A 72-year-old French woman, whose husband admitted to drugging her and inviting dozens of men to rape her over a decade, told a court that she was treated “like a rag doll” and was “sacrificed on the altar of vice”.
In a calm and clear voice, Gisele Pelicot, in the southern French city of Avignon, detailed the horror of how her husband Dominique Pelicot, 71, allegedly lined up scores of men to rape her while she was unconscious.
This happened close to 100 times in their home for nearly a decade, while her husband systematically filmed the suspected rapes and stored thousands of images as well as videos later found by the investigators.
“I was sacrificed on the altar of vice… They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag… I no longer have an identity. I don’t know if I will ever rebuild myself,” she testified, as per a report in The Independent.
She added, “For me, everything collapses. These are scenes of barbarity, of rape.”
She said she was abused at least six times by someone, who was known to have HIV.
“My life was in danger but not one second did anyone stop… I was tested for HIV as one man who came (to rape me) six times was seropositive,” Gisele told the court, testifying about the abuse inflicted on her between 2011 and 2020, New York Post reported.
Police ‘saved my life’
The woman said the “police saved my life” after they investigated her husband’s computer back in November 2020 after he was caught by a security guard filming up the skirts of women at a supermarket near their home in a village in southern France, The Guardian reported.
Describing the moment the investigators first showed her the videos of images of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband, Gisele Pelicot termed it as “an explosion, a tsunami”.
“My world is falling apart. For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years… Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me,” she said while Dominique Pelicot kept listening to her in court with his head bowed.
The report stated that while investigating the case, police saw a file, labelled “abuses” on the USB drive that was connected to Dominique Pelicot’s computer. While searching the drive, officials found nearly 20,000 images and films of the woman getting raped almost 100 times.
The crime
According to police, the accused husband used to crush sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication and mix them into his wife’s meal or wine. He then used to invite men to rape her after contacting them through an online chatroom.
Dominique Pelicot as well as 50 other men, aged between 26 and 74, are on trial, reports said.
According to The Telegraph, the woman’s husband and 14 other co-accused have admitted to rape, while 35 men, belonging to all walks of life, have denied the charges, claiming the woman was in some way consented to libertine sex.
