Raped for ten years, after being drugged with sleeping pills, by dozens of strangers recruited by her husband on the Internet, Gisèle Pélicot, 71, has been facing, since Monday, September 2, 51 men who abused her in an extraordinary trial expected to last 4 months. Among the accused: one is Caledonian.
It was feminist associations that spread the information on Facebook, TikTok and the social network X (formerly Twitter). In Avignon, in the south of France, where the trial known as the “Mazan rapes” is taking place, a father from Noumea is in the dock.
Aged around forty, this Caledonian went to live in France, where he was an Alpine hunter for twelve years. The former soldier, who retrained in construction, settled in Carpentras, in the south-east of France.
Carpentras is located 7 km from Mazan, a small village where the vast majority of the facts judged since Monday, September 2 before the criminal court of Vaucluse took place. That is, nearly 200 rapes or sexual assaults committed between 2010 and 2020 without her knowledge on Gisèle Pélicot, now aged 72, while she was sleeping, drugged by her husband, a real “conductor” according to the prosecution, who offered his wife’s “services” on a specialized website.
At the couple’s home in Mazan, investigators found no fewer than 4,000 photos and videos of the rapes on various computers, USB sticks and hard drives belonging to Dominique Pélicot, the main accused, alongside 51 men who appeared alongside him, sometimes minimizing the facts, like the forty-year-old from New Caledonia. In June 2023, the Le Monde newspaper quoted an extract from his statements to investigators: “She’s his wife, he can do whatever he wants with her.”the former soldier had then launched. Still presumed innocent, like the 50 other accused, he never denounced the rapes. We will have to wait until “l“The case comes out in the local press”continues Le Monde, so that he takes “awareness of the seriousness of his actions.”
“She’s his wife, he can do whatever he wants with her.”
The Caledonian accused of having participated in the rapes, during his hearing.
The World
The case was able to gain media coverage thanks to Gisèle Pélicot’s refusal to have a trial behind closed doors: “I speak for all those women who are drugged and don’t know it, I do it on behalf of all those women who may never know it. (…), so that no more women have to suffer chemical submission”she said Thursday, September 5, as she testified for the first time on the stand.
