A French woman who was dr*gged by her husband so 50 men could r@pe her, has appeared in court for the first time after waiving her right to anonymity.
The woman, Gisele P., 72, arrived in courtroom with her three children to witness the opening day of the trial of Dominique P., 71, which began on Monday morning, September 2, in Avignon.
He is accused of orchestrating a sick rape ring, using an online forum to invite a horde of men to his home in Mazan near Avignon before filming them assaulting his wife over nine years between 2011 and 2020.
Police counted a total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom were identified and are being tried alongside the main suspect, a former employee at France’s power utility company EDF.
Presiding judge Roger Arata announced that all the hearings would be public, granting Gisele her wish for ‘complete publicity until the end’ of the court case, according to her lawyer, Stephane Babonneau.
Gisele could have opted for a trial behind closed doors given the nature of her husband’s alleged crimes, but ‘that’s what her attackers would have wanted’, another lawyer named Antoine Camus said.
‘For the first time, she will have to live through the r@pes that she endured over 10 years,’ Camus said, adding that his client had ‘no recollection’ of the abuse which she only discovered in 2020.
The couple met in 1971 and married two years later before having three kids together.
Gisele previously said her husband had asked her to try swinging – a request she refused. But she also described him as a ‘great guy’ with a ‘normal s3xuality’.
The heinous campaign of sexual abuse masterminded by Dominique P. is said to have begun in 2011 when the couple was living near Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.
Police began to investigate the defendant Dominique P. in September 2020 when he was caught by a security guard secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.
Police said they found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife on his computer, visibly unconscious and mostly in the foetal position.
The images are alleged to show dozens of r@pes in the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people roughly 20 miles from Avignon in Provence.
Investigators also found chats on a site called coco.fr, since shut down by police, in which he recruited strangers to come to their home and have intercourse with his wife.
Dominique P. later admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug.
The husband took part in the rapes, filmed them and encouraged the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.
In previous hearings, he explained how he took a range of precautions to avoid his wife or family from discovering the dark deeds.
French outlet Le Point reported how Dominique P. imposed strict rules on each of the men who he invited to rape his wife: no perfume or tobacco, cut, and clean nails, and hands first run under hot water so as not to risk waking the victim.
The attackers would park a few minutes from the couple’s home and undress in the kitchen. No money changed hands.
The accused rapists included a forklift driver, a fire brigade officer, a company boss and a journalist.
Dominique P., who said he was raped by a male nurse when he was nine, is ready to face ‘his family and his wife’, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro said.
‘He is ashamed of what he did, it is unforgivable,’ Zavarro told reporters on Monday morning, adding that the case was ‘in a form of addiction’.
‘My client’s line of conduct is that he recognises what he did and there has not been an ounce of protest since the beginning,’ she said in comments carried by French press.
The defendant has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, to which he admitted after DNA testing
The trial is due to last until December 20.
