French prosecutors said on Monday they were seeking the maximum 20-year jail term for the man charged with enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily-sedated wife, in a trial that has shaken France.
Dominique Pelicot has since September been in the dock in the southern city of Avignon with 49 other men for organising the rapes and sexual abuse of his now ex-wife Gisele Pelicot. One man is being tried in absentia.
The case has shocked a France still working through its version of the #MeToo movement, with a prosecutor telling the court that the trial needed to herald a fundamental change in relations between men and women.
“Twenty years is a lot because it is 20 years of a life … But it is both a lot and too little. Too little in view of the seriousness of the acts that were committed and repeated,” prosecutor Laure Chabaud said, outlining the case against Pelicot.
Pelicot has himself said he wants to go to prison for plying Gisele with anti-anxiety drugs regularly from July 2011 to October 2020, leaving her exposed to abuse by strangers recruited online.
Pelicot documented the crimes extensively in photos and videos later discovered by police after he was caught filming up women’s skirts in public.
Beyond Pelicot, who has admitted to all of the charges, prosecutors must also decide on appropriate potential punishments for the other defendants: men aged 26 to 74 and from all walks of life.
“This trial is shaking up our society in our relationship with each other, in the most intimate relationships between human beings,” Jean-Francois Mayet, the other prosecutor, told the court.
The trial is making French society work “to understand our needs, our emotions, our desires and above all to take into account those of others”, he said.
What is at stake, he added, “is not a conviction or an acquittal” but “to fundamentally change the relations between men and women”.
Many accused argued in court that they believed Pelicot’s claim they were participating in a libertine fantasy, in which his then-wife had consented to sexual contact and was only pretending to be asleep.
Among them, 33 have also claimed they were not in their right minds when they abused or raped Gisele — a defence not backed up by any of the psychological reports compiled by court-appointed experts.
Sentencing requests are slated to take three full days in the court’s agenda, with prosecutors themselves estimating an average of 15 minutes per defendant.
Most, including Pelicot, are charged with aggravated rape.
“The facts and the personality of each accused were taken into account even in our sentencing demands,” Mayet added.
As 11 weeks of hearings drew to a close last week, Gisele’s lawyer Antoine Camus called for “truth and justice” to be rendered to the plaintiff as well as her three children, David, Caroline and Florian, her step-children Celine and Aurore, and her grandchildren.
The court’s five judges will not issue their ruling on the sentences until late December.
Prosecutors may also ask the maximum penalty for fellow defendant Jean-Pierre M, now aged 63, who applied Pelicot’s practices against his own wife to rape her a dozen times, sometimes in the presence of Pelicot himself.
Of the remaining accused, 35 completely deny taking part in a rape.
Observers will be watching whether prosecutors ask for heavier penalties for those who came to rape Gisele multiple times — some of them as many as six — than for those who answered Pelicot’s invitation once.
The trial has made Gisele, who has attended hearings and insisted they be held in public, a feminist icon in the fight for women against sexual abuse.
Mayer praised the “courage” and “dignity” of Gisele, the victim of some 200 repeated rapes, half of which were attributed to her ex-husband.
Mayet thanked her for allowing hearings to be open to the public and allowing some of the 20,000 or so photos and videos taken without her knowledge by Pelicot to be shown.
“You were right, madam: the past few weeks have shown the importance of showing this so that shame changes sides,” he added.
