Dominique Pelicot: The ‘great guy’ who was a monster

Gisèle Pélicot always believed that Dominique was a “great guy.” At least that is how she described her husband at the police station, answering persistent questions just seconds before discovering that the man she had been married to for half a century had been drugging her for a decade and handing her over to dozens of men who raped her in their own marital bedroom. That great guy, with his ups and downs, had been, in the eyes of his family and friends, a good father, a loving granddad, and an honest worker.

He was scheduled to testify Tuesday before the Avignon court that is trying one of the most important and harrowing cases of sexual assault known in France, but a court official announced that the accused was feeling ill and would not attend the hearing. So far, the court has heard the opinion of psychiatric experts, who on Monday questioned the image of normality so carefully cultivated by Pélicot.

The first expert to testify, psychologist Marianne Douteau, highlighted Pélicot’s “irascible” character, which created a climate of “fear, lies and secrets,” according to Agence France-Presse. “Mr Pélicot’s sexuality reflects his personality: it is ordinary in public, but within the relationship he is obsessive, as in matters such as partner swapping, which his wife was opposed to and which he compensated for by using pornographic forums,” she added. “A man with two faces,” said psychologist Annabelle Montagne, quoted by Le Dauphiné Libéré. “He presents himself as stable, a respected and appreciated family man, but at the same time he is dissimulative, with a propensity for transgression in his sexuality.” Gisèle “was used as bait,” said another psychiatrist, who described her husband’s criminal risk level as “high.”

The character that Pélicot had created for himself for years is now crumbling. According to the police investigation, the accused could in fact be a serial rapist. After his arrest in 2020, investigators implicated him in two other cases. In the fall of 2022, already under arrest, he was charged with the 1991 rape and murder of Sophie Narme, 23, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. He denied the accusations brought by the cold case unit, dedicated to serial or unsolved crimes and based in Nanterre. These are accusations “based solely on conjecture,” denounced his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro. But Pélicot was also charged with an attempted rape in Seine-et-Marne in 1999. In this case, his DNA was found at the scene and he admitted the crime, but denied having used a weapon. The modus operandi was always the same: both women were drugged with ether “during a visit to an apartment; both victims were real estate agents,” according to the Nanterre prosecutor’s office. Dominique P. was also involved in the buying and selling of apartments.

Anxiety medication hidden in a hiking shoe

Suspicions about previous crimes only emerged when the police began investigating the case on September 2, 2020, when the accused was caught in a supermarket in Carpentras (Vaucluse) filming up the skirts of several women with his phone. But it was not the first time, either. On July 31, 2010, in another shopping center in Seine-et-Marne, he was also arrested for similar acts using a hidden camera inside a pen. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine of €100.

Shortly after that episode, as Franceinfo explained, Pélicot began visiting Coco.fr, a (now shut down) website known for its sexual and illegal content where he began offering his wife’s drugged body to dozens of people who paraded through his house to rape her. The first photos found in his files date from the night of July 23-24, 2011, and go all the way to 2020, when he was arrested. “The police saved my life,” said Gisèle at the first hearing. Nobody in the family suspected anything. But Gisèle’s testimony to investigators also reveals that during the following nine years she woke up startled a few times while her husband was raping her, probably also under the effects of some medication. The accused used a powerful anxiolytic for years, which he concealed in a hiking shoe kept in the garage of the house.

The Pélicots’ story spanned 40 years in the Ile-de-France region of Paris. They met in 1971 and married two years later in Indre, three hours from the capital. Dominique had a somewhat turbulent youth. According to the Nouvelle République, he quit his studies to qualify as an electrician, which did not serve him much in life, because he ended up working first in the nuclear energy industry and then in the real estate sector. But what really marked him was having grown up in a family environment “with disturbing references and marked by certain secrets” and an incestuous climate, according to the conclusion of the personality test carried out on him when he was arrested. In addition, he himself has said — and this is one of the keys to the mitigating circumstances that his defense is now seeking — that at the age of nine he was raped by a nurse while he was in the hospital.

Dominique Pélicot spoke of the rape to his family. But his daughter Caroline Darian, who has written a book telling her story and created a foundation to fight against cases of sexual assault with chemical submission, does not believe in “this story.” In her statement, she said that her father is “a person who lies a lot.” The daughter is also one of the victims, as her father took photos of her while she lay unconscious in bed in her underwear. Those images were found on his computer and are part of another ramification of the case that is also undergoing trial, as is the fact that he took photos of his two granddaughters naked in the bathroom.

When Gisèle met her husband, she was unaware of many details of his biography. Over the next few years, they had three children: the youngest, Florian, was born in 1986. Florian has described his childhood as “normal” and said that his father “was always there for his children” and was “rather polite and respectful” towards women. He also admitted that he understood, “when he grew up,” that his father concealed his money problems from his wife. In 2001, the couple divorced for financial reasons, but continued to live together and remarried in 2007 under a more favorable marital regime. In 2013, when they retired, they decided to move to the south of France, where most of the rapes took place. “Moving and retirement may have weakened the defensive barriers in his psyche,” said one of the psychiatrists.

During questioning before the investigating judge, Pélicot, who claims not to have received money in exchange for letting his wife get raped, explained that he got “pleasure from seeing her touched by another person” and spoke of an “addiction that prevented him from stopping.” An expert psychiatrist detected in him a “paraphilic deviation,” that is, a penchant for sexual acts with non-consensual people, which includes “voyeurism and somnophilia.” “The fact that his wife is inert increases his feeling of control,” said the psychiatrist. The experts, after several psychiatric examinations carried out during the investigation, believe that the accused does not suffer from “any mental pathology or abnormality” that could influence his actions.

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