Avignon, France, Nov 25 (EFE).- French prosecutors on Monday asked for sentences of between 4 and 17 years in prison for a first batch of 20 defendants in the case of Gisèle Pelicot, who was raped while unconscious by dozens of men between 2011 and 2020 at the behest of her then-husband Dominique Pelicot.
The requests fell short of the popular demand for “20 years for each of them,” which has become a rallying cry for feminists in France.
The sentences requested on Monday afternoon ranged from four years for Joseph C., the only one prosecuted for “sexual assault in a group” and not for rape or attempted rape, to 17 years for aggravated rapes for Jean-Pierre M., the only defendant who never touched Gisèle Pelicot but who became Dominique Pelicot’s disciple and imitated his methods on his own wife.
Earlier in the day, the prosecution had requested the maximum sentence of 20 years for rape for Dominique Pelicot, 71, who confessed to being the mastermind of the whole plan to subject his wife to multiple and continuous sexual assaults for almost 10 years.
The attacks always took place without the victim’s consent, as she was in a state of chemical submission due to the high doses of sleeping pills and anxiety medication that Dominique Pelicot secretly slipped to her.
There are 51 defendants in the dock, those whom the police were able to locate out of the 80 men who appeared in the videos recorded by Dominique Pelicot and stored in a folder on his computer labeled “Abuse.”
François Mayet, the prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Avignon, in southeastern France, said that all the defendants had gone to the Pelicot home intending to have “an easy sexual relationship in which the other person’s status is non-existent, if only because she’s been reduced to an object. At what point did they ask themselves about consent? Neither before, nor during, nor after.”
As for the other 18 defendants whose sentences were requested on Monday, the prosecution asked for 10-year sentences for 11 of them, 11 years for two others, 12 years for four, and 13 years for one.
The prosecutors explained that the different sentences were based on the nature of the crimes committed, the recurrence of the abuses, the defendant’s statements during the trial (most of them pretended not to know that they had raped Gisèle Pelicot), any previous convictions, danger to society and behavior in detention ( there are currently a dozen of the defendants in preventive custody).
For example, the prosecution asked for 13 years in prison for “aggravated rape” for Nizar H., 41, who denied the charges and who has eight previous convictions, including for domestic violence against two ex-girlfriends.
This trial is testing the limits of French law, which does not include the notion of lack of explicit consent in the definition of the crime of rape.
The French Penal Code defines rape as “any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, committed against another person by force, coercion, threat or surprise.”
Based on this definition, some defendants’ strategy has been to deny that any sexual penetration took place.
The events being heard in Avignon took place between July 2011 and October 2020, first in the Paris region and then in the town Mazan, near Avignon, where the Pelicots had retired.
Dominique Pelicot contacted other men on an online platform and invited them to his home after giving his wife large doses of anxiolytics, which rendered her unconscious and allowed them to abuse her without her knowledge.
It all ended in September 2020 when he was arrested for filming under women’s skirts in a supermarket in Carpentras and when his computer files were searched, investigators discovered thousands of videos and photos showing the assaults on his wife.
The main defendant is charged in two other cases of gender violence, one for the rape and murder of a woman in 1991 and the other for an attempted rape with a knife in 1999. EFE
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