For years, she had been losing hair and weight. She was forgetting whole days, and sometimes appeared to be in dreamlike trances. In 2020, after she was summoned to a police station in southern France, she learned that her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep and then raping her. He had ushered dozens of men into her home to film them raping her, too, in abuse that lasted nearly a decade. Using the man’s photographs, videos and online messages, the police spent two years identifying and charging those other suspects. On Monday, 51 men, including Pelicot, went on trial in Avignon, in a case that has shocked France and cast a spotlight on the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the culture in which such crimes could occur, the New York Times reports.
The accused men represent a kaleidoscope of working-class and middle-class French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Most are charged with raping the woman once. A handful are accused of returning as many as six times to rape her. The victim, who has divorced her husband, is now in her 70s. Pelicot, 71, has “always declared himself guilty,” said Béatrice Zavarro, his lawyer. “He is not at all contesting his role.” Other defendants have denied the rape charges, some arguing that they had the husband’s permission and thought that was sufficient, while others claimed they believed the victim had agreed to be drugged. When the police showed the victim some of the photographs they say her husband had carefully classified and stored, she expressed deep shock. She had no memory of being raped, by him or the other men, only one of whom she recognized.
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