The Trial That Appalled The World
72-year-old Gisele Pelicot was secretly drugged and raped by her husband and more than fifty other men.
Between 2011 and 2020 Dominique Pelicot along with over fifty other sick and twisted men who he invited to his home through a vile website Coco Chat, raped his wife Gisele whilst she was unconscious.
Gisele Pelicot aged 72
Yes for over nine years, Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife and invited perverts from an online platform called Coco Chat to have sex with his wife as she slept, this of course was non-consensual sex and thus considered rape
Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot married in 1973 when they were both in their early twenties. By 2011, they had three children and several grandchildren living in the suburbs of Paris.
Gisele worked at the state electricity company whilst Dominique was an electrician. In 2011 Dominique began to secretly give Gisele drugs that would render her unconscious, he would then rape her in her sleep.
Two years later, the couple retired to the French commune-style town of Mazan, in Vaucluse, it was there that Dominique began inviting men to come to the couple’s home to rape his wife while she was sedated.
Rapist Dominique Pelicot
Dominique’s crimes only came to light when police arrested him in 2020 after he was caught filming up the skirts of three women in a supermarket. Police searched him and his home and as a result confiscated his phones, hard drives, and laptop. When the equipment was examined images and videos of Gisele being raped were discovered.
Some four years later a massive trial began in Avignon with Dominique and fifty other men being accused of rape, aggravated rape, and sexual assault. In France, rape trials are usually held behind closed doors, what is known as ‘in camera’, to preserve the anonymity of the victim.
However, Gisèle rejected the right to anonymity, saying that she wanted “to ensure that the public would see what was happening.
Crowds clap as Gisele arrives at court
During the trial, Dominique told the court that “one is not born a pervert, one becomes one.” The question is what was it that perverted him and the other sick individuals”? During the lengthy trial, the court heard the testimony of the defendants themselves, as well as from character witnesses, and mental health professionals who had interviewed Dominique and the other defendants, including a French social worker a Freudian expert psychologist and a medical psychiatrist. One of the answers that emerged from those interviews was sexual trauma.
More than a quarter of those accused that stood trial claimed to have been victims of sexual abuse during childhood including Dominique himself.
I personally fail to understand this line of excuse/explanation as surely if you have been a victim of sexual abuse you would know how frightening and traumatising this could be and would not want to inflict it on someone else, am I going down the wrong track here? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Cartoon sketch from the Pelicot trial
I am aware from a few reports of the case that several members of the public complained that defence lawyers were taking a casual approach to explain away their clients’ responsibility for heinous crimes. After all, as I said before not all people who are subjected to such abuse end up committing serious sexual crimes such as rape.
Other defence lawyers followed a slightly different route as they seemed to realise that an abusive childhood would not be accepted as an excuse for committing the crime of rape. These men certainly knew that Gisele Pelicot was in a state of deep sleep when they visited the couple’s home and thus knew that she was not consenting to sexual activity.
Defence lawyers asked the court questions such as: should we understand “fantasy”? What is “paraphilia”? When is sexuality “deviant”? What counts as “curiosity”? The issue seems to have been that the more points and so-called explanations that various defence lawyers put to the court, the less acceptable as mitigation of their clients behaviour they became.
Depraved rapist and sexual deviant, Dominique Pelicot
I have to say at this point, I am shocked and somewhat taken aback that the sick sexual deviant, Dominique Pelicot was able to find an online platform where he could attract such a large number of twisted individuals that not only fantasised about such dreadful activity but actually travelled and took part in violent sexual crimes.
It seems that Pelicot began drugging Gisele after she refused to consider taking part in acts such as wife-swapping and three-way sex. He then found the now-defunct site, Coco Chat and recruited over fifty individuals to join him in his perversions.
Coco Chat or Cocoland was an online chat site without any kind of registration and completely free to access. It did not store user's chat once they logged off from a chat session so it was extremely difficult to trace.
Information obtained from the public prosecutor's office in Paris reported that, between January 2021, and May 2024, Coco Chat or Cocoland was named in more than twenty-three thousand criminal cases. Several of these were related to a wave of violent ambushes of gay or trans people, which were orchestrated by predators who arranged meetups with their victims online. This just goes to show the kind of sick individuals Dominique Pelicot was talking to online.
I will be bringing you another article on online chat rooms such as Coco Chat in the coming days in which we will look at the psychology behind the minds of individuals who use such sites.
This statement demonstrates just how minds are affected by such sites:
Many defendants at the Pelicot trial similarly expressed the feeling that the scenes they lived through were fictional. Ghabi and Venzin said that they thought their visits were, respectively, a “scenario” and a “fantasy.”
Whilst, Vandevelde, who went to the Pelicot house six times between 2019 and 2020, described himself as “a self-directed zombie.” Related to the fictionality was a perceived lack of agency. Douiri, one psychologist said, did not see himself as a subject, “but as an object which responded to impulses.” What a creepy statement!
In this case, The defendants’ obvious lack of consciousness and remorse for their actions would seem to go way beyond what we might expect to hear from criminal defendants. I guess this goes to make this case all the more unique.
As I said earlier I will be bringing another article on the sexual depravity of online sites such as Coco Chat and if anyone reading this can help contribute to that I would be delighted. Get in touch with me via email with any information that you may feel is relevant.
In conclusion to this article; On December 19th 2024 Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men were convicted of aggravated rape, attempted rape or sexual assault against Gisele Pelicot and were given sentences between three and fifteen years in prison. One man was found guilty of having drugged and raped his own wife with Dominique but was not charged with having committed any offence against Gisele. Seventeen of those that were convicted have lodged appeals against their convictions but Dominique was not one of them.
Speaking on 19 December after the trial, Gisèle said: “When I started on September 2nd I wanted to ensure that society could see what was happening and I have never regretted this decision. I now have faith in our capacity collectively to take hold of a future in which everybody, women, and men, can live together in harmony, in respect and mutual understanding”.
I have to say that I am just struck by how a man could not only do such vile things to the woman to whom he had dedicated his life but then bring in unknown individuals to abuse her in his presence. I often hear members of the older generations saying things like “What on earth is this world coming to” but in this case, I have to ask the same question. How on earth was such a website allowed to operate with no recompense, no control and more seriously still, how can people want to abuse another in such sick and vile ways? I am truly horrified to think that there are so many people out in the world who suffer such sexual depravity.
I am not done with this and will be back with more on this depravity soon, until then please stay safe and leave me a comment or drop me an email:
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