A man on trial in France for drugging his wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her over a decade told a criminal psychologist his “idyllic life” had been ruined by the criminal case brought against him.
Dominique Pelicot, 71, was excused from attending today’s hearing after his lawyer told the trial judge he had suffered “medical problems” over the past 48 hours for which he had not received “adequate treatment.”
A prison psychologist told the court this morning that Pelicot had a “split personality”, lacked empathy and inherited the temperament of his father, who was said to be a violent abuser.
He also revealed that Pelicot maintains the disgusting abuse of his wife Gisele Pelicot would have continued had he not been arrested, but added that the depraved defendant was not “inauthentic” about his love for his wife.
The disturbing revelations about Pelicot’s mind were revealed before his two sons, David and Florian, took the stand to testify against their father.
Dominique Pelicot is accused of recruiting men online to assault his wife repeatedly over a 10-year period
Gisele Pelicot, 72, arrives at the court in Avignon, France
David and Florian Pelicot enter the courtroom on the morning of Monday, September 9.
The couple’s only child, Caroline Peyronnet, told the court last week how her world fell apart when her mother called her to inform her of Pelicot’s crimes.
Psychologist Marianne Douteau told the court how her client regretted his arrest, complaining that the case against him had ruined his life and that he and his wife could have continued in a happy marriage if his misdeeds had not been discovered. ‘(Pelicot) complains that this criminal case against him has destroyed his life.
“He says that everything could have continued as before if he had been arrested. ‘Gisele would not have found out anything, we would have continued being happy,'” he says.
Madame Douteau later told the court about several significant events in Pelicot’s upbringing, explaining that he revealed in a lengthy interview with her in February 2021 that he was raped by a hospital nurse when he was just nine years old.
Meanwhile, Pelicot’s father Denis was said to be a violent wife beater who sent his son to work from the age of 14 and pocketed 80 percent of his wages. His parents also took in a girl, who Denis is said to have abused.
The psychologist concluded that Pelicot had inherited a personality similar to that of her father: angry, stubborn and impulsive.
She said: ‘Dominique Pelicot comes from a troubled family where young children were abused.
‘(Pelicot) has a two-faced personality: he is a patriarch, but he is also irresponsible and manipulative. Behind closed doors he respects no boundaries.
‘He has a personality divided between the person he wants to be and the person he is.
“He doesn’t show any empathy, but he’s not inauthentic (in his expressions of love towards his wife),” he concluded.
The psychologist also explained how Pelicot admitted that he was very sexually demanding and that he usually looked for sex on the Internet.
He told her: ‘I went online every day and constantly visited sites that offered wife swapping.’
The psychologist told how Madame Pelicot became isolated from her support network in Paris after the couple moved to the south of France in 2013 to retire, at which point Dominique Pelicot escalated his appalling campaign of abuse until his eventual arrest in 2020.
Brave Gisele Pelicot has bravely waived her right to anonymity so the world can hear the depths of depravity her husband of 50 years sank to in order to satisfy his twisted sexual desires.
The Pelicots’ daughter, Caroline, gave harrowing testimony last week.
Pelicot fell in love with Gisele, whom he considered “a saint”, when they were 18 and the couple married just two years later, establishing a home in the Paris region.
They both recall having a happy marriage, although she had an affair with a co-worker about 14 years after they were married while he was also having extramarital affairs.
Pelicot trained as an electrician and worked for French energy giant EDF, but in the early 2000s he decided to retrain and start a new career as an entrepreneur in the real estate sector.
He divorced his wife in 2004 in what he described as a “strategic move” to protect her from the huge debts he racked up in a failed business venture to become a real estate agent, and the couple was forced to borrow money from several different sources.
Despite their financial troubles, the couple remarried in 2007 to great fanfare, and Gisele’s steady income from her position as a manager at a Paris-based company meant they were finally able to make ends meet.
But the picture of an idyllic marriage painted by Dominique Pelicot was shot down by his brother and sons David and Florian, who described their father as an angry liar who could not stand being contradicted and became angry when confronted with his failings.
The case, which was heard in the city of Avignon in French Provence, has horrified anyone who has heard how former electrical engineer Dominique Pelicot abused his wife for a decade.
Last week, Madame Pelicot, 72, faced the 51 men, including her husband, who have been accused of raping her, and who were brought to the Vaucluse Criminal Court each day as proceedings continued.
In a three-hour testimony last week, the grandmother of seven described the moment she learned from police officers how she was drugged into unconsciousness and then raped by strangers as she lay motionless in their marital bed, while her husband watched, recording the abuse on camera for his own personal pleasure.
She told the court: “I was subjected to the altar of vice. It’s like a dead woman in a bed. This is not a bedroom, it’s an operating theatre. I’m treated like a bag of rubbish, like a rag doll. These are not sex scenes, these are rape scenes, it’s unbearable.”
In her testimony, the couple’s only daughter, Caroline Peyronnet, told the court last week how her world fell apart when her mother called her to inform her of their crimes.
Her agony was compounded when detectives discovered that Mr Pelicot had also taken photographs of Caroline lying motionless on a bed in her mother’s underwear.
Madame Peyronnet, 45, described her father as “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”.
The trial heard that Pelicot’s perversion was only discovered after he was arrested for taking photographs up women’s skirts in a supermarket near the couple’s home in the pretty village of Mazan, in the shadow of Mont Ventoux, in September 2020.
A police search of his computer uncovered 20,000 home movies and photographs of men he met on the internet raping his wife dating back to 2011.
Detectives tracked down 50 of the 84 men Pelicot had met on a now-defunct website and invited to her home to carry out the abuse.
Madame Pelicot, 72, last week faced the 51 men, including her husband, accused of raping her.
Madame Pelicot, 72, relived the trauma she experienced when a police investigator showed her graphic videos of her being repeatedly raped by her husband Dominique and more than 80 strangers while she was unconscious.
Madame Pelicot is determined that the public should know that she played no part in her husband’s twisted sexual fantasies which he played out in their picturesque chalet-house in the Provençal village of Mazan (pictured).
They discovered Pelicot routinely laced his wife’s food and drink with powerful sedatives to render her unconscious when his abusers arrived at the family home under cover of darkness.
Pelicot urged the men to sneak into the modest country house and undress in the kitchen so as not to leave a trace.
He then turned on the camera and filmed each man inflicting his horrific abuse on his wife, before meticulously filing and cataloguing the household’s movements under various chilling headings.
The men, all from the Provence region in southern France, are aged between 26 and 73 and include a firefighter, a nurse, a civil servant, a plumber, a soldier and a journalist.
The detective tracked down 50 of these men and, along with Pelicot, charged them all with rape.
Some 16 defendants, including Pelicot, have admitted the crime.
But 35 maintain they are innocent and one man told police he believed Madame Pelicot had given consent because her husband was present.
Pelicot faces up to 20 years in prison. The other men face shorter sentences if convicted.
The trial is scheduled to last until December.