Protesters on Monday disrupted the start of a trial of a French pensioner accused of recruiting more than 50 of strangers online to rape his wife in their Provence home after he drugged her into unconsciousness.

In a case that has appalled France, the main suspect Dominique Pélicot, a 71-year-old former employee at France’s power utility EDF, stood in the dock alongside 50 other men in the southern city of Avignon.

They are accused of raping his wife who, according to her lawyers, was so heavily sedated that she was not aware of the abuse at the couple’s comfortable house with a swimming pool in the village of Mazan near Carpentras.

“He disgusts me, I feel dirty, soiled, betrayed. It’s a tsunami, I’ve been hit by a high-speed train’, she told the judge when the facts were revealed.

Before the trial began, members of two feminist groups, ‘Les Amazones d’Avignon’ and ‘Osez le féminisme 84’, demonstrated outside the courthouse. Dressed in black, they chanted ‘Rapists, we see you, victims, we believe you’.

The wife arrived in court in dark glasses and with the couple’s three children, a son and two daughters.

Pélicot, who is pleading guilty, admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug.

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