because for four years, she's been taking it. "I'm like a boxer who falls and has to get back up after every piece of bad news." That first hitch, on September 12, 2020, when she returned from a stay with her children and "Mr. “Pélicot”, as she now calls him, explains to her in tears in their kitchen in Mazan that he was arrested after filming under the skirts of customers at the Carpentras supermarket.

“In fifty years of living together, he had never made an inappropriate gesture. I tell her, this time I forgive you, you're going to have to apologize, and get treatment.” She talks about him without apparent hatred, recounts their meeting in 1971.

She thought she had a brain tumor

“We were 19, we fell madly in love, I can still see him, he was very handsome, with his long hair and his red 2 CV. I had a happy and fulfilling life with Mr. Pélicot". She tells of the three children, the seven grandchildren, the financial and health worries, overcome together. How he accompanied her to the neurologist, when around 2011 what she calls began”his absences. I would wake up with no memory of the evening, and then I could sleep for 18 hours straight. I was convinced that I had the beginnings of Alzheimer's or a brain tumor and that I was doomed. My friends, my family were worried.

Ten years of therapeutic wandering

Today she understood what no doctor had detected. That she was drugged, without her knowledge, by her husband, who then delivered her to others. “For me it was ten years of therapeutic wandering, because we don't look where we should. Since November 2nd I haven't had any absences. It is important that today we raise this scourge of chemical submission. For women who don't know they are drugged. If I hadn't had all the evidence in the file, I wouldn't have known.”

One of them was HIV positive

She learned that between her husband's arrest at the supermarket and the summons on November 2, she had been raped three more times by men recruited online. She also knows that out of the 51 accused, one of whom, who came six times, was HIV positive, more than 30 denied raping her at the beginning of the trial, and that her word will be challenged.

Because videos were found of her making love to her husband. “This was done without my knowledge, I never gave her permission to film our lovemaking.”

A libertine scenario developed by the couple ?

Because some say they believed in a libertine scenario developed by their couple. “I am absolutely not an accomplice, I never pretended to be asleep. For me it is an insult to intelligence. These individuals knew very well what a state of lethargy I was in.

Wouldn't they have been "engulfed by the criminal scheme" in which Dominique Pélicot "enveloped them", asks a lawyer. “Why didn't they go to the police station to report the facts, even with an anonymous phone call ? Not a single one did. They didn't have a second of pity. They didn't rape me with a gun or a knife to my temple. They raped me in full consciousness.“

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