Dominique Pelicot may have recruited dozens of men to rape his drugged wife out of “revenge” for her having an extramarital affair, according to a written judgment by magistrates.
The 72-year-old French pensioner was on Thursday given a 20-year sentence at the Vaucluse criminal court in Avignon, southern France, for the aggravated rape of his former wife Gisèle.
Some 50 other men were all found guilty of charges from sexual assault to aggravated rape against Ms Pelicot, who was unaware of the decades of abuse she had suffered at her husband’s hands until police stumbled on footage of their acts.
The defendants were handed sentences of three to 15 years in prison.
In the written judgment seen by Le Monde, the magistrates wondered whether Dominique Pelicot’s motives for abusing his wife and the choice of men recruited online were at least partially out of revenge for an affair Gisèle had with a work colleague.
They wrote that by specifically choosing each of the men on the basis of age, ethnicity, the size and shape of their sexual attributes, as well as collecting and storing several hundred hours of video footage of the assaults, “all contribute to feeding Dominique Pelicot’s perverse fantasies”.
They questioned Pelicot’s dismissal of revenge as a motive given that he “unequivocally confessed this desire for revenge to one of his contacts”.
“For her part, Gisèle Pelicot does not rule out the possibility of revenge,” they added.
Gisèle Picot mentioned the affair in court, saying it had gone on for some time and was the only extramarital relationship she had while her ex-husband had several.
She recounted how he had become furious when he found out. Based on her testimony, her younger son Florian, 38, later told the court he had doubts about whether he was Dominique Pelicot’s biological son and asked him to agree to do a paternity test. “It would be a relief not to be his son,” he added.
The judgment underlined the central role of Dominique Pelicot as “instigator and organiser of the criminal process” and dismissed his repeated claims that “all the men in the room knew” about his wife’s drugged state and lack of consent.
They wrote: “There is nothing in the proceedings to confirm that these warnings were issued to all the defendants, systematically and exhaustively, as Dominique Pelicot insists.”
However, the judges concluded that all of the men had “free will” but failed to exercise it.
The ruling continued by saying Gisèle Pelicot was under total “chemical submission” and had absolutely no idea about the abuse.
As a result, the sentence of rape was justified under French law due to the elements of “surprise” and “constraint”.
Knocking her out with sedatives without her knowledge amounted to surprise, while the “chemical straitjacket” she was under amounted to “constraint”, they concluded.
Dominique Pelicot and the other convicted men have 10 days to appeal the verdicts. If they do, this could lead to a retrial by a citizen’s jury.
Pelicot is also facing a separate investigation into the rape and murder of a 23-year-old estate agent in Paris in 1991.
Sophie Narme’s employers found her lying face down, with her hands bound, on the floor of an apartment she had shown to a man in his 30s.
She had been strangled with her own Chanel belt and attacked with a blade, according to her family’s lawyer. The killer had used a cloth soaked in ether, a compound similar to alcohol that can render victims unconscious.
Pelicot has previously denied any involvement in Ms Narme’s rape and killing.
He has admitted to one attempted rape of another 23-year-old estate agent, known by the pseudonym Marion, in a nearby area in 1999, after DNA linked him to the scene. The method of attack was near-identical.
Investigators have argued that there are too many similarities between the two cases to be coincidental.
