"With my husband, everything was great, he was always a very good person, a very protective dad. It's inconceivable that he would do this. He's destroyed us." The sobbing woman who spoke before the Vaucluse criminal court on Wednesday, September 11, was not Gisèle Pelicot. And the man listening to her, staring at his feet in the dock, was not Dominique Pelicot, the main defendant.

The man, aged 63, was Jean-Pierre M. As with the other defendants, Pelicot had explained to Jean-Pierre M. how he drugged his wife in order to abuse her, and invited him to come and rape her himself. Jean-Pierre M. always refused. Instead, he brought Pelicot's method into his own home and in turn invited Pelicot to rape his own wife, Cilia M., the woman crying on the stand. Between 2015 and 2020, Pelicot visited the M. home a dozen times, while Cilia M. had been drugged. This is the case within the case.

It all came to an end one night in June 2020, when Cilia M., clearly not sufficiently drugged, woke up with a start and was surprised to discover a pot-bellied stranger in her bedroom, next to her husband. Pelicot fled, Jean-Pierre M. tried to spin the lie of an encounter with a stranger who had wanted to see her underwear. "I didn't believe him, but to go from there to suspect it was for rape, no, it was unthinkable," she said, as Jean-Pierre M. slumped further and further into the box. As for Pelicot, he wasn't slumping, he wasn't there to listen to the story of the other woman he raped in her sleep.

For three days now, the "Pelicot trial" has been progressing without Pelicot, who has been excused due to ill health, and the hearing has gradually ground to a halt. The questioning of the 71-year-old accused, scheduled for Tuesday morning, then Tuesday afternoon, then Wednesday, has been postponed again and again. Pelicot needs "appropriate care," said the presiding judge, Roger Arata, on Wednesday. The hearing is expected to be again suspended on Thursday.

As long as the main defendant is absent, neither his sons David and Florian, nor his son-in-law Pierre, nor his brother Joël, who have a lot to say, nor his ex-wife Gisèle, who is due back on the stand, nor the other defendants, who are impatient, can be heard. The already overloaded trial schedule was derailed at the first hitch.

Reorganizing this unusual trial is a headache. There is much confusion. Some of the plaintiffs, for whom it is complicated to be in Avignon every day, are in a quandary. One of Pelicot's sons, noting his father's absence on Tuesday, had decided to take the road back to Paris, but he had to turn back halfway because it was eventually decided that his father would in fact be back in court on Wednesday morning, which then was not the case.

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