#dominique pelicot

[someone-will-remember-us]

[msclaritea]

This is Dominique Pélicot. The husband behind the most harrowing rape case in France. Inspite of Gisèle (wife) being the epitome of courage right now and choosing to go for a public trial to warn and educate other women of such perpetrators, the husband's pic is not being shared in most of the new articles. This is Dominique Pélicot, who must be shamed.

Here are the names of other perpetrators who could be identified till now. Some of these men were HIV+ and/or suffering from other STDs. Gisèle found that she was carrying four STD's.

Shame Must Change Sides.

Gisèle Pélicot, a French national, endured at least 92 sexual assaults committed by over 72 men over 10 years, while she was drugged by her husband, Dominique Pélicot, who documented many of the rapes.

'She could have opted for a closed trial, but that’s what her attackers would have wanted'.

She has courageously decided that the trial of her accused rapists be made public. This is to make other women aware of the excuses and games such men use and to reveal what these men look like: just any other man.

[lauroboros]

One thing that pisses me off in the reporting on the Gisèle Pelicot case is how they keep writing along the lines of "some of the defendants believed the husband's consent was all that was needed" as in they apparently didn't think it was rape if the husband agreed to it. I don't think that's true at all and it obscures what they're really saying which is that the husband's consent was the only part THEY cared about. They had consent from the man to rape his wife, and they knew that's what they were doing; there was never any belief that the husband had the ability to consent on her behalf. And the media wants to be all "Oh no we need more education on consent!!! Can you believe they thought the husband's consent was enough?!?!"

[ai-yo]

I'm learning about the Dominique Pelicot case in France. Gisele Pelicot should be allowed to go on a man killing spree to the men of that town for what they did to her.

Dominique should be tortured medieval style, hanged, drawn and quartered

[crazycatlady6]

Gisèlle Pélicot

9 years and no one said a thing

9 years and she remained sick, unable to know why

9 years and 20,000 media files later

9 years and 73 men later

9 years and hundreds of thousands of people online later

9 years and a hundred rapes later

9 years and now a court case later

9 years and she still smiled at her neighbour

9 years and her neighbour still greeted her back

[estellaestella]

the things Dominique Pelicot did is beyond words. drugged and raped his wife of 50 years (she was 18 when they met); brought in strangers to rape her while she lay drugged; drugged his daughter, took naked photos of her.

and the scariest thing is that he was just another ordinary family man. we think we can tell the good ones from the bad but we cant.

[sickofthis666]

Dominique Pelicot's trial progressed today... he stated that he's a rapist, that the other accused men are rapists too and that they perfectly knew what they were there for.

Yet he also claims that he never hated his wife, and still loves her today...

[head-post]

How Pélicot case exposed rape culture in France

50 people stood trial, accused of raping the motionless body of Gisèle Pélicot while her husband recorded their actions for his video library. The unprecedented mass rape case revealed the actual image of a rapist, according to AP News.

A trial in France shows how pornography, sex chat rooms and men’s disdain for consent are fuelling rape culture. French society was disturbed not by the fact that her husband Dominique Pélicot orchestrated the mass rape, but that he had no difficulty finding dozens of men who agreed to engage in unlawful sexual acts.

One of the rapists, a married plumber with three children and five grandchildren, said he was not particularly bothered that the woman was not moving when he visited the Pélicot family home in the town of Mazan in 2019. He stated that it reminded him of adult videos, featuring women “pretending to be asleep and don’t react,” he watched.

Many of the other defendants told the court that they could not have imagined Dominique Pélicot drugging his wife and that they were told she was a willing participant acting out a perverted fantasy. However, the husband denied the accusation, claiming that his co-defendants was aware of the situation.

Pornography flourishing

Céline Piques, a spokesperson of the feminist group Osez le Féminisme!, or Dare Feminism! stated that many of the men under investigation were perverted by pornography. Although some websites started fighting search terms such as “unconscious,” hundreds of such videos could still be found online, Piques stressed.

Last year, French authorities registered 114,000 victims of sexual violence, including more than 25,000 reported rapes. However, experts argue that most rape cases go unreported due to a lack of tangible evidence. Many women do not press charges, with most dropping cases before investigations start.

The Pélicot case was unique in the French judicial system. After a shop security guard caught Dominique Pélicot making videos of unsuspecting women’s skirts in 2020, police searched his home and found thousands of pornographic photos and videos. The main defendant later revealed that he had recorded and stored the sexual encounters of each of his guests and organised them neatly in separate files.

France thrilled world community

Gisèle Pélicot, who is in her early 70s, did not know she had been raped. She chose to stay in the courtroom while the videos were shown. Unable to watch, she closed her eyes, stared at the floor or buried her face in her hands.

Sexual assault experts say the unwillingness or inability of the accused to confess to rape reveals the taboos and stereotypes that persist in French society. Magali Lafourcade, a judge and general secretary of the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights, did not attend the trial but said popular culture had given people a wrong idea of what rapists looked like and how they acted.

It’s the idea of a hooded man with a knife whom you don’t know and is waiting for you in a place that is not a private place.

Two-thirds of rapes occurred in private homes, with the vast majority of victims knowing their rapists, Lafourcade emphasised. She drew attention to the frightening reality that the Pélicot case “makes us realise that in fact rapists could be anyone.”

For once, they’re not monsters – they’re not serial killers on the margin of society. They are men who resemble those we love. In this sense, there is something revolutionary.

Read more HERE

[bilboyagathechickenfootedhobbit]

NAME AND SHAME

Shame to ALL men.

[instantmanifestation]

[TW: Rape, SA, drug facilitated SA]

These tv shows really expose what’s already going on. All evil happens in plain sight.

[dailyworldecho]

[head-post]

Man accused of drugging his wife so dozens of men could sexually assault her

The 71-year-old Frenchman admitted in court that he drugged his then-wife so he and other men could rape her, according to ABC News.

In court, Dominique Pélicot begged her and their three children for forgiveness.

Today I maintain that, along with the other men here, I am a rapist. They knew everything. They can’t say otherwise.

The Pélicot case raised new awareness of sexual assault. Although he had previously confessed to investigators, his testimony in court would be crucial for a panel of judges to decide the fate of some 50 other men standing trial with him. Many denied raping Gisèle Pélicot, saying they were manipulated by her then-husband or claiming they believed she consented.

Gisèle Pélicot has become a symbol of the fight against sexual violence in France for agreeing to give up her anonymity in the case, allowing the trial to be public and speaking openly to media.

Dominique told the judges how he was raped by a medical man in hospital at the age of 9 and forced to take part in a gang rape at the age of 14. He also described the trauma he experienced when his parents adopted a little girl and witnessed his father’s inappropriate behaviour towards her.

My father used to do the same thing with the little girl. After my father’s death, my brother said that men used to come to our house. I don’t really want to talk about this, I am just ashamed of my father. In the end, I didn’t do any better.

According to court documents, a security agent caught Pélicot in 2020 making videos under women’s skirts in a supermarket. Police searched his home and found thousands of photos and videos of men engaging in sexual acts with Gisèle Pélicot while she was apparently lying unconscious on a bed.

The footage helped police track down most of the 72 suspects they were looking for.

When police called her in for questioning in late 2020, she first told them her husband was “a great guy,” according to legal documents. Then they showed her some pictures and she left her husband.

If convicted, he faces 20 years in prison. In addition to Pélicot, 50 other men between the ages of 26 and 74 are on trial. However, Pélicot’s long-awaited testimony was postponed for several days after he fell ill, suffering from kidney stones and a urinary tract infection, his lawyers announced.

Read more HERE

[jellyfishfem]

I hate how the media uses the woman’s face for headlines. Idc what she looks like and Im sure she doesnt want to be recognizable infront of the whole world. I wanna see the mens faces. I want to plaster the internet and irl world with their faces. They shall never have a moment of peace as everywhere they go people start whispering and pointing. “Look, thats one of the disgusting rapists from that french trial.” Amd if theyre unlucky the come across a group of people who are just drunk enough to throw hands. I want people to always leave their seats when they sit down on the bus or a restaurant. To go to jail and die there.

[radicalcoffeeclub]

"Tensions at the French mass rape trial burst into the open on Wednesday when Dominique Pelicot’s daughter Caroline shouted at her father from across the courtroom that he would “die alone like a dog”.

!The main defendant said he most wished he still had Caroline's support.

“Some may laugh but it’s my daughter I wish I could look at in the face. It hurts to see her like this,” he said, sitting in a glass box only metres away from his daughter and the rest of his family.

“I would love to see her, I would love to talk to her,” he added. As his voice faltered, Caroline’s rose: “I will never come see you. Never. You will die alone like a dog,” she shouted.

“We all die alone,” he replied. “You especially,” she hit back."

Iconic!

[warningsine]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/02/world/europe/france-husband-rape-drug-trial-mazan.html

For years, she had been losing hair and weight. She had started forgetting whole days, and sometimes appeared to be in dreamlike trances. Her children and friends worried she had Alzheimer’s.

But in late 2020, after she was summoned to a police station in southern France, she learned a far more shattering story.

Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep, the police said, and then raping her. He had ushered dozens of men into her home to film them raping her, too, they said, in abuse that lasted nearly a decade.

Using the man’s photographs, videos and online messages, the police spent the next two years identifying and charging those other suspects.

On Monday, 51 men, including Mr. Pelicot, went on trial in Avignon, in a case that has shocked France and cast a spotlight on the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the broader culture in which such crimes could occur.

The accused men represent a kaleidoscope of working-class and middle-class French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many have children and are in relationships.

Most are charged with raping the woman once. A handful are accused of returning as many as six times to rape her.

The victim, Gisèle, who has divorced her husband and changed her surname since his arrest, is now in her 70s.

Since his arrest, Mr. Pelicot, 71, has “always declared himself guilty,” said Béatrice Zavarro, his lawyer. “He is not at all contesting his role.”

Other defendants have denied the rape charges, with some arguing that they had the husband’s permission and thought that was sufficient, while others claimed they believed the victim had agreed to be drugged.

When the police showed Gisèle some of the photographs they say her husband had carefully classified and stored, she expressed deep shock. She and her husband had been together since they were 18. She had described him to the police as caring and considerate.

She had no memory of being raped, by him or the other men, only one of whom she recognized, she told the police, as a neighbor in town.

The first time she will consciously witness the rapes, her lawyer Antoine Camus says, will be in the courtroom when the video recordings are played as evidence.

The trial comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of the handling of sexual crimes in the country. Rape is defined in French law as an “act of sexual penetration” committed “by violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” A number of feminist lawmakers want to amend that wording to say explicitly that sex without consent is rape, that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and that consent cannot exist if sexual assault is committed “by abusing a state impairing the judgment of another.”

“There is a kind of naïveté on the topic of predators in France, a kind of denial,” said Sandrine Josso, a lawmaker who led a parliamentary commission into what is known in France as “chemical submission” — drugging someone with malicious intent. She started the commission after she says she became the victim of a drugging last year. A senator is being investigated on accusations that he slipped Ecstasy into her Champagne.

Ms. Josso hopes that the Avignon trial will draw attention to the use of drugs to prey on women, and also shed light on the wide profile of predators. “They could be your neighbors, without falling into paranoia,” she said.

Mr. Pelicot seemed like a classic man next door. He was a trained electrician, an entrepreneur and an avid cyclist. His middle child and only daughter, Caroline Darian, her pen name, described him as a warm and present father in a book published in 2022 about the case, “And I Stopped Calling You Papa.” She tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit association, “Don’t Put Me to Sleep,” to publicize the dangers of drug-facilitated crimes.

Her father, she wrote, was the one who drove her to school, picked her up late from parties, encouraged her and consoled her. Her mother was the stable breadwinner, working as a manager in a Paris-area company for 20 years.

When Gisèle retired, they moved to a house with a big garden and pool in Mazan, a small town northeast of Avignon. The couple regularly hosted their three children and grandchildren for summer vacations peppered with late dinners on the terrace, where the family debated, held dance competitions and played Trivial Pursuit.

“I think of us as happy,” his daughter wrote. “I thought my parents were.”

None of them harbored any suspicions. Then, in 2020, three women reported Mr. Pelicot to the police for trying to use his camera to film up their skirts in a grocery store, and he was arrested.

The police seized his two cellphones, two cameras and his electronic devices, including his laptop, before releasing him on bail.

On the devices, the police say they found 300 photographs and a video of an unconscious woman being sexually assaulted by many people. They said they also found Skype messages in which the man boasted of drugging his wife and invited men to join him in having sex with her while she was unconscious.

Over the course of their investigation, the police found more than 20,000 videos and photographs, many of them dated and labeled, in an electronic folder titled “abuse.” The timeline they built began in 2011. The list of suspects grew to 83.

Two months after his initial arrest, Mr. Pelicot was arrested again and charged with aggravated rape, drugging and a list of sexual abuse charges. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at times distributing, intimate photos of them.

If he is found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

During interviews with the police, the details of which were included in an overview of the case by the investigative judge, Mr. Pelicot said he began drugging his wife so he could do things to her, and dress her in things, that she normally refused. Then he started inviting others to participate. He said he never asked for or accepted money.

He met most of the men, the investigating judge’s report stated, in a chat room on a notorious, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France alone from 2021 to 2024. It was finally shut down, and its owner arrested, in June after an 18-month investigation stretching across Europe.

The chat room where most of the men met Mr. Pelicot was called “a son insu,” which means “without their knowledge.”

Over the years, Mr. Pelicot told the police, he developed rules for the visitors to ensure that his wife did not wake: no smoking or cologne; undress in the kitchen; warm hands under hot water or on a radiator, so their cold touch would not jolt her. At the end of each night, according to the investigating judge’s report, he cleaned his wife’s body.

Of the 83 suspects, the police identified and charged 50.

Only one of the men is not charged with rape, assault or attempted rape of Mr. Pelicot’s wife. Instead, that man is accused of following the same model, and drugging his own wife to rape her. Mr. Pelicot is also charged with raping the man’s wife while she was drugged.

Five of the men also face charges for possessing child sexual abuse imagery.

Mr. Pelicot is also being investigated in the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991 and the attempted rape of a 19-year-old in 1999. He admitted to the attempted rape, according to Florence Rault, the lawyer representing the victims in both cases, but denies any involvement in the 1991 homicide.

The story has prompted some soul-searching among doctors, since Gisèle had visited gynecologists and neurologists over a series of mystifying symptoms, but had received no diagnosis, according to her daughter.

“What I found disturbing for us doctors was that no doctor considered this hypothesis,” said Dr. Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, a well known obstetrician-gynecologist and expert in violence against women. She and a pharmacist, Leila Chaouachi, have now developed training for doctors and nurses on the symptoms that victims of drug-facilitated assault can experience.

Contrary to popular belief, most cases occur at home, not at bars, said Ms. Chaouachi, who runs annual surveys on such offenses in France. Most victims are women, the surveys show, and around half of the victims do not remember the attack, because of blackouts, she said.

In the case going to court in Avignon, some of the accused admitted guilt to the police. According to the investigating judge’s report, many claimed that they were tricked into having sex with a drugged woman — lured by a husband for a three-way encounter and told she was pretending to sleep, because she was shy.

Several said they believed that she had consented to being drugged and raped as part of a sex fantasy. Some said they did not believe it was rape, because her husband was there and they believed he could consent for both of them.

“It sends shivers down the spine regarding the state of affairs in French society,” said Mr. Camus, who is also representing Ms. Darian and many other members of the family. “If that’s the conception of consent in sexual matters in 2024, then we have a lot, a lot, a lot of work to do.”