Dominique Pelicot is widely regarded as France’s most notorious predator. He confessed to drugging his wife for nearly ten years to facilitate raping her and even invited dozens of strangers he met online to violate her unconscious body.

Despite these horrific crimes, for over three months, Pelicot, 72, has sat in a courtroom where he is being tried alongside 50 other men, presenting himself as the one who tells the truth. He claims to be the rapist among 51, the one who dared to expose what they all did. He describes himself as someone who loved his wife and family deeply, but after four decades of resisting his perverse desires, he succumbed to them.https://wordpress.com/

He also admitted that he had nothing left to lose. Pelicot stated he expected a harsh sentence, possibly 20 years in prison, after the trial concludes this week.

“No one belongs to anyone else, but I did what I wanted when the urge struck,” Pelicot remarked during the trial, reclining in his chair in the defendant’s box, wearing the same gray fleece jacket he had worn each day. “That’s the essence of this story.”

He claimed that he felt remorse the morning after drugging his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, but said it never stopped him. “The next day was terrible because I saw how bad she was,” he admitted. “But I won’t complain today. That would be indecent. She is the one who suffers, not me.”

Throughout the trial, the judges and lawyers in the French city of Avignon struggled to comprehend the complexity of Pelicot’s psyche, with limited success.

Early in the proceedings, psychiatrists and psychologists explained that Pelicot’s personality appeared to have two distinct sides, although no formal mental disorder diagnosis was given.

The first side, “Side A,” was the Pelicot known to friends and family before his second arrest in November 2020. This Pelicot was a devoted father, grandfather, and husband, who had been deeply in love with Gisèle since their youth. The couple had portrayed a model relationship for their three children, enduring financial hardships and infidelities. Pelicot attended his son David’s soccer games and movies, and made sure to pick up his daughter Caroline from nightclubs.

Professionally, Pelicot struggled to find success, working as an electrician, in real estate, and later in sales. He often asked his adult daughter for money, but it didn’t create a rift in the family.

Then there was Pelicot’s “Side B,” as the experts described it: manipulative, devoid of empathy, sexually addicted, and viewing people as objects to control or exploit. This side, according to Pelicot and his half-sister Ginette, was rooted in a violent childhood environment.

Pelicot grew up in central France, south of Paris. After his mother’s first husband left her, she married his brother, with whom she had two more children—one of whom was Dominique.

Ginette recounted fleeing the home to escape sexual abuse attempts from her stepfather.

Pelicot frequently recalled a traumatic memory from his childhood, in which he witnessed what he described as his father raping and degrading his mother.

“In every man, there is a demon,” Pelicot testified. “Mine came from my childhood.”

Pelicot’s defense lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, argued that Pelicot had been further scarred by other alleged traumatic events. These included an incident at the age of 9 when he claimed he was raped by a male nurse while hospitalized, and at 14, when he said he was forced into a gang rape while apprenticing as an electrician. (No evidence for these claims was presented during the trial.)

Pelicot claimed he kept his “Side B” in check for 40 years, thanks to his relationship with his wife, whom he repeatedly referred to as a “saint.”

“I have something inside me that I fought for a long time, thanks to my wife,” he said in court. “I loved her enormously, and I still love her.”

However, his lawyer suggested that this restraint began to break down in 2011, when Pelicot connected with other men through a notorious website that was later shut down. It was there that he learned how to drug his wife for his sexual gratification, enabling him to do things to her that she wouldn’t consent to while conscious. Eventually, he began offering her to other men he met online.

Pelicot’s increasing depravity was evident in the number of men he allegedly recruited each year: one in 2015, seven in 2017, and 17 in 2019.

He led a double life—driving his wife to doctor appointments during the day while causing her grave harm at night. Even after his arrest in 2020 for filming upskirt videos in a grocery store, Pelicot continued his behavior. When released on bail, he once again invited men into his home to rape his wife until his second arrest two months later.

Zavarro contended that Pelicot wanted to be caught, as it was his way of ending his destructive behavior. He even helped police locate his external hard drive, which contained thousands of photos and videos of his wife’s abuse, enabling authorities to charge many of the other men involved.

However, the claim that Pelicot only began his criminal behavior in 2011 was challenged when his DNA matched evidence from an attempted rape case in the Paris area from 1999. Pelicot admitted to this crime in a police interrogation, and the transcript was read aloud in court.

In that case, Pelicot had lured a 19-year-old real estate agent into a building under the pretense of showing interest in buying it. He then pinned her down, bound her with rope, held an ether-soaked bottle to her face, and attempted to undress her. The victim managed to escape when the drug’s effect wore off.

He is also the primary suspect in a 1991 cold case, in which a young real estate agent was raped and killed after being drugged with ether by an unknown client. Pelicot denied involvement in this case during the trial.

The prosecutor, Laure Chabaud, pointed out that Pelicot’s deviant behavior had persisted for decades.

Throughout the trial, Pelicot largely presented his “Side A” to the court: a polite, remorseful man who claimed to be working with psychologists to understand his actions. “I am here for the truth,” he declared, “I am hiding nothing.”

He is one of several defendants who have pleaded guilty, although some of the others claim they never intended to rape Gisèle Pelicot. They argue they were tricked into thinking they were part of a consensual threesome with her, with Pelicot manipulating them into believing she was pretending to sleep.

Each defendant’s testimony was followed by Pelicot’s declarations that they knew exactly what they were doing—that he had drugged his wife without her consent, and they had come to rape her knowingly.

“I am a rapist like many in this room,” Pelicot stated at the trial’s beginning. “They knew everything.”

As the trial neared its end, Pelicot continued to assign equal blame to all involved. “Without me, they wouldn’t be here. And without them, I wouldn’t be here,” he said.

While Pelicot tried to portray himself in a more sympathetic light, defending his ex-wife when lawyers questioned her, he often revealed glimpses of his darker side. He vehemently denied ever abusing his children or grandchildren, despite evidence to the contrary, including photos of his daughter Caroline, which he never explained satisfactorily.

His son David also voiced concerns about his own son being a victim of Pelicot’s abuse, but Pelicot denied any such wrongdoing.

When Antoine Camus, representing Gisèle and the children, urged Pelicot to help them heal from their trauma, Pelicot responded coldly, saying, “That’s their problem. Not mine.”