Dominique Pelicot appeared in court for precisely two minutes on Monday, September 9. This was the time it took for lawyer Béatrice Zavarro to mention her client’s “intestinal difficulties” and “possible urinary infection,” and to get the presiding judge Roger Arata to excuse him from this sixth day of hearings, which would be entirely focused on him.

It was therefore, strangely, in his absence that a personality analyst, an expert psychologist and two psychiatrists took turns before the criminal court in Avignon, southeastern France, to dissect the background and profile of Pelicot, whose reactions to certain statements made on the stand would have been welcome.

“No salient personality traits,” “correct relationship with reality,” “no mental pathology,” “no psychiatric antecedents,” listed the specialists who had examined Pelicot. He was also described by close friends and family, during the course of the investigation, as “an undeniably present and loving father,” “very involved in the education of his grandchildren,” “a patriarch who breathed happiness,” within a “very close-knit family.”

Pelicot worked as a laborer and then as a site supervisor in an electrical installation company, before becoming a real estate agent and selling alarms, IT equipment and telephones. He was a man well-established in the community, who kept in good physical condition. Gisèle Pelicot was the first and only love of his life. They married in 1973 and, despite some turbulence in the 2000s, reflected the image of a “loving couple, without a hint of trouble.”

Behind this “facade of normality,” in the words of psychiatrist Paul Bensussan, Dominique Pelicot was able to drug his wife in order to rape her and have her raped in her sleep by dozens of strangers he met on the internet, over almost 10 years. He practiced ordinary sex with her when she was not unconscious, then gave free rein to all his paraphilias – or sexual deviances – including his “somnophilia bordering on necrophilia,” as pointed out by the experts. “We’re going to have to take a close look at this enigma,” said Bensussan.

‘Split-personality’ defendant

“What kind of personality allows someone who claims to love his wife to inflict these scenes on her, to witness her decline, to put her in danger? How can this dizzying contradiction be reconciled?” asked Stéphane Babonneau and Antoine Camus, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers.

All the experts responded by invoking the concept of “splitting,” a psychological defense mechanism thanks to which “two opposing personalities can coexist within the same individual, living two different lives,” said Bensussan, who insisted: “He may have been sincere in what he gave to see.”

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