8 New Defendants Will Hear While Mass Rape Trial Continues in France

The trial of a Frenchman who recruited dozens of strangers to rape his drug-using wife in their home continues Monday, with the cases of eight new defendants being heard in court.

The trial of 71-year-old Dominique Pelicot and 50 other defendants aged between 26 and 74 has caused outrage and sparked protests since it was opened in the southern city of Avignon on September 2.

His ex-wife, Gisele Pelicot (also 71), who refused to be embarrassed and demanded the trial be held in public, became a feminist hero in France and abroad.

The court has already questioned 36 of the defendants, including Pelicot himself, and will begin questioning eight more defendants on Monday after a weeklong break.

Antoine Camus, one of Gisele Pelicot’s lawyers, said the international attention gave his client the strength to continue.

“This is an endurance race, but he is of course ready for the challenge and determined to complete it, because he too has been boosted by this wave of support in France and abroad,” he told AFP.

“He often gets a lot of stories that lift him up and help him through this marathon that he’s not just completing for himself.”

The abuse came to light after police arrested Dominique Pelicot in 2020 for filming women upskirts at a local supermarket.

He admitted raping his then-wife, Gisele Pelicot, and recruiting dozens of people to join him between 2011 and 2020, meticulously documenting the abuse in thousands of images that investigators found on his hard drives.

Driver, cleaner, HIV positive man

But other defendants, many of whom face prison sentences of up to 20 years for aggravated rape, have largely claimed they had no idea it was rape.

They said they thought they were participating in a flirtatious couple’s sex game.

“It is truly exhausting for Gisele Pelicot to hear almost systematically the same statements from the defendants,” Camus said. “This was the victim of ‘accidental’ rape, ‘error of judgement’ rape, or ‘involuntary’ rape.”

The next eight people to be cross-examined starting Monday include a 36-year-old truck driver, a 31-year-old laborer, a 36-year-old cleaner and a 42-year-old restaurant manager.

Among them is a 50-year-old software technician accused of planning to emulate Dominique Pelicot’s methods on his own wife.

An HIV-positive single man, now 63, was accused of visiting the Pelicot home in the southern town of Mazan six times to molest Gisele Pelicot without once using a condom.

The court will also review the case of a 30-year-old man who is the only defendant tried in absentia.

‘He abused his own daughter’

Finally, a 41-year-old unemployed man was accused of raping Gisele Pelicot at the couple’s daughter’s Paris-area home in 2019, with the complicity of her then-husband.

He denied raping on the first day of the trial.

The couple’s two sons and daughter, who uses the pseudonym Caroline Darian, appeared regularly in court to support their mother.

But Darian was not present at some of the recent hearings.

In late October, after the trial reached the halfway mark, he announced on Instagram that he was going to a clinic for a few days to recharge and “be able to sleep again.”

Darian, who wrote a book called “Et j’ai cesse de t’appeler papa” (“And I stopped calling you dad”) in 2022, ran an awareness campaign about drug use for sexual abuse.

During the hearing, she left the courtroom in tears after the presiding judge told her that her father had also made nude photomontages of her on his computer.

“I too am a victim of Dominique P,” Darian wrote on Instagram.

“He drugged me without my knowledge and undoubtedly abused his own and only daughter.”

The hearing will last until December 20.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)