The court of Avignon, southeast of France, will pass sentence this Thursday in the historic macro-trial on the rapes under chemical submission of Gisèle Pelicotwith sentences that can reach up to 20 years for each of the 51 defendants.
On November 27, the Prosecutor’s Office requested up to 650 years in prison for the total number of crimes.which include both rapes and sexual assaults against the 72-year-old victim, who has become a global feminist symbol, for deciding that the trial would be public “so that shame can change sides.”
The highest sentence requested, 20 years (the maximum contemplated by law in France), It is for her ex-husband and mastermind of the plan, Dominique Pelicot.72 years old, who from the beginning of the process recognized all the facts, and assured that his fantasy was “to subdue an unsubmissive woman.”
He abused her and put her in danger of death from 2011 to 2020drugging her and inviting other men to abuse her.
Another of the accused, Jean-Pierre Maréchal, admitted the crimes at trial although he never touched Gisèle Pelicot, but rather He replicated the methods of the main defendant with his own wifewho was also raped under the effects of anxiolytics by both men.
The lowest sentence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, 4 years, is for another man who He is only accused of sexual assaultwithout rape charges.
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The rest, aged between 27 and 74, face requests for sentences that They range from 10 to 20 years in prison for aggravated rape.
“There will be a before and after,” said the prosecutor of the Avignon criminal court, Laure Chabaud, during the hearings, aware of the importance of this trial. Therefore, called for a “real and deep awareness of the notion of consent” for the accused, and also for society.
In fact, in France, the Penal Code defines rape as “any act of sexual penetration of any kind or any oral-genital act committed against another person” through “violence, compulsion, threat or surprise.”
The notion of consent does not appear in the French legal system, and For the crime of rape to be classified, there must be penetration.
For this reason, the strategies of various defenses were based on trying to develop convoluted arguments about what sexual practices their defendants developed.
The evidence of all crimes, They are in the thousands of videos and photos that the confessed rapist himself took, Dominique Pelicot.
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The events being judged occurred between 2011 and 2020first in the Paris region and, starting in 2013, in the house to which the Pelicots moved when they retired, located in Mazan, a town of 6 thousand inhabitants, near Avignon.
Dominique Pelicot contacted dozens of men on the Internet and invited them to his home, once he had drugged his wife with large doses of anxiolytics, that left her unconscious and close to a comaaccording to the medical experts who testified at the beginning of the trial.
The main accused recorded these violations, discovered in 2020 by the police, after having arrested him, after being discovered recording under the skirts of some women in a supermarket in Carpentras.
Dominique Pelicot is also accused in two other cases of gender violenceone for the rape and murder of a woman in 1991 and the other for an attempted rape in 1999.
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