It was not just Gisèle Pelicot’s life that collapsed the day the police delivered the news that they believed her husband of 50 years had been drugging her, and inviting other men into their house to rape her alongside him for almost a decade.
“It was the whole family,” their eldest son, David, told a court Monday, in a dramatic day when the couple’s three children addressed their father, sitting in a witness box on the edge of the packed courtroom in Avignon, France.
“You need to know this trial is a trial of a devastated family.”
David Pelicot, 50, is haunted by fears that his own son, who remains in psychological treatment, was also abused by his father. His sister, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, is a shadow of her former self, convinced she was also drugged and sexually abused by their father. (Their father denies both those charges.) His youngest sibling, Florian, took the stand to say that his identity and marriage had collapsed.
“It cost me a divorce and thousands of questions,” said Florian Pelicot, 38, turning to his father and saying he now had doubts about his own paternity. “It’s been 4 years since I lost my father.”
He added, in anguish, “How do you reconstruct as a son?”
Some 51 men are on trial all at once, mostly for accusations of aggravated rape of the Pelicots’s mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who was drugged unconscious. Their father, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to crushing sleeping pills into her food and drinks for almost a decade, and then inviting dozens of other men he met online into their home to rape her alongside him.
Around 15 of the men, including Mr. Pelicot, have pleaded guilty. The rest have admitted they had sexual relations with Ms. Pelicot but say they did not intend to rape her. Instead, many have argued they believed that Ms. Pelicot had consented and that they had been lured by Mr. Pelicot with the promise of a threesome, in which Ms. Pelicot was pretending to sleep as part of the couple’s fantasy.
Some said they believe Mr. Pelicot had drugged them also.
Mr. Pelicot, time and time again, has said that all the accused knew he had drugged his former wife without her knowledge, and that he drugged no one but his wife. Ms. Pelicot has said that while the men might have been tricked into coming into her bedroom, once they got there she was so unconscious that it was clear that she could not have possibly given consent.
The trial, now in its third month, has shaken France and has raised uncomfortable questions about relations between men and women, the prevalence of rape and conceptions of consent. In a country that showed much resistance to the #MeToo movement seven years ago, conversations about rape culture and toxic masculinity have suddenly become common.
Ms. Pelicot, 71, has emerged as a feminist hero, after making the rare decision to waive her right to private trial and insist it all be public — including the graphic photos and videos her husband took of the sexual interactions while she was drugged.
She did so, she told the court, hoping it would help other victims and “change society.”
Each day, crowds line up to watch the trial in an overflow room and burst into applause when Ms. Pelicot passes.
On Monday, messages celebrating her bravery and repeating statements she has made in court were plastered on many walls around Avignon. “Gisèle, women thank you,” read one beside a smoke shop a block from the courthouse.
Though this was the first time the court heard from the Pelicots’ two sons, their daughter and one current and one former daughter-in-law testified in September.
They all described how, before Dominique Pelicot was taken into police custody in November 2020 on accusations of raping his wife, the family had been very close, spending their vacations together, often at the house the couple had rented for their retirement in southern France.
Since then, they say, they are all haunted by what they did not see and by what might have happened to them and their children, who spent a lot of time with their grandfather.
Ms. Darian told the court again on Monday that she is convinced the father she had always considered loving and supportive had drugged and sexually assaulted her too.
The police found evidence of photos of her among her father’s collection, including two of her sleeping at night in an awkward position, with the lights on.
“I am an victim of Dominique Pelicot,” Ms. Darian said. When the photos were taken, she said, “you weren’t looking at me the way a father looks at his daughter, but in an incestuous way.”
Mr. Pelicot has denied drugging or sexually assaulting his daughter or grandchildren, and prosecutors have not charged him with those crimes. Taking the microphone from the box on Monday, he said: “I maintain and hope, even if I am no longer here, one day you will have the proof that nothing happened.”
Ms. Darian has 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, and writing a book, “And I Stopped Calling You Papa,” detailing the horrors.
But the toll on her has been immense. She was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward soon after the police took her father into custody and showed her the photos they had found. Part way through the trial, she announced on Instagram that she was checking herself into a clinic for a few days “to recover all my energy, to be able to sleep again.”
She called the trial a “tsunami” for her family, and said she didn’t want people to have the misguided belief that she was a “pseudo wonder woman.”
“Far from it.”
The post Sons Tell of a ‘Devastated’ Family at Rape Trial in France appeared first on New York Times.
