A 71-year-old French retiree faces prosecution on Monday for recruiting dozens of strangers online to rape his wife after he drugged her into unconsciousness, in a case that has shocked the country.
Fifty other men are also being prosecuted in Avignon, with the main suspect, a 71-year-old former EDF employee.
They are accused of violating the woman, which, according to her lawyers, was so heavily drugged that she was not aware of the abuse.
This process will be a terrible test for the woman, who is now in her 70s, and who wishes to remain anonymous, said Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers.
“For the first time, long after the events, she will relive the rapes she suffered for ten years,” he told AFP, adding that his client has “no memories” of the abuse. which she only discovered in 2020.
The woman could have asked for a secret trial, but she didn’t because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted,” explained Antoine Camus.
“She is completely determined to face them and her husband with whom she lived for 50 years but whom she knew nothing about, as she discovered at 68,” the lawyer said.
The investigation on Dominique P. began in September 2020, when he was surprised by a security agent secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping center.
While examining his computer, police said they found thousands of photos and videos of his wife, apparently unconscious and mostly in the fetal position.
The images are said to show dozens of instances of rape at the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of just 6,000 people about thirty kilometers from Avignon in Provence.
The accused violators include a truck driver, a firefighter and a journalist.
Investigators also found chats on a site called coco.fr, closed by the police, in which he recruited foreigners to come to his house and have sex with his wife.
In total, 92 rapes were recorded, committed by 72 men, of which 51 were officially identified.
Dominique P. admitted to the investigator that he had administered powerful sedatives to his wife, including Temesta, an anxiolytic.
The abuse began in 2011, when the couple lived close to Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.
The suspect had given strict instructions to the men not to wake her when they raped her at night.
No aftershave or cigarette smell was allowed, and they had to warm their hands before touching and undress in the kitchen to avoid accidentally leaving their clothes in the bedroom.
The man participated in the rapes, filmed them and encouraged other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.
No money was exchanged.
The accused violators, aged between 21 and 68, include a forklift driver, a firefighter, a company owner and a journalist.
Some were single, some married or divorced, and some were fathers.
Most have participated only once, some up to six times.
“A manipulator” who used his wife as “bait”
Their defense was that they had simply helped a free couple to live out their sexual fantasies, but Dominique P. told the investigator that every one of them knew that his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.
The trial will determine how they understood the situation when they had intercourse with the woman, whose state, according to an expert, “was closer to coma than sleep.”
Her husband told prosecutors that only three men quickly left the house after arriving, while all the others continued to have sex with his wife.
Dominique P., who says he himself was raped by a nurse at the age of nine, is ready to face “his family and his wife”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told AFP.
This process cannot be the last. He is also being prosecuted for murder and rape in 1991, which he denies, and attempted rape in 1999, which he admitted after final DNA tests. “There is no typical profile of the rapist,” Véronique Le Goaziou, a specialist in sexual violence, told AFP. “Most people will say that he is crazy,” he told Dominique P. “But it is not certain. Only a small number of violators are diagnosed with a real mental illness.”
Psychiatric evaluations conducted during the investigation indicated that Dominique P. is both a “patriarch” and “manipulator” with an “evil” personality who used his wife as “bait”.
The trial is expected to last until December.
Source: CBS News
