Thursday, October 3, was a dizzying, overwhelming, exhausting day at the Avignon courthouse: No less than seven defendants were heard by the Vaucluse criminal court on the accusations that they raped Gisèle Pelicot while she was unconscious because her husband drugged her. One or more of the interrogations could usefully have been postponed by 24 hours, but a verdict has to be reached before Christmas, so the proceedings were condensed and interrogating was done at double speed.
In the court's defense, the blanket denials from the defendants are a little repetitive. The litany of "rape-without-intent-to-commit" claims continued on Thursday, and it is tempting to hurry through the many defendants who "didn't know she was drugged" or thought "it was a sex game and she was going to wake up." But this trial tells so many stories within the story and is packed with so many details that it would take much more time to hear everything.
Where to start? With Jean T.'s curious amnesia? With the lamentations of Redouane E.? At least these two gave the court justifications it had not yet heard. The first, aged 52, remembers everything up to his entry into Gisèle Pelicot's room. He remembers everything after waking up in his car in the nearby parking lot. But what happened between that, "I don't remember at all," he swore, trying to convince the court that he himself had been "drugged" by Dominique Pelicot, Gisèle's husband.
Redouane E. 55, also denied his involvement, claiming to be a "victim" of Dominique Pelicot, whom he said had given him the fear of his life. "When I got to the room, I said to myself: 'Did he kill his wife? Is he going to film? Is he going to implicate me in a murder? I was terrified! I was trapped, I said to myself: The slightest attempt to escape and I'm dead. So what I did [to Gisèle Pelicot] was to not frustrate the man, who seemed to me to be a dangerous psychopath."
"I watched the videos again this morning, I didn't see you terrorized at all," said Antoine Camus, Gisèle Pelicot's lawyer. "What you have to understand," replied Redouane E., anticipating the unfavorable videos to be viewed on Friday, "is that I'm in the presence of a predator, so I mustn't show any weakness so as not to encourage him to attack me. This makes the interpretation of the videos very complex. People tell me I don't look panicked, but that's the point, I didn't want to look panicked!"
Simone M., aged 43, is the only co-defendant that Gisèle Pelicot knew in her life before the rapes were revealed. By chatting with him on the coco.fr website, Dominique Pelicot realized that he lived 200 meters from them, in the town of Mazan. One day, under some pretext concerning a bicycle wheel, he invited his neighbor to show him what the woman he would abuse a few days later looked like.
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