There will be 69 days of hearings about how 51 men, whose social background was generally untarnished, turned into rapists. Firemen, journalists, craftsmen, pensioners, delivery drivers, prison guards. Aged between 30 and 74, these men are due to be tried by the criminal court in southeastern France from September 2 to December 20, because they accepted a proposal from Dominique P. (the anonymity of the accused is intended to guarantee that of his relatives), 71, to come and abuse his wife, who had been drugged and induced into a comatose state by anxiolytic medication, which he had made her ingest without her knowing it.

Indeed, "Without her knowing" was the name given to the chat room on the Coco.fr dating website, where the man in his 70s would recruit these men. "You're like me, you like rape mode," wrote Dominique P. to a man, after they made contact on the chatroom, which was closed in June for having been implicated in several criminal cases.

It all began on September 12, 2020, with what appeared to be a straightforward incident: Police officers intervened in a supermarket in the town of Carpentras, where a retired man was being detained by security guards. Dominique P. had been filming up the skirts of several female customers in the aisles, using a cell phone attached to a bag. He had called it "an impulse" while his wife was away looking after their grandchildren. It was a voyeurism-type deviance, concluded a psychiatrist. Yet when the investigators opened the laptop they had seized from his home, they discovered a file entitled "abuses." It contained over 20,000 photos and videos, which the pensioner had methodically cataloged by date, first name or nickname, and a pornographic title.

Then, at the police station, his wife was first told that, since 2011, her husband – whom she described as "a great guy" before being confronted with the facts – offered her up to be raped by dozens of men, in a drug-induced state that left her with no recollection of events. "He disgusts me, I feel dirty, defiled, betrayed. It was a tsunami, I was hit by a high-speed train," she told the judge when recalling the moment the facts were revealed to her.

A two-faced personality

It took seven waves of arrests to apprehend the accused. Two of them have died, while some others were not able to be identified. The investigating judge has estimated that a total of 72 men consciously accepted the instructions given to them by Dominique P.: Smelling of perfume or tobacco was forbidden, and they had to park their vehicles in the parking lot of a school a short distance from the couple's home, undress in the kitchen, and warm their hands on the radiator. The investigating officers recorded 92 rapes committed between July 2011 and October 2020.

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