When he was born in 1961, Romain V. was named Jean-Marie, after his father. He changed his first name in 2013 because he could no longer stand to bear the name of the man who had made his childhood a never-ending nightmare. It is important to start by saying that his father may be not just his father, but also his brother. According to one of his sisters, Romain V. is in fact the son of their grandfather, who she says slept with their mother. These are foundations of an existence where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Appearing before the criminal court in Avignon on Tuesday, November 5, and Wednesday, November 6, the 63-year-old defendant described a childhood of drudgery, humiliation and abuse, a childhood spent in constant terror of a violent father and a complicit mother. As an adult, he occasionally experienced a fleeting desire to become a father, but decided it was preferable not to have children, "for fear of reproducing the family pattern."

In court, Romain V. also recounted the rape he suffered as a child by a stranger ("in a field, while [he was] looking for grass for the rabbits") and the recurrent sexual fondling by a priest, a family friend, in the parental home, where he remained until he came of age, "not a day longer."

What followed was hardly happier. His marriage, at the age of 20, lasted just three months, the time it took for his wife to meet another man while he was away doing his military service. An injury he acquired at work as a forklift operator made him unemployed in 2011, and he has been living on the disabled adults' allowance ever since. His life story has made him a fragile man, withdrawn and alone. He wept throughout the account of his life, given on the stand by the character assessor, who herself confided that she had never in her career come across a defendant who had accumulated many misfortunes.

Romain V.'s list of offenses is long, in this case in which dozens of men are accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot while she was drugged by her husband, Dominique Pelicot. He is one of four multi-recidivists in the case, who came to the Pelicots' home in Mazan six times – between December 2019 and June 2020 for his part. There appeared to be an additional aggravating factor: He has been HIV-positive since 2004 – something he had not told Dominique Pelicot – and never wore a condom during the numerous penetrations he forced on Gisèle Pelicot. According to her lawyers, she said that learning this was "a summit in this ocean of abomination."

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