AVIGNON (AFP) – A French pensioner went on trial yesterday for allowing scores of strangers to rape his wife after he drugged her in a case that has horrified the country.
Fifty men, who he recruited online, are also being tried in the southern city of Avignon alongside the main suspect, a 71-year-old former employee at France’s power utility company, EDF.
Police counted a total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom were identified.
The men, aged between 26 and 74, are accused of raping the 72-year-old woman who, her lawyers say, was so heavily sedated she was not aware of the abuse, that went on for a decade.
The trial will be “a horrible ordeal” for her, said Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers. “For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuse which she only discovered in 2020.
The woman, who turned up at court supported by her three children, could have opted for a trial behind closed doors, but “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”, Camus said.
Police began to investigate the defendant Dominique P in September 2020 when he was caught by a security guard secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.
Police said they found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife on his computer, visibly unconscious and mostly in the foetal position.
The images are alleged to show dozens of rapes in the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people some 33 kilometres from Avignon in Provence.
Investigators also found chats on a site called coco.fr, since shut down by police, in which he recruited strangers to come to their home and have intercourse with his wife.
Dominique P admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug. The abuse started in 2011, when the couple was living near Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.
