‘A rapist can be in the family’: how Dominique Pelicot became one of the worst sexual predators in history |

 

 

"Dominique, a 72-year-old retired electrician and estate agent, is now described by his family as the worst sexual predator in recent French history. Over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020, he crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into his unsuspecting wife’s mashed potato, ice-cream, coffee or beer, and invited dozens of men he met online to come to the couple’s house in a village in Provence to rape her while she was unconscious.

He also hid cameras to secretly photograph and film his son’s wives in their own bathrooms or rooms in his home, including when one was pregnant with twins, and shared naked photographs of them online. He photographed his adult daughter asleep semi-naked, in underwear she didn’t recognise as her own, sparking her own fears that she too had been drugged and abused, though he denied in court ever abusing her. He repeatedly raped another man’s wife after teaching him how to use the same drugging technique. He had proposed teaching several other men how to drug their own girlfriends or wives – and even one man’s mother – suggesting he could rape them too.

Gisèle Pelicot, 72, has become a feminist hero for insisting that the rape trial of her now ex-husband Dominique and 50 other accused men should be held in public so that shame could change sides. The story of all these men and their alleged sex crimes must be told, she said, in order to end what she called “rape culture”, where sexual violence is so commonplace in society it is almost shrugged off, and because Pelicot and the men got away with it for so long."

read report by Angelique Chrisafis

‘A rapist can be in the family’: how Dominique Pelicot became one of the worst sexual predators in history | Gisèle Pelicot rape trial | The Guardian