She is the other woman in this appalling trial, sitting every day opposite Gisèle Pelicot, just in front of the glass box of the main accused. Béatrice Zavarro, 1.44 meters, 41 kilos, alone carries on her shoulders the heavy burden of defending Dominique Pelicot. The hearing began on his 55th birthday, September 2. How do we recognize a historic trial? One Friday evening, the lawyer returned home to Marseille after a trying week spent defending her client in Avignon. His phone rings: “Hello, it’s Radio Bogota, you’re live…” The interview lasted fifty-five minutes, in the presence of an interpreter, on set, to translate his remarks. The show titled the sequence “La abogada del diablo”, “the devil’s advocate”. “There, I understood that we had moved into another sphere,” the Marseille criminal lawyer told us, seated that evening over a glass of chardonnay. She admits: she didn’t see it coming. She thought that the trial of the year would be that of the parliamentary assistants of the National Rally, currently underway in Paris.
“I am in a defense of support and enlightenment”
In March 2021, Dominique Pelicot is looking for a defender. He wrote to her on the advice of a fellow inmate at Baumettes prison in Marseille. “He told me that he had drugged his wife to hand her over to men recruited on the Internet,” she confided to us. He said there were a lot of them, but I didn’t realize there would be so many. » At the time, the media didn’t talk about it. The police and justice system remain extremely discreet to be able to identify as many suspects as possible. There are now fifty-one co-accused to appear in court. And then, a few days before the trial opened, a journalist called her to warn her that Gisèle Pelicot refused to go behind closed doors: “I said “Are you kidding?” It amazed me. » Since then, the victim’s face has been painted on walls on the other side of the world, his name is shouted in demonstrations, the public applauds him every day when he arrives at the hearing.
“I can’t see that as a woman, otherwise I wouldn’t defend Dominique Pelicot”
In twenty-eight years of career, Béatrice Zavarro had already experienced media affairs. She notably pleaded in the case of the assassination of MP Yann Piat in 1998, defended Christine Deviers-Joncour in the Elf affair in 2001. But she had never experienced the global frenzy caused by the Mazan trial. These hearings from the 2000s belong to another era, before “that”, says the lawyer, pointing to her smartphone placed on the table: “Today, when I leave the courtroom, everyone is aware of what happened there five minutes ago. There is an immediacy that contaminates my entire profession: when a guy sends you an email, if you don’t respond within five minutes, he will call another lawyer. This immediacy scares me. » She herself has no social networks. She is therefore neither harassed nor threatened, as other lawyers of serious criminals may have been. But his secretary calls him every day and gives him a list of insulting calls received at the Marseille office.
Since September, Béatrice Zavarro has defended Dominique Pelicot in the Mazan rape case. © Patrick Gherdoussi
Béatrice Zavarro remains in her bubble. She debriefs each court day with her husband, who sits in the front row in the criminal courtroom every day. A room where every moment is a plunge into abjection, especially when the videos of Gisèle Pelicot’s rapes are broadcast, systematically documented by her ex-husband. We then wonder what she might be feeling: “I can’t see this as a woman, otherwise I wouldn’t defend him,” she says. Of course I think it’s disgusting. But as a lawyer, I say everyone has the right to a fair trial. Afterwards, I am not going to overthrow the mountain and plead for his acquittal. I am in a defense of support and enlightenment, to understand his experience and what could have led him to do that. I am also working to clarify certain gray areas, particularly regarding what he may have done to his daughter. Until now, he has always said that he neither drugged nor raped her. But I will ask him the question again. »
“She defends the indefensible”
Photos of Caroline Darian, the couple’s daughter, were also found on Dominique Pelicot’s computer. Photos taken without her knowledge while she was asleep. “She defends the indefensible,” the latter tells us about her father’s lawyer. But she does it in a very dignified way, with the right words. I have a lot of respect for her. » Every morning, Béatrice Zavarro greets Gisèle Pelicot before going to sit in front of her client. “Everything we are experiencing at the moment, we owe it to her,” she said, “to this courage she had to open the door of the audience and say “Come listen, come see what I suffered.” She thinks that in the future other victims will refuse closed doors during their trial, and even that there will be fewer rapes committed: “Males risk feeling very exposed,” says Me Zavarro. Before, when we judged behind closed doors in a locked courtroom, what did people know about rape? Dirt from this offense? Nothing. »
Some lawyers for Dominique Pelicot’s fifty co-defendants find that she is sometimes a little too much on the side of the victim. On the day of our interview, one of them even described her at the hearing as a “general advocate”, that is to say a magistrate responsible for bringing the accusation, the ultimate insult for a lawyer of defense. The deep, serious voice of Me Zavarro rose to put his colleague in his place: “I am defending my client and you are defending yours, is that clear? » “I hear them say that Mr. Pelicot is a manipulator who engulfed them in his criminal scheme. But some came to his house within the hour! To manipulate someone, you have to develop control, exploit weak points, it takes weeks. Excuse me, I’m going to be trivial and vulgar, but isn’t the scenario more that they wanted to “get their shot” so badly, that they didn’t think? »
In this criminal court, the lawyer sometimes seems isolated, but she doesn’t care. She saw others. She suffers in particular from brittle bone disease, which caused her multiple fractures in her childhood. During the training, eight of her vertebrae were broken and compressed, she lost 6 centimeters. She had to wear a corset for eight months. This is one of the reasons why her husband accompanies her every day to the hearing, to carry the heavy suitcase containing the sprawling Pelicot file. Sitting in the front row, he regularly sends her text messages after each intervention. He also advised her to approach the stand every time she had to question an accused: “Otherwise, given that she is small, some lawyers pretended not to see her when she spoke!” her son told us. husband, Édouard. For years I’ve seen her work with the regularity of a metronome. It’s a Formula 1.” He was also the one who raised their son, now 26 years old. “I only saw him for thirty minutes in the morning to accompany him to school. I didn’t see him grow up,” says the lawyer. On the desk of his office in Marseille, files await him on a homicide between male spouses, an assassination without a body, a case of international pimping… and an upcoming trial for Dominique Pelicot, suspected of being involved in two cold cases , a rape and murder dating back to the 1990s. “What I am experiencing, I will only experience once in my life,” said Mr. Zavarro. I won’t have a second file like this. »
