“He will experience for the first time, in a delayed manner, the rapes he suffered for ten years”
For Gisèle Pélicot, this trial will be “an absolutely terrible ordeal”, according to Me Camus, the lawyer for the couple's three children. She “will experience for the first time, in a delayed way, the rapes she suffered ten years from now” because she “has no memory of them,” he told AFP.
The victim's “trauma” highlighted by investigators
Questioned on Wednesday, Jérémie Bosse Platière, director of investigation in the case and now interdepartmental director of the Hautes-Alpes police, emphasized the “distress” of the victim when he learned of the facts, in the fall of 2020, by the police. Her husband had just been arrested for filming up the skirts of three women in a shopping center in Carpentras.
“I have to answer.”
Silent, 72-year-old Gisèle P., however, was very attentive to the debates that began on Monday and were planned to last four months, until December 20. And the questions to the director of investigations from certain defense lawyers on Wednesday, asking, for example, whether the P. couple were a libertine couple or whether it was credible that Mrs. P. had not noticed anything, for ten years, seems to have affected her.
Gisèle Pélicot speaks for the first time today
For the first time, the victim will speak on Thursday, as part of the Mazan rape trial, which began on September 2, 2024.
Between 2011 and 2020, Gisèle Pélicot suffered 92 incidents of rape by nearly 80 men, 51 of whom went to trial. One man orchestrated this abuse: Dominique Pélicot. For 10 years, the latter drugged his wife to deliver her to accomplices he met through the website coco.gg .
After refusing to be held behind closed doors “so that the shame would change sides”, 72-year-old Gisèle Pélicot has been appearing before the Vaucluse Court of Arbitration in Avignon since Monday. Since the beginning of the trial, the latter has remained “stoic, silent, speaking only through her lawyers”, according to AFP.