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Prosecutors request maximum sentence for Dominique Pelicot

Prosecutors request maximum sentence for Dominique Pelicot


Prosecutors said on Monday, November 25, they were seeking the maximum 20-year jail term for the man charged with enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily-sedated wife. Dominique Pelicot has since September been in the dock in the southern French city of Avignon with 49 other men for organizing the rapes and sexual abuse of his now ex-wife Gisèle 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 Dominique Pelicot.

Read more Subscribers only 48 days in the ‘swamp’ of the Pelicot rape trial: What Le Monde’s court reporters saw

Dominique Pelicot has himself said he wants to go to prison for plying Gisèle Pelicot with anti-anxiety drugs regularly from July 2011 to October 2020, leaving her exposed to abuse by strangers recruited online. He documented the crimes extensively in photos and videos later discovered by police after he was caught filming up women’s skirts in public.

Beyond Dominique 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 Dominique 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 Gisèle Pelicot – a defense 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 Dominique 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.

‘You were right’

As 11 weeks of hearings drew to a close last week, Gisèle Pelicot’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 daughters-in-law Ceéline and Aurore, and her grandchildren. The judges will not issue their ruling until late December.

Read more Subscribers only In closing arguments, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers plea for end to ‘rape culture’

Prosecutors requested a 17-year prison sentence for one defendant Jean-Pierre M., 63, who used Dominique Pelicot’s practices against his own wife to rape her a dozen times, sometimes in the presence of Pelicot. On the last occasion, she woke up. “I ask my husband what’s going on. He says it’s to see my underwear and then he gets caught up in his lies,” said his wife, Cilia M., who did not press charges to protect their five children, one of whom is disabled.

Of the remaining accused, 35 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 than for those who answered Dominique Pelicot’s invitation once.

Le Monde with AFP

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