Ever since Pelicot, 71, was summoned to a local police station in southern France four years ago and presented with video evidence of the many rapes her husband had subjected her to between 2011 and 2020 she has been asking herself one question: Why?
In her second testimony since the trial began in Avignon in September, she said that she still had no idea. Her ex-husband has admitted to recruiting dozens of men to rape her while he filmed the assaults but has not yet explained his motive.
Read more‘I was convinced it was a game’: Defendants begin testifying at Pelicot rape trial gripping France
Dressed in a black dress with a blue pattern, khaki-green heels and her red hair coiffed into a perfect bob, Pelicot took to the stand before Chief Justice Roger Arata and the sea of French and foreign journalists who have crowded the courtroom ever since the victim demanded that the trial should be held in public.
The main defendant, her ex-husband, was seated in a glass box to her left.
“I’m not going to be able to look at him because there are a lot of emotions. I’m going to call him Dominique,” she whispered before addressing the courtroom.
She began by recounting the love she had always thought reigned between the couple.
“We’ve been together for 50 years. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been happy and fulfilled. We had three children and seven grandchildren. You were a caring father. You were a kind man whom I trusted…,” she began.
“Our friends liked him. We spent holidays, birthdays and Christmases together … All that, for me, was happiness. After four years of preparing for this trial, I still can’t understand why. How could this man, who in my eyes was the perfect man, do this?”
An extramarital affair
Sure, she said, the couple had been through some ups and downs over the years, including a short period of divorce for what she called “business reasons” before getting remarried again.
For three years, Pelicot also had an extramarital affair with a colleague of hers. “When I told him about the relationship, I was in my bathroom. He had suspicions, he sensed that I had someone else in my life. It hit him extremely hard,” she recalled.
Chief Justice Arata asked whether her husband might not have been driven partly by revenge. “To make you pay, through humiliation combined with sexual acts?”
“I’ve thought about it,” she reponded. “I’ve seen all the videos. I’ve wondered if he never got over that I’d had a lover in my life (…). We talked about it a lot. I think the revenge aspect is the wrong lead to follow.”
The accused has said he did not “act out of vengeance”.
Consumed by ‘obsessive fantasies’
The psychiatric experts who have evaluated Dominique Pelicot as part of the probe have underscored his paraphilic tendencies – an intense attraction to inanimate objects or nonconsenting partners, or the “suffering or humiliation” of the sexual object, according to the Merck Manuals.
They have described him as a man who is consumed by “obsessive fantasies” akin to necrophilia and who has “a total lack of empathy”. Doctor Paul Bensussan testified as to his “voyeurism”, “exhibitionism” and a form of “candaulism”, or being aroused by watching a partner having sex with others.
These were all fantasies he did not realise with his wife, since she categorically refused to take part in any type of swinging activities. Another expert has concluded that the main suspect was excited “by seeing [his partner] penetrated and even degraded by men he knew virtually nothing about, but whom (…) he had authorised to perform the sexual acts”.
Inferiority complex?
Another theory that has been raised is whether Dominique Pelicot suffers from an inferiority complex. In one of the videos, he condescendingly refers to his wife as “bourgeois”.
He and his now ex-wife come from very different backgrounds. While he grew up in a “dysfunctional family environment”, having to work from the age of 13 and paying 80 percent of his wages to his father, she had a much more privileged and affectionate upbringing.
“Despite the loss of my mother, I was always surrounded by love,” she said. “For Dominique, it was the total opposite. He had a tyrannical, authoritarian father. That’s the difference, he didn’t have love.”
When the two met, the court heard, her family became something of a refuge for him, and his father-in-law even got him a job in the real estate business.
Public Prosecutor Laure Chabaud asked Pelicot whether her then husband could have been driven by jealousy or an inferiority complex. “Jealousy? No, I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. I’ve already been wrong [about a lot of things],” she replied.
Her lawyer, Antoine Camus, said the question arose based on some of the available video evidence.
“When I asked the psychiatric sexologist, he conceded that there was indeed a form of hatred [detectible] in those moments. But then Dominique Pelicot refuted it, and we will probably never know,” he said.
Béatrice Zavarro, the defendant’s lawyer, said such lines of enquiry are meaningful, but may not explain everything.
The suspect has so far mainly testified about his childhood, the sexual assault he allegedly suffered at the age of 9, the methods he used to drug his wife – but not about the motive for his crimes.
Zavarro said she wanted her client to speak about his motives the same day, so the Pelicots’ testimonies could be heard side-by-side. The chief justice refused.
But between now and mid-December, when the trial is expected to come to an end, Dominique Pelicot will have plenty of time to explain himself.
This article is a translation of the original in French.
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