A court in Avignon will soon decide the fates of Dominique Pelicot and dozens of other men, bringing to a close a weeks-long mass rape trial that has stunned France and appalled the watching world.
The 72-year-old faces sentencing for allegedly repeatedly raping and enlisting strangers to abuse his heavily sedated then-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, in the couple’s home over the course of a decade.
Dominique Pelicot has admitted to using an online chatroom called Coco to recruit men to rape his wife. Pelicot told the trial that responsibility for the rapes should be shared among the accused, saying: “I am a rapist just like all the others in this room.”
Gisèle Pelicot was drugged by him and, while unconscious, raped over 200 times by 70 men who all first met Pelicot online, prosecutors say. Police uncovered hundreds of hours of footage showing the rapes filmed by Pelicot.
Fifty other men accused of taking part in the abuse are also on trial. Some of those defendants have admitted their guilt, while others say Dominique Pelicot manipulated them into having sex with his wife, that they thought the wife had pretended to be asleep, or that it was a sex game.
Prosecutors have requested sentences ranging from four to 20 years for the 51 defendants. The maximum prison sentence of 20 years has only been requested for Dominique Pelicot himself.
While some of the defendants have pled guilty, the majority have denied the rape charges, saying they thought the husband’s consent sufficed and that they were manipulated by Pelicot into believing it was part of a consensual game between the couple.
Public prosecutor Laure Chabaud told the court in Avignon, southern France, last month that Dominique Pelicot’s sentence would be “long” but “not enough considering the serious nature of these acts.”
