Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer Béatrice Zavarro, a ‘devil’s advocate’ on a lonely journey

Béatrice Zavarro was sworn in in 1996 and still wears the same dress, doing what she can to mend her worn-in collar or patched fabric after 28 years of service. She is nearing the end of a trial of a lifetime: that of the dozens of men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot while she was unconscious. Zavarro is defending Dominique Pelicot, the husband who drugged his wife and invited the strangers into their bedroom to commit the abuses. Until this months-long trial, the lawyer was best known for having defended Christine Deviers-Joncour, sentenced in 2003 to 18 months’ imprisonment for handling stolen company assets in a vast embezzlement scandal. Zavarro could have emerged in tatters from this new ordeal, but in the end, she seems to be in better condition than her robe.

“I feel I’ve risen to the challenge,” she said, aware that only a miraculous leniency from the criminal court in Avignon will let her client escape the maximum 20-year prison sentence. The verdict is expected on December 19 or 20. Her goal was not to avoid this sentence but to show Dominique Pelicot’s humanity and defend his version of events. “I held the hearing, I knew how to parry certain blows, it was intense.” The marathon lasted just over a hundred days. “I had to keep up the pace.” Alone.

The lawyer with red glasses had floated the idea of having several defense counsels. Dominique Pelicot wanted no one other than the lawyer recommended to him in the courtyard of the Baumettes prison. “Then it’ll be you and me against the whole world,” predicted Zavarro, the daughter of Jewish shopkeepers from Marseille of Spanish origin. She almost failed her law degree, and then almost chose to join the magistracy, before opting for the bar, “to defend people who are drowning rather than pushing their heads under water.”

‘I hadn’t imagined solitude’

Zavarro, 55, is not exceptionally eloquent. No punchlines, nothing exaggerative, no vocal outbursts. “Me, I don’t know how to shout.” She has the placid authority of someone who doesn’t need those qualities to be listened to. She might seem fragile at just 1.45 meters tall – five centimeters less than in 2022, before she suffered multiple vertebral fractures due to brittle bone disease. But it’s 1.45m of solidity.

“You and me against the whole world.” The prediction, repeated at the start of her closing argument on November 27, her client’s birthday, has been largely borne out since the trial opened on September 2, her birthday. “I knew that my colleagues were going to give me a hard time, so I went into it as if it were a fight. But I hadn’t imagined how lonely it would be. At least not as intense.” From day one, a safe distance was established around her, Covid-style. No one wanted to sit next to the “devil’s advocate,” seated on the far left of the room, where some of the court’s judges were hidden from her by the raised desk of the clerk, her only neighbor, to whom she sometimes confided her moods.

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