The dark mystery of France’s most notorious sexual predator

DOMINIQUE Pelicot is France’s most infamous predator. He admits that he surreptitiously drugged his wife for almost a decade so that he could rape her, and that he invited dozens of strangers he met online to violate her limp, snoring body.

And yet, for more than three months, Pelicot, 72, has sat in the courtroom where he is on trial with 50 other men and painted himself as the honest one. The rapist among 51 rapists, he says, who had the courage to deliver the truth on what they all did. The one who loved his wife and family desperately but, after 40 years of resisting, was overcome by perverted impulses.

“No one belongs to anyone else, but I did what I wanted when I had the urge,” Pelicot said one day during the trial, leaning back in his chair in the prisoner’s box, the same grey fleece jacket he had worn every day zipped up.

“That’s what’s at the heart of this story.”

He told the court that he had felt remorse the mornings after he drugged his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, but that had not stopped him.

“The next day was terrible, because I saw what a bad state she was in,” he said, “but I won’t complain today, because that would be indecent. She is the one suffering, not me.”

The enigmatic and multifaceted Pelicot. — Agencies

During the trial, the judges and lawyers in the court in the French city of Avignon tried to grasp the enigma that is Dominique Pelicot, with only modest success.

Near the beginning of the trial, the court heard from psychiatrists and psychologists who described Pelicot’s psyche as cleaved into two distinct parts, though they did not diagnose him with a mental health disorder.

Side A was the Pelicot his friends and family knew before his second and final arrest in November 2020. That Pelicot was an attentive and dedicated grandfather, father and husband who had been besotted with Gisèle since they met at 19.

The couple had modelled a strong, dedicated relationship to their three children over the decades, weathering difficult financial times and romantic affairs. Pelicot went to soccer games and movies with his eldest son, David, and picked up his daughter, Caroline, from nightclubs to ensure that she got home safely.

Professionally, he never seemed to find his groove, working first as an electrician before turning to real estate and then sales. He would quietly ask his adult daughter for money, but that did not provoke a rupture in the close-knit family.

Then there was the other part of Pelicot’s psyche, the therapists said, his Side B: perverse, manipulative, incapable of empathy, addicted to sex, a person who saw others as objects to use or bend to his will.

This side, experts in court said, was rooted in what Pelicot and his half sister, Ginette Pelicot, described as a violent childhood home.

Troubled childhood

Pelicot grew up in the centre of France, south of Paris. After his mother’s first husband abandoned her and their two children, she married his brother, with whom she had two more children – one of those was Dominique.

Ginette said she had left the house while young to escape her stepfather’s attempted sexual abuse. Many times during the weeks of testimony, Pelicot mentioned a searing memory of glimpsing what he described as his father raping and humiliating his mother.

“In every man, there is a demon,” Pelicot testified. “Mine came from my childhood.”

His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, argued that Pelicot was also emotionally scarred by other alleged traumas.

The first was a rape that Pelicot said he suffered at age nine, while he was a hospital patient, at the hands of a male nurse. Then, five years later, when he was an apprentice electrician working on a construction site, he told the court, he was forced to participate in a gang rape. (No evidence that either crime happened was offered in court.)

Still, by Pelicot’s telling, he restrained his Side B for 40 years through the strength of his relationship with his wife, a woman he repeatedly called his “saint.”

“I have something inside me that I fought for a long time, thanks to my wife,” he said one day. On another day, he said: “I loved her enormously, and I still love her.”

That restraint, his lawyer suggested, started to give way in 2011, when Pelicot connected with other men on a notorious, unmoderated website that was shut down last June after accruing more than 23,000 police cases in France from 2021 to 2024.

It was there, he said, that he learned from another user the method of drugging his wife for his own sexual pleasure, so he could do things to her that she would not permit while conscious. Over time, he offered her to other men he met online, the court heard.

What he described as his growing perversion was reflected on the courtroom benches, by the number of men he was accused of recruiting per year: one from 2015, seven from 2017 and then 17 from 2019.

He was living a double life – driving his wife to medical appointments during the day to address the haunting symptoms he was causing her at night.

Even after he was arrested and charged with filming up women’s skirts in a grocery store in September 2020, and police confiscated his phones and laptop brimming with incriminating evidence, Pelicot continued. After he was released from jail, he again brought men to his home to join him in raping his near-comatose wife until police arrested him a second time two months later, this time based on evidence of rapes found on his electronics.

Zavarro, Pelicot’s lawyer, argued that he wanted to be caught as a way of stopping his harmful behaviour. He even told the police where in his garage to find his external hard drive that held thousands of photos and videos he had taken of the rapes of his wife – the evidence that police needed to track down and charge dozens of other men.

Bad core?

But the narrative that Pelicot had given in to his worse side starting only in 2011 hit a snag in court.

Since he has been in jail, his DNA was matched to a cold case of attempted rape in the Paris region in 1999. Pelicot admitted the attempted rape in a police interrogation, and that transcript was read aloud by the lead judge near the end of the trial.

According to those records, Pelicot lured a 19-year-old real estate agent into a building on the pretext that he was interested in buying it. He pinned her to the ground, bound her wrists with a rope, pressed a small bottle of ether to her nose and then pulled down her pants. But the effect of the drug soon dissipated, and she managed to escape.

He is also the main suspect in a second cold case from 1991, regarding another young female real estate agent who was raped and killed. She was put to sleep with ether while visiting an apartment in Paris with an unknown client. In court this month, Pelicot denied any involvement in that case.

Those two cases have yet to go to court, but Laure Chabaud, the prosecutor in the current case, said in her closing statement that it was clear that Pelicot’s “deviant behaviour had persisted over several decades.”

Over the months in court, Pelicot mostly presented his Side A: polite, contrite and, he said, working with psychologists to understand himself.

“I am here for the truth effectively,” he said one day. “I am hiding nothing.”

He is one of more than a dozen defendants who have pleaded guilty in the trial. Those who say they are innocent have admitted to having sex with Gisèle but say they never intended to rape her.

Mostly, they say they were tricked by Pelicot into believing that they were participating in a threesome and that Gisèle was pretending to be asleep. They were manipulated, they’ve argued, directed or overpowered by Pelicot. Some have said they believe he drugged them, too, most likely in a drink he offered them.

After each defendant’s testimony, a microphone was passed into Pelicot’s glass box, where he repeated the same lines so many times that they became a chorus in the macabre trial: The men knew “perfectly well” that he had drugged his wife without her knowledge and they were coming to join him in raping her.

“In no way” did he manipulate them, he said. He didn’t offer a single one of them water, coffee or anything to drink, he said. And, by his telling, he didn’t drug any of them, just his wife.

“I am a rapist like many in this room,” he said near the beginning of the trial. “They knew everything, all of it.”

“I am just as responsible as them,” he said months later, on his last day of testimony and cross-examination. “Without me, they wouldn’t be here. And without them, I wouldn’t be here.”

Many statements like those, casting blame equally around a courtroom packed with defendants, provoked loud jeers and guffaws from the other accused men.

Throughout the trial, Pelicot seemed to try to present himself in a more positive light. He jumped to the defence of his now ex-wife; when some defence lawyers questioned her aggressively, he said, “In no case was she complicit.”

When the videos he had taken of others raping her were played in court as evidence, he covered his eyes. He said repeatedly that he was ashamed.

On Thursday, the panel of five judges judged Pelicot guilty and sentenced him to the maximum 20 years in jail.

The court found 46 of his “co-conspirators” guilty of rape, two guilty of attempted rape and two guilty of sexual assault.

Delivering the verdict, the lead judge of the court said Pelicot would not be eligible for parole until he has served two thirds of his sentence.

Pelicot’s lawyer Zavarro said after the sentencing that her client was considering lodging an appeal. He and the other defendants have 10 days to decide on this.

Earlier, Zavarro had ended her closing statements with two poems that Pelicot had written in prison to members of his family, asking them to remember his better self.

“I know one day, we will see one another again,” he wrote to his ex-wife. “I hope we can talk of all this.”

But over the months, there have been flashes of the other Pelicot in the courtroom, once when confronted with his children’s worries.

The police reconstituted deleted photos from his computer, capturing his daughter, Caroline, in bed, wearing underwear that was not her own and sleeping with the lights on. She has said she is convinced that he drugged and sexually assaulted her.

He has said he never drugged Caroline. But he has never offered a compelling reason for having the photos. He denied ever taking them.

And his son David publicly expressed concern that his own son was victim to Pelicot’s abuses. Time and time again, Pelicot has said that he never sexually abused any of his children or grandchildren.

When Antoine Camus, the lawyer representing Gisèle and their children, told him the children needed to heal and rebuild themselves, and “only you can liberate them from this nightmare,” Pelicot answered coldly.

“That’s their problem,” he said. “Not mine.” — ©2024 New York Times Company