French mass rape trial: Defense begins closing arguments

A lawyer for the chief defendant in a French mass rape trial on Wednesday, November 27, urged the court to recall his good side after prosecutors demanded lengthy jail terms for the dozens of suspects. The main defendant, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his then-wife while she was drugged and unconscious.

Prosecutors have called for a maximum 20-year jail term for the 72-year-old, who has been on trial in the southern city of Avignon since September with 50 other men for organizing the repeated rape and sexual abuse of Gisèle Pelicot. Prosecutors also sought jail terms of between 10 and 18 years for most of the co-defendants, with a four-year punishment requested in only one case.

“With your verdict, you will make clear that there is no such thing as ordinary rape,” lead prosecutor Laure Chabaud told the court Wednesday. “You will deliver a message of hope to the victims of sexual violence” and “return a part of humanity to Gisèle Pelicot that she was robbed of”, she said.

Kicking off closing arguments by some 30 defense lawyers – scheduled to last until December 13 – was Béatrice Zavarro, the lawyer for Dominique Pelicot. He has been described as the “conductor” behind the sexual abuse of his former wife, the details of which have shocked France.

‘Accepted and admitted’

Beginning by addressing her “deep respect” for Gisèle Pelicot, her ex-husband’s lawyer spent around an hour recalling that Dominique had been a “good husband, father and grandfather” according to all who knew him. Zavarro plunged back into his traumatic childhood – which he claims included sexual abuse – and shaky mental state to explain his “perversity.”

“People aren’t born perverted, they become it,” she said, repeating her client’s own words from his first courtroom questioning. “Dominique Pelicot has accepted and admitted the harm of which he is accused,” said Zavarro. She insisted that he was not the “conductor” many of the other defendants painted him as some claiming they were under his domination or even themselves drugged.

“What comes next is, of course, the sentence you will issue, perhaps distancing yourselves a little from the strongest requested by prosecutors,” she told judges. “He has been hoping to apologize 1,000 times, I don’t know if you will listen to him, Madame, but he’s saying it again,” Zavarro added to Gisèle Pelicot.

“Keep in mind the first Dominique, the one you cherished, hugged and loved deeply,” she told Gisèle and her children, who are co-plaintiffs in the case. Earlier in the hearings, the court had heard how Gisèle Pelicot told police her then-husband was a “super guy” before learning of the abuse.

‘Devil’s advocate’

Dominique Pelicot’s decade-long abuse was only uncovered after he was arrested for filming up women’s skirts in public. The probe led investigators to his meticulously kept records of the visitors to the family home in the town of Mazan. Their trial has made Gisèle Pelicot, who insisted the hearings be held in public, a feminist icon in women’s fight against sexual abuse.

Pelicot is the only one of the 50 men to have fully confessed to the crimes he is accused of. Observers say his lawyer, Zavarro, has an impossible task on her hands. If convicted, her client would be considered one of France’s worst-ever sex offenders.

But Zavarro has refused to describe her client as a “monster,” insisting instead that she represents a man who has committed “monstrous” crimes. “I have become the devil’s advocate against my will… as I have often told you, it’s the two of us against the whole world,” she told her client in court.

Lawyers for Pelicot’s co-defendants are to lay out their closing arguments starting Thursday. Most are expected to argue that their clients were manipulated by Dominique Pelicot to sexually abuse his wife. Some have already argued that they assumed Pelicot had his wife’s consent, and that they were playing a part in a libertine sex game. The verdicts in the case are expected by December 20.