A blue chair, not quite as uncomfortable as the wooden benches, appeared in the dock on Tuesday, September 17. Dominique Pelicot, whose hearing was postponed for a week for medical reasons, reappeared before the Vaucluse criminal court in southern France. But he was back under certain conditions: He has to be able to take a break every 90 minutes, get sufficient hydration, and have a more comfortable seat.

Slumped in the blue chair, legs crossed and with a microphone on his stomach, Dominique Pelicot listened to the list of charges, scratched his nose with the back of his left hand, then mumbled into the microphone: "I admit to these facts in their entirety." "I'm a rapist, like the others in this room," the 71-year-old said a few minutes later.

Dominique Pelicot had already confessed to everything during the investigation: His rapes on his ex-wife between 2011 and 2020 after drugging her with anti-anxiety drugs, and the rapes by other men that he facilitated. They were men of all ages recruited from the now-defunct libertine website Coco.fr, accused of sexually abusing Gisèle Pelicot in her sleep. "I beg my wife, my children, my grandchildren, as well as Mrs. [the wife of a co-defendant he admits raping] to please accept my apologies. I regret what I have done, I ask for forgiveness, even if it is unforgivable."

The aim of the first part of his interrogation on Tuesday was to get to the bottom of the Pelicot "enigma" – as psychiatrist Paul Bensussan put it – and try to understand how a socially well-adjusted man, presented as a good father, a good grandfather, a good neighbor, could have done such things. Feminist writer and icon Simone de Beauvoir – who wrote in her 1949 essay The Second Sex "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" – must have been turning over in her grave when Dominique Pelicot said: "One is not born this way, but rather becomes it."

How does one become Dominique Pelicot? He began by enumerating his unverifiable childhood traumas: A rape at age 9 while in the hospital; his forced participation in a rape committed by colleagues on a construction site when he was 14 – "I was grabbed by the collar, told: 'She's going to deflower you,' and they stuck my nose in her sex;" his early exposure to his parents' sexuality and to degrading practices on his mother; the sexual abuse inflicted by his father on his adopted sister. "What I went through as a child," he said, "one can't say it didn't have an influence."

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