Warning: this article contains descriptions of rape and sexual assault
Fifty men went on trial alongside Dominique Pelicot in connection with the drugging, rape and assault of Gisèle Pelicot. On Thursday at the culmination of a months-long trial in the southern French city of Avignon, they were convicted and received sentences of between three and 15 years.
Over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020 in the village of Mazan in Provence, Dominique Pelicot crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into his then wife’s food and invited dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious.
The 50 men convicted of rape and assault alongside Dominique Pelicot are aged between 26 and 74. They include a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a councillor, a soldier, lorry drivers and farm workers.
Most lived in south-eastern France within a 60km radius of the village of Mazan, where the Pelicots lived. Six had previous convictions for domestic violence, and two had convictions for sexual violence. A total of 23 had a criminal record for offences such as drunk-driving and possession of drugs.
Some of the accused men admitted rape but said they had not set out with this intention, and apologised in court to Gisèle Pelicot, 72, a grandmother and former logistics manager. Others denied the charge of rape, saying they had believed they were taking part in a game by the couple.
Pelicot admitted the charges against him and said that for almost a decade he had been in contact with men on an online chatroom titled “without her knowledge” where he would organise for strangers to come to the couple’s home.
“I am a rapist, like the others in this room,” Pelicot told the court during the trial.
The case was heard by a panel of five professional judges and ran until 19 December, when the verdicts and sentences were announced. Gisèle Pelicot had waived her right to anonymity in order for the trial to be held in public, saying: “Shame must change sides.”
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Cyrille Delville, 54
Trained as a butcher, Delville was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her home in September 2019 and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Delville’s partner, the mother of his children, was on holiday at the time of the crime. He said he had been sexually frustrated in his relationship and had gone on to the online chatroom to console himself.
In court, Delville admitted rape, saying he had realised later that he had not gained Gisèle Pelicot’s consent, only her husband’s. He said Gisèle Pelicot was clearly unconscious but that her husband was “insistent”. He said: “I’m sorry, I was naive, a little stupid, an idiot.” He told the court that while in prison on remand he had understood that “women do not belong to men”.
Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyer said video evidence showed that the rape by Delville put her life in danger as she risked not being able to breathe.
Delville detailed a violent childhood at the hands of his alcoholic father, who he said would wait outside school with a meat cleaver to attack him and threaten him. “My father was Hitler,” he told the court. After a brutal public beating by his father outside school, Delville was placed into care as a teenager.
Lionel Rodriguez, 44
A worker at the Pelicots’ local supermarket in Carpentras, Rodriguez was a married father of three when he made contact with Dominique Pelicot. He admitted raping Gisèle Pelicot at her home on 2 December 2018 but said he had not intended to commit rape.
“Since I never obtained Mrs Pelicot’s consent, I have no choice but to accept the facts,” he told the court. Turning to Gisèle Pelicot, he said: “I am sorry, I can only imagine the nightmare you’ve lived through … and I am part of this nightmare.” He said: “I never told myself ‘I will rape that woman’,” but he admitted: “I’m guilty of rape.” He added that he should have left when he saw that she was unconscious, and that it was cowardly of him not to have said anything.
The court heard that Dominique Pelicot had previously brought an unsuspecting Gisèle Pelicot shopping at the supermarket so that Rodriguez could see if he was attracted to her.
On Thursday, Rodriguez was found guilty of rape and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Rodriguez told the court he had been sexually abused at the age of 12 to 13 by the president of the pétanque club in his village.
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Jacques Cubeau, 72
A former fire officer who had worked as a truck driver and then owned a pizzeria, Cubeau had been married for 25 years and had two children.
He was found guilty of rape and sentenced to five years in prison, three of them suspended.
He had told the court he denied rape. He said he had been “naive” and thought that Gisèle Pelicot would wake up and it was a game by the couple. Cubeau admitted touching Pelicot but said there was no penetration and therefore no rape.
Cubeau told the court he considered that his religious education had made him a “giving person” who did good and respected women. He said he loved women “in all their complexity”.
Jean-Pierre Maréchal, 63
A former lorry driver for an agricultural cooperative in southern France, Maréchal was not accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot. Instead, he was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years for using the same technique to drug and rape his own wife and organising for Pelicot to rape her with him.
Described in court as a “disciple” of Pelicot, he admitted sedating his wife, with whom he had five children, and enlisting Pelicot to rape her.
Maréchal told the court that he admitted the charges. Pelicot admitted raping Maréchal’s wife on several occasions and said he regretted his actions. He said he cut contact with the couple after Maréchal’s wife woke up during one of the assaults while he was in her bedroom.
The court heard that Maréchal’s childhood in the French countryside was marked by poverty, extreme violence, and he was a victim of sexual abuse within his family. “I was raised by pigs in the woods,” he had told his children.
Joan Kawai, 26
A soldier in the French military, Kawai was the youngest man on trial and was on Thursday found guilty of rape and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
He was 22 at the time of his rape of Gisèle Pelicot on two separate visits to her home in 2019 and 2020. He told the court: “I’m a rapist because the law says I am,” but he said he had not intended to rape and “at the time I did not know what consent was”.
He said he was invited to the couple’s home by Dominique Pelicot for an encounter and did not ask for Gisèle Pelicot’s consent, saying he learned only in prison what consent was.
Kawai said he had found it strange that Gisèle Pelicot was snoring, and he knew she was unconscious but had not known this meant she had not consented.
Kawai was absent for the premature birth of his daughter on the night he was accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot for the first time in November 2019.
Born in French Guiana, he had joined his brother in Avignon when he was 16 before enlisting in the army. The court heard he had lived on the streets as a teenager and three of his brothers had died. He lost his army job when he was arrested. He was described by a psychologist as a chronic user of alcohol and cannabis, “depressive, impulsive and solitary”.
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Hugues Malago, 39
A tiler, motorbike enthusiast and father of two, Malago was convicted of the attempted rape of Gisèle Pelicot a few days before his then girlfriend’s birthday in October 2019. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
Malago had denied the charge. He said he had not known that Gisèle Pelicot had been drugged and did not look at her face, just her body.
His ex-partner Emilie O, 33, who had met him online and lived with him for five years, told the court she feared she may have been drugged and sexually assaulted by him herself. “I don’t know if I was raped,” she said. “It’s terrible. I will always have doubts.”
She told the court that one night in 2019 she woke up to find her partner attempting to assault her. She launched a police complaint but it was dismissed for “lack of material evidence”. She told the court she experienced “dizziness” between September 2019 and March 2020 but investigators did not detect any substances that might have affected her at the time.
Husamettin Dogan, 43
A married father who had given up part-time work to care for his disabled son, Dogan was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in June 2019. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Dogan had denied the charge in court, saying: “I don’t accept being called a rapist, I’m not a rapist.”
The court heard that Dogan made contact with Dominique Pelicot in the chatroom and went to the Pelicots’ home the same night, telling his wife he was going out.
Pelicot had told him he was looking for an “Arab” man for his wife. Dogan, born in Turkey, used the online pseudonym “Karim”.
He admitted that Gisèle Pelicot “seemed dead”, with her leg dangling oddly, but he said he had thought it was a scenario or game and that she was pretending. He said Dominique Pelicot had said his wife was in agreement. He said he had not known she had been drugged.
The court heard that Dogan had become addicted to cannabis from the age of 11 and had lived in children’s homes. In 2000 he was convicted for dealing drugs.
Fabien Sotton, 39
Sotton, who had 16 previous convictions ranging from armed robbery and drug dealing to domestic violence and sexual assault of a minor, was on Thursday was given another for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot in August 2018. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Sotton had admitted the charge but said he had not gone to the Pelicots’ home with the intention of raping her.
“I didn’t go there to rape her. I didn’t know I was supposed to rape her, but I recognise the facts,” he said, adding that he had “not paid attention” to whether or not she had consented.
He said he wasn’t interested in a scenario where a woman was unconscious because he liked to hear women scream. He apologised to Gisèle Pelicot in court.
The court heard that Sotton raped Gisèle Pelicot in her dining room. Asked how this was possible, Dominique Pelicot said he had put drugs in her meal and carried her unconscious to the dining room table.
The court heard that Sotton had been sexually abused by his father from the age of two, then placed in different foster families where he faced further violence and sexual abuse, and that he was admitted to psychiatric care at the age of 16. From 18 to 28 he lived on the streets in Toulon as an alcoholic.
Mathieu Dartus, 53
The father of two had worked as baker for 25 years before having to leave his job because of an intolerance to wheat. He was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot with Dominique Pelicot on 3 October 2020 and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Dartus admitted the facts, saying he was high on MDMA at the time and thought it was a game with a married couple. He accepted later that Gisèle Pelicot had not been in a fit state to consent. “I can’t deny it was rape,” he said.
The court heard that Dartus’s stepfather had been violent. He told investigators he was inspired by Buddhism and “the balance of karmas”.
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Andy Rodriguez, 37
An unemployed agricultural labourer and married father of two, Rodriguez had two domestic violence convictions and on Thursday was found guilty of the attempted rape of Gisèle Pelicot. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Rodriguez had told the court: “As the husband had given me permission, in my mind she agreed to it.”
Rodriguez arrived at the Pelicots’ home an hour after first making contact online with Dominique Pelicot on New Year’s Eve. He said he had “nothing else to do” that night because his brothers hadn’t invited him to their New Year’s Eve party. He said he had thought it was a sexual “game” between the Pelicots.
The court heard he had been addicted to alcohol since he was 13 or 14 and was a regular user of cocaine.
Simone Mekenese, 43
A builder, former soldier and father of five, Mekenese lived on the next street to the Pelicots in the village of Mazan, and was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Mekenese was the only one of the defendants whom she recognised when she was shown video evidence by police. She told the court Mekenese had come into their living room once to discuss cycling with her husband. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me,” she said.
The former mountain infantryman made contact with Dominique Pelicot in the online chatroom before realising they lived less than 200 metres apart. Mekenese lived opposite the tennis club where Dominique Pelicot played. “Things were going badly with my ex-wife, I was looking for love, an encounter to calm myself,” Mekenese told the court.
Dominique Pelicot suggested Mekenese first come to the house during the day “to see how beautiful my wife is”, adding: “If she asks, say you’ve come to discuss my bike.”
Mekenese was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot on the night of 14 November 2018. He denied rape, saying he had thought she was only pretending to be asleep and would wake up. “I’m not a rapist,” he told the court.
His ex-wife told the court he had once threatened her with an axe.
Mekenese grew up in New Caledonia. As a teenager he was abused and raped by a man his parents had sent him to live with as a labourer. The court heard he had a complex about his penis size and needed constant reassurance. He had debts and had had periods of alcoholism.
He has a 15-month-old daughter with his current partner, who told the court she stood by him.
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Thierry Postat, 61
A refrigeration specialist and father of three from Bouches-du-Rhône in southern France, Postat was convicted of rape and the possession of child abuse images and handed a 12-year prison sentence.
Hundreds of images were found on a USB stick after his arrest on suspicion of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot on 21 August 2020. He admitted charges over the images but denied rape.
He said he hadn’t seen anything abnormal about the night he went to the Pelicots’ home believing he was meeting a couple. “I always thought Mrs Pelicot would wake up,” he said. “She wasn’t cold, she wasn’t dead, her skin was soft.”
He said he had not sought Gisèle Pelicot’s consent because he had lots of experience of encounters with couples when it was mostly the man who gave consent for the woman. He said he had had three “major” previous experiences where a husband had invited him to have sex with a wife and “she’ll be asleep, she doesn’t want to know, we’ll film it”. In one case the woman had woken up. In two cases he had left without seeing the women’s faces. He said he couldn’t tell if those women had been asleep or not.
He told the court: “After I leave prison, I’d like to create an association to get men like me to understand that consent is important. I’d go to swingers’ clubs and say: ‘Don’t forget to get consent.’”
Jérôme Vilela, 46
The former grocery store worker and father of three was one of the few on trial to have admitted the charges of raping Gisèle Pelicot with the knowledge that she had been drugged. He told an expert psychiatrist in the case that he had been aware she had not consented. He was convicted by the court on Thursday of rape and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Vilela went to the Pelicots’ home six times between March and June 2020, during the first Covid lockdown in France, to rape Gisèle Pelicot. A volunteer in the fire service, he lived 30 minutes’ drive away.
He told the court: “I didn’t keep going back because rape mode was my thing but because I couldn’t control my sexuality.” He said he was at first attracted by the idea of having an inert body at his disposal and being free to act however he wanted.
He said his life was defined by sexual urges, he was regularly unfaithful to partners because they “couldn’t meet my demands” and he had tried extreme practices to break the “monotony”. He said he had paid “less and less” attention to his partners.
Vilela said he was addicted to sex and that Pelicot took advantage of that. In court, looking over at Gisèle Pelicot, he said he was ashamed “to have done bad to someone who seems so pure”. At his home, a list was found of 89 sexual partners. “I needed to count my conquests,” he said.
His current partner told the court she stood by him and visited him regularly in prison.
He said he had never been supported or protected by his parents. He had been bullied at school and once forcibly stripped in public by other pupils at high school.
Thierry Parisis, 54
A former builder who turned to alcohol when his 18-year-old son died in a road collision, Parisis was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot and sentenced to eight years in prison.
He had been an inpatient on a psychiatric ward and suffering from depression when investigators identified him as a suspect in 2020.
Parisis had separated from his wife a few weeks before his rape of Gisèle Pelicot in July 2020 and had left his family home, later saying he had been unable to bear the photographs and memories of his son.
He said he contacted Dominique Pelicot online for an encounter with a couple. He denied rape, saying: “I didn’t set out from my house saying ‘I’m going to rape someone’.” He said: “I don’t understand how she didn’t feel anything, didn’t realise.” He said he thought Dominique Pelicot may have drugged him, and that he had been manipulated and brainwashed by Pelicot.
His ex-wife told the court the rape was out of character. She said she would like to get back together with him.
The court heard that Parisis’s mother had an alcohol dependency and his father had often been absent.
Adrien Longeron, 34
A former building site manager from Carpentras, Longeron was convicted last year of the rapes of three former partners in a different trial and is serving a 14-year jail sentence. On Thursday he was found guilty of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot in March 2014 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Longeron had denied the charge. He said he had thought he was taking part in a game and had not thought Gisèle Pelicot had been drugged.
Aged 23 at the time of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot, he was one of the youngest men on trial. He was educated at private school before joining his father’s successful building business, and was described as coming from a higher-income background than many of the other men accused.
He told the court that when he was 21 he discovered after a paternity test that he was not the biological father of the three-year-old girl he was raising with his girlfriend. He said from that point onwards “I had a hatred towards women”.
The night he raped Gisèle Pelicot, his new girlfriend was nine months pregnant; she gave birth 10 days later. He admitted to court experts that he had mistreated his pregnant girlfriend and called her a whore.
The court heard that he had been sexually abused by a cousin when he was 10.
Jean Tirano, 52
A former roofer born on the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion, Tirano was convicted of rape and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Tirano had been in a nine-year relationship when he drove for two and a half hours from Lyon to rape Gisèle Pelicot in her bed on the night of 21 September 2018. He had made contact with Dominique Pelicot in the chatroom, where he used the name “Bill”.
He told the court: “I am not a rapist”. He said he thought Dominique Pelicot had drugged him. “I don’t remember anything,” he said.
In court he recalled many details of the evening, including the house, the rules of undressing in the kitchen, and seeing Gisèle Pelicot on the bed. But he told the court he had no memory of the moment of his rape of Pelicot, and recalled only getting into his car afterwards when he drove home.
Judges observed that he did appear drugged in seven videos, in which he was active and gave a thumbs-up sign. He was asked why, if he feared he had been drugged, he had not reported this to police. He said at the time he had thought: “It was a bad encounter, forget about it.”
The court heard he had regularly sought encounters with couples for more than a decade and had paid sex workers but said “it felt dirty”.
Redouan El Farihi, 55
A former anaesthesia nurse in hospital operating theatres in Morocco, El Farihi lived in Avignon, where he worked as a community nurse. He was found guilty of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot at her home on a Saturday night in June 2019 and sentenced to eight years in jail.
El Farihi had told the court he was not guilty. He denied rape, saying he was a “victim of a trick” and had been too “terrified” of Dominique Pelicot to say no. Confronted with video evidence of several rapes of Gisèle Pelicot, he said: “I was terrified, but you can’t see it.” He said he did not leave because he feared it would ruin Pelicot’s Saturday night.
He said he had not known Gisèle Pelicot was sedated. Asked in court how, as a trained anaesthesia nurse, he had not seen that Gisèle Pelicot was unconscious, he said he had thought she was pretending to be dead “but never that she’d been drugged”, and he believed he had seen her move.
Patrick Aron, 60
A former factory worker and video club owner from the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Aron admitted the charge of raping Gisèle Pelicot but said he took part reluctantly because he was gay and had wanted an encounter with Dominique Pelicot, not his wife. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to six years in prison.
Aron met Dominique Pelicot in the online chatroom and they messaged on Skype, where Pelicot told him Gisèle Pelicot was a “prudish bitch who didn’t want threesomes” and said: “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife, she takes sleeping pills and I take advantage.” Aron replied: “OK.”
He told the court he had wanted so much to have a gay encounter with Dominique Pelicot that he was blinded by it and brainwashed. He said he raped Gisèle Pelicot “reluctantly” to “please” Dominique Pelicot. He questioned whether he may have been drugged.
“You are homosexual but you have committed a heterosexual rape, which you admit,” said Antoine Camus, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyer. “In this trial we have already heard of rapes committed ‘by accident’; your specificity is to plead rape committed ‘reluctantly’.”
Aron apologised in court. He told the court he had known he was gay from his teenage years but sought to hide it from his homophobic parents. He married a woman, had two children, and after divorcing at 43 regularly met men for sex in saunas and backrooms of sex shops in the Avignon region, and in motorway laybys.
Didier Sambuchi, 68
A former long-distance lorry driver and divorced father of two, Sambuchi said he went to Dominique Pelicot’s house “exclusively for a homosexual encounter” with him. He was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot on 30 January 2019.
He had denied the charge, telling the court he had thought she was pretending to be asleep. He was sentenced to five years in jail, two of them suspended.
In court, he said he had had no intention to rape Gisèle Pelicot and was simply following her husband’s instructions. “It’s not me you should be angry with, it’s your husband,” he told Gisèle Pelicot in court, trying to catch her eye. She turned away.
He lived a 20-minute drive away, had logged on to the chatroom at 8pm one night and two hours later went to the Pelicots’ home, he told the court.
The court heard that Sambuchi had been raped when he was 16.
Karim Sebaoui, 40
A computer expert with two university degrees, Sebaoui was found guilty of rape and of possession of child abuse images. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
He had denied raping Gisèle Pelicot on 27 June 2020 and possessing the images, saying he had downloaded them “inadvertently”.
Sebaoui told the court that on the night he went to the Pelicots’ home “I did not go there with the aim of committing a crime and I had absolutely no idea that Mrs Pelicot was not consenting”. Messages between him and Pelicot showed them discussing Gisèle Pelicot in crude terms, referring to her not being aware of what was going on. Sebaoui had been told that Gisèle Pelicot would be “asleep from alcohol and a sleeping tablet” but he said he had thought it was a game.
Dominique Pelicot, who told Sebaoui he was a doctor, invited him back in August. Sebaoui said he feigned food poisoning as an excuse because the June encounter had been “too bizarre for me”.
He grew up in Marseille and had moved to a picturesque village half an hour’s drive from Mazan just before the Covid lockdowns of 2020.
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Vincent Coullet, 42
Coullet, a carpenter, was convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot at her home on two occasions in October 2019 and January 2020. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Coullethad a previous conviction of domestic violence against an ex-partner in 2021, for which he was given a six-month suspended sentence. The court heard he had had an alcohol addiction since he was a teenager.
Coullet denied raping Gisèle Pelicot, admitting to a sexual encounter but saying he had had no intention of committing rape. He said he had thought she would wake up.
“I was looking for sex,” he said, adding that he had not put much thought into it. He said he found the situation in the Pelicots’ bedroom “bizarre” but trusted the fact that he was “at a couple’s home, invited by the husband”.
He said he felt no pleasure himself but went back a second time because Dominique Pelicot told him that he and Gisèle Pelicot had “enjoyed it”. Pelicot said Gisèle Pelicot had watched a video of his first visit and “liked it”, which for him “closed the door on any doubt”, Coullet said. He said he felt he had “satisfied” the Pelicots more than himself.
During his testimony, Gisèle Pelicot got up and briefly left the courtroom, appearing exasperated.
Jean-Marc Leloup, 74
Describing himself as a former “international truck driver between Paris and Baghdad”, the divorced grandfather is the oldest of those convicted in Avignon. He was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in May 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
He said he had always thought that rape was “something violent … done by a madman, a brutal thing”, and that this encounter had instead been a “sexual game”. He told the court he had only “obeyed orders” from Dominique Pelicot. He said: “She was going to wake up because it was a game.”
It was only after he left the house that he thought about whether Gisèle Pelicot had consented, he said. He didn’t alert the police. “I should have done but it didn’t cross my mind.”
He said Dominique Pelicot, whom he had met beforehand in a supermarket car park, told him he wanted to “punish” his wife for having had an affair in the past.
He said Pelicot asked him to come back another time “with a friend”, which he didn’t do, after mentioning it to another truck driver who said it wasn’t normal.
Leloup said he had often paid sex workers in Spain. “What truck driver hasn’t been to prostitutes?” he said in court.
Dominique Davies, 45
Davies, a lorry driver and former soldier, was handed a 13-year prison sentence for raping Gisèle Pelicot on six different occasions. Police found video evidence of five visits to the Pelicots’ house and he told them of one further visit.
Davies said he was contacted via the chatroom in February 2015 by Dominique Pelicot who said he was looking for a man as a “gift” for his wife “for Valentine’s Day”.
He denied rape, saying he had not intended to rape anyone. He told the court: “I didn’t wake up one morning and say to myself ‘hey, today I’m going to go to a couple’s house and commit a crime’.”
He said that before going to the Pelicots’ home for the first time in 2015, he asked to see Gisèle Pelicot and was sent a video of her taken without her knowledge as she left the shower. He also briefly visited the home pretending to be an electrician and saw Gisèle Pelicot reading on the sofa. He said he felt he had enough guarantees from Dominique Pelicot, adding: “I just forgot one big guarantee – Madame’s consent.”
He is the youngest of 16 children and was placed in care at the age of six months.
Mohamed Rafaa, 70
Rafaa, a former discotheque worker from La Rochelle who in 1999 was sentenced to five years in prison for raping his 17-year-old daughter, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot at the holiday cottage of the Pelicots’ daughter, Caroline, on the island of Île-de-Ré.
Rafaa had denied the charge, telling the court: “I couldn’t imagine for a fraction of a second that Dominique Pelicot did that without his wife knowing.” He had been in contact with Dominique Pelicot via the online chatroom.
Dominique Pelicot was asked in court why he had drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot not just at the couple’s own home but at their daughter’s holiday home, where the Pelicots often went with their grandchildren. The couple’s daughter and grandchildren were not at the cottage at the time.
Pelicot said: “There was no symbolism, it could have happened anywhere.”
Ahmed Tbarik, 54
Tbarik, a plumber and former champion boxer married for more than 30 years with three children, was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot at the couple’s home in June 2019. He was sentenced to eight years in jail.
He had denied rape and told the court: “I’m not a rapist, but if I had wanted to rape I wouldn’t have chosen a 57-year-old woman, I would have chosen a pretty one.”
He had been in contact with Dominique Pelicot on a chatroom, and said that at the time he was having less sex with his wife and he “did not want a mistress” but thought “why not” have an encounter with a couple. He said Dominique Pelicot referred to Gisèle Pelicot as “la bourgeoise”, saying she was away a lot in Paris and home at weekends. He said he had thought Gisèle Pelicot must be shy, and that he had trusted her husband.
Tbarik said he travelled to the couple’s home by car after his wife had gone to bed.
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Redouane Azougagh, 40
Azougagh, an unemployed, separated father of four who had convictions for domestic violence, burglary and death threats and had served time in prison, was found guilty of rape and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Azougagh went to the Pelicots’ home twice in 2019, and he said he asked Dominique Pelicot if it was normal that Gisèle Pelicot was snoring, to which he was told: “Yes, we like doing it like that.”
He described the Pelicots’ home as “a beautiful house in Provence” with a “well-kept garden”.
He said he grew up on a housing estate, began smoking cannabis at 10 and was a victim of sexual abuse at this age, by an old man he had met in the park who took him to his van. He left school at 16.
The question was raised in court of a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, with one psychiatrist saying instead that Azougagh had a personality disorder.
Mahdi Daoudi, 36
Daoudi, a transport worker and father of one from Avignon, was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in October 2018 and sentenced to eight years in jail.
He had denied rape. He placed the responsibility on Dominique Pelicot, who he said had presented himself online as part of a couple who wanted to meet single men.
Daoudi said of Gisèle Pelicot: “One can’t imagine what she has been through, she has been destroyed and I have thoughts not only for that poor woman but her whole entourage and family.” He said it had been “terrible” for him to find himself caught up in something like this.
Cyril Beaubis, 47
Beaubis, a lorry driver who described himself as a daily consumer of cannabis, was convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot at her home in November 2018 and sentenced to nine years in jail.
He was recorded by Dominique Pelicot in a video called “With Cyril from Carpentras”. Beaubis denied rape and said he had been manipulated and was not capable of committing a rape. He said he was also a victim of the situation as he had been duped by Dominique Pelicot, whom he had met in an online chatroom.
He told the court he had previously had encounters with couples he met via websites.
Cyprien Culieras, 43
Culieras, a former lorry driver and father of one, was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bed in Mazan in 2017. He was sentenced to six years in jail.
Culieras had denied rape. During cross-examination, he accepted that a sexual encounter took place and said he was sorry to Gisèle Pelicot but that he could “not say more than that”. He told the court: “I can’t say that it’s rape,” arguing that Dominique Pelicot had led him to believe that Gisèle Pelicot was playing a role in a game and “would pretend to be asleep”.
The court heard that he grew up in children’s homes and foster families and had suffered from alcohol addiction as an adult.
Quentin Hennebert, 34
A prison warden who had previously worked as a junior member of the motorway police, Hennebert was convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bed in November 2019. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Hennebert said he had sold drugs on the website where Dominique Pelicot sought men to abuse his wife, and said Dominique Pelicot told him he had a female “friend” who “had a fantasy about playing the sleeping woman”.
In his car afterwards, Hennebert said, he realised “something wasn’t right”; Gisèle Pelicot hadn’t been moving. Asked why he did not call the police then and there, he said: “I was ashamed, I wanted to get it out of my head.”
Hennebert, who lived with a girlfriend at the time, worked as a warden in the prison outside Avignon where Dominique Pelicot was held after his arrest. When he read newspaper reports of the detention, he said, he knew that sooner or later “police would come knocking at my door”. He admitted to the charge of rape.
Hennebert said he had “wanted for nothing” during his childhood in northern France with parents who worked in the public sector, but that gambling on sports betting sites had later caused him financial difficulties. He had recently begun retraining as a member of an ambulance team. A court psychologist said he had a “psychopathic personality”; another expert psychiatrist disagreed.
Grégory Serviol, 31
A painter and decorator with seven convictions ranging from possession of drugs to driving offences, Serviol was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in June 2017 when she had been drugged unconscious. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Serviol had denied the charges. He said he had believed Dominique Pelicot’s assertion that his then wife liked to “make love while drunk”.
He told the court that when he arrived in the Pelicots’ bedroom, he said: “Given the state she’s in, it’s not really worth it,” but Dominique Pelicot told him to go ahead.
Testifying in court, Serviol said what he did was not rape. Looking over at Gisèle Pelicot, he said: “Your husband manipulated me and I know he manipulated quite a few people here.” She looked away.
Serviol said that at the time he was 24, smoking between 10 and 15 joints a day and was struggling with the loss of his baby daughter at seven months’ pregnancy due to a heart defect. He said he had been afraid of Dominique Pelicot, despite video evidence showing him smiling.
The court heard that Serviol’s father was in prison when he was a small boy, a fact his parents tried to hide by lying and saying the building in which he visited him was a hospital, not a prison. When Serviol was jailed on remand in the Pelicot case, he did similarly for his stepson of the same age, telling him the prison was a building site and he was working there as a painter.
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Florian Rocca, 32
A delivery driver previously convicted of nine offences including driving without a licence, burglary and receiving stolen goods, Rocca was convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot in December 2019 and sentenced to seven years in prison.
He had denied rape, saying he had thought it was a “consenting game between three people”. He made contact with Dominique Pelicot online and a few hours later went to the couple’s home out of curiosity, he told the court.
He said he had drunk a bottle of whisky that day. “I did not leave my house with the intention to commit a rape,” he said. Towards the end he noticed there was a “bizarre atmosphere” in the room and he felt afraid, he said. He did not call the police.
Rocca’s mother, a cleaner, told the court that when she heard the charges against her son, “I wondered did I get something wrong in the way he was raised. I know what he did is very serious. I don’t hide that.”
Rocca told the court he did not know his biological father.
Jean-Luc La, 46
A mirror maker and father of four, La admitted raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bedroom on two occasions in 2018 knowing she had been drugged unconscious. He was given a 10-year prison sentence.
At first he had thought Gisèle Pelicot’s husband had consented on her behalf and that therefore “it wasn’t against the law,” he said. He told a psychologist after his arrest that he had thought the definition of rape was instead something that “happens in the street” in the style of “if you don’t want it, I’ll hit you”.
La’s wife, who is Vietnamese, told the court her mother was ill at the time and she had refused sex. She said: “I think because I refused him all the time, as a man, he had to look elsewhere.”
Gisèle Pelicot, through her lawyer, said La’s wife was not responsible for her husband’s actions. “There is never an obligation to have sexual relations with your husband. Do you understand that?” the lawyer said.
The court heard that Dominique Pelicot had suggested drugging La’s wife so they could both rape her. “I told him I’d think about it just to please him, but I didn’t do it,” La said. “Sex wasn’t really her thing.”
The court heard that La had fled Vietnam by boat with his mother as a child and had lived in refugee camps before coming to France.
Patrice Nicolle, 55
An electrician from Carpentras, Nicolle has described himself as a “jovial” guy who once trained youth football teams. He was found guilty of rape and sentenced to eight years in jail.
He had denied rape, saying: “To my mind, it was a game.” Despite video evidence in court showing Gisèle Pelicot in an unconscious state, snoring loudly, Nicolle claimed he did not notice she was sedated when he went to the couple’s home in February 2020.
He said he told Dominique Pelicot at the end of the visit: “Your wife looks like she’s really asleep.” Dominique Pelicot replied that he gave his wife pills and would also take her to motorway laybys and “hand her to men”. Nicolle said he called Dominique Pelicot “sick” and then left.
Asked why he did not contact the police, he said: “I didn’t want to waste my time at the police station. I’m a humble neighbourhood electrician … who would have believed me?”
A care worker who became Nicolle’s girlfriend 16 months ago while knowing he was charged with rape in the Pelicot case told the court: “He treats me like a princess.”
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Abdelali Dallal, 47
A former canteen worker who has had a stroke since his arrest, Dallal admitted rape, saying he went to the Pelicots’ home twice and raped Gisèle Pelicot when she was in a comatose state. He was sentenced to eight years in jail.
The first time, one January night in 2018, he asked his then girlfriend to drive him to the Pelicots’ village and wait for him in the car for an hour. She told the court she had driven him because she was worried about him driving drunk. She had thought he was meeting a couple for a sexual encounter but had not sought details. “I didn’t want to know,” she said.
She described Dallal as someone who “drank morning, noon and night”.
Romain Vandevelde, 63
Vandevelde, a former forklift truck driver, was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot on six occasions over six months between 2019 and 2020 and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
He had denied rape, saying Dominique Pelicot “invited me in” and that a husband’s consent had been enough. He denied knowing she was drugged, despite video evidence showing him smiling as she snored loudly.
He said he first went to the Pelicots’ home because “I felt lonely. Christmas was approaching and I was going to be on my own again. I was looking for friendship.”
Vandevelde told the court he had known he was HIV positive at the time of the rapes and had not worn a condom. His lawyer said that because he had been on HIV treatment since his diagnosis in 2004, he had an undetectable viral load, which was regularly tested, and could not transmit the virus. “I knew I wasn’t contagious,” he said.
The court heard that Vandevelde had been subjected to such extreme physical violence and abuse by his parents that it amounted to “torture”. He was raped by several men as a child, including a priest.
Cédric Grassot, 50
A software technician who used to run a record shop in Avignon, Grassot was found guilty of rape and of possessing child abuse imagery. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail.
Grassot raped Gisèle Pelicot at her home in October 2017. The court heard that he also procured from Dominique Pelicot sedatives with the aim of drugging his girlfriend at the time. He said he did not go through with it. He had written a message to Dominique Pelicot about his girlfriend saying: “My dream is her getting raped on the way home from work.” He had shown Pelicot where his girlfriend lived.
Grassot said he did not use the sedatives but that having them in his possession “gave a feeling of power”. He added: “It flatters your ego. I had the fantasy but I didn’t do it.”
He said that when he went to the Pelicots’ home, “my sexuality was already twisted … the deviance was already there.” Turning to Gisèle Pelicot in court, he said: “I was your rapist. I was your torturer.”
The court heard that at the age of 13 he was raped by an uncle.
Hassan Ouamou, 30
Born in Marseille, Ouamou was tried in absentia for raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bedroom in March 2018. After he left France, an international warrant for his arrest was issued. He was sentenced by the Avignon court to 12 years in prison.
The court heard that Ouamou had received 13 convictions between 2010 and 2017 in connection with theft, violence, drugs and possession of weapons. Dominique Pelicot told the court he remembered Ouamou coming to the Pelicots’ home.
Cendric Venzin, 44
A former soldier in the French foreign legion who later became a restaurant manager in Corsica, Venzin was unemployed when he went to the Pelicots’ home twice, in 2016 and 2018. He was found guilty of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot and sentenced to nine years.
Venzin had denied rape but in court he changed his position and said it was not possible to deny the facts of what had happened. He said: “I have always said that I did not intend to rape anyone.”
He told the court he felt tricked by Dominique Pelicot, and had believed he was going to have an encounter with a consenting couple with “fantasies”.
He said that at the time he was under the impression that Gisèle Pelicot was consenting, but in court he recognised she had not been in a state to consent. When questioned, he said: “Given this case, I can consider that I raped, yes.” He apologised in court and said: “Today I see consent differently.”
Ludovick Blemeur, 39
The warehouse worker was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot one night between Christmas and new year in 2019 when the Pelicots were on holiday at their daughter’s home in the Paris area. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Blemeur said he recognised that a sexual encounter took place but told the court he had had no intention to rape. “What I did was not premeditated,” he said. He told the court he was a regular cannabis user and said he had been afraid of Dominique Pelicot’s reaction if he left the bedroom. He said he was a “collateral victim” of Dominique Pelicot, who he said had used him to enact his fantasy.
After December 2019, Ludovick Blemeur, who has one child, sent Dominique Pelicot a message about potentially meeting up again if he was in the area, and a new year message the following year.
The court heard that as a child Blemeur was a victim of a notorious sex offender, Fabrice Motch, a fire service captain convicted of drugging and raping boys who were young volunteers. Motch, who was sentenced to 15 years for those offences, is serving a life sentence for murder.
Omar Douiri, 36
A married mechanic who worked cleaning buses in Avignon, Douiri was convicted of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot at her home in November 2017 and was sentenced to eight years in prison.
He made contact with Dominique Pelicot in a chatroom hours before the rape and said the older man told him what to do and he did not ask questions. Asked by a judge if he had been concerned that Gisèle Pelicot appeared unconscious and did not react, he said: “It was my first threesome and I didn’t know how it worked.”
He said he did not remember if he had looked at Gisèle Pelicot’s face. Asked by Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyer if he accepted that what he did was rape, he said: “No, not at all.”
Born in Morocco, Douiri arrived in France at the age of two.
Paul Grovogui, 31
Grovogui, who told the court he would like to train as a pastor, was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot at her home one lunchtime in 2016 after Dominique Pelicot had drugged her at breakfast. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Grovogui admitted to the charge of rape. “I raped, I accept it, I raped,” he told the court. He said that at the time he had not seen it as rape, because he was young (23 at the time) and wanted to “have fun” without much thought. He said that after he was shown video evidence by police, he realised it was rape.
He apologised to Gisèle Pelicot, telling the court: “We are not monsters, we are men like any others.”
Born in Guinea to parents who worked as a midwife and a pastor, Grovogui arrived in France as an unaccompanied minor aged 16, having travelled by boat to Europe. A father of one, he has previous convictions in France for theft and forgery, as well as domestic violence.
Saifeddine Ghabi, 37
The long-distance lorry driver was accused of raping Gisèle Pelicotbut was found guilty of the lesser charge of sexual assault, for which he was handed a three-year prison sentence.
In court, Ghabi admitted what he called “attempted rape” but denied that a rape took place. He told the court: “I recognise that I did not get Madame Pelicot’s consent. I am totally conscious of the seriousness of the facts … But for me, it’s an attempted rape. That is not to minimise it. I’m here for Madame Pelicot to know the truth.”
The court heard he grew up in Tunisia and arrived in France aged 15. He said he had an “addiction to social networks and the internet” and would go on websites for meeting partners simply out of “boredom”.
Charly Arbo, 30
A vineyard worker who later packed lorries for a cement company, Arbo spent part of his childhood in the village of Mazan where the Pelicots lived. He raped Gisèle Pelicot on six occasions between 2016 and 2020, and on Thursday he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
On the first occasion, Arbo was 22 and Gisèle Pelicot was 64. Arbo and Dominique Pelicot were accused of raping her in her bed on the night of her 66th birthday.
During the trial, Arbo denied rape, saying: “I was told it was a scenario in which she was asleep. In that scenario, she was consenting. For me, I didn’t intend to rape. I didn’t want to rape her; I didn’t want to do something bad to that family.”
Video evidence showed Arbo discussing drugging and raping his own mother with Dominique Pelicot. He said he had been afraid of Pelicot, who had asked him if there was another woman in his entourage who he would like to rape or see raped. Arbo said he suggested his own mother “because it was the only woman who came to mind”. He said he never intended to go through with it and kept making excuses.
Dominique Pelicot gave Arbo three sedative tablets wrapped in silver foil in order for him to sedate his mother, explaining that he should crush them into her food. Arbo said he never used them.
A court psychiatrist said Arbo’s “very intense use of pornography” from his early teenage years – including pornographic cliches about mothers and older women – had played a role in his objectification of women.
Christian Lescole, 57
A fire officer who said he had “spent 40 years of my life saving people”, Lescole was identified from the top half of the fire service uniform he wore during his rape of Gisèle Pelicot in her bed in January 2019. He was given a prison sentence of nine years.
He had denied rape, saying he thought he had been drugged, despite video evidence showing him fully active and giving a thumbs-up to the camera. He told the court: “In the video, it’s my body but it’s not my brain.”
He said that in his extensive experience on the swinging scene, it was always the man who organised things and made an approach on behalf of the wife. He said Dominique Pelicot was a predator who hadn’t “respected the rules”.
Questioned by Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers on the need to always ask for consent, he said: “If no one trusts anyone any more we’ll end up having to ask for written authorisation on a piece of paper.”
Lescole, who likened his idyllic southern French childhood to a novel by Marcel Pagnol, denied separate charges of possessing child abuse imagery and was acquitted of those charges on Thursday.
Nizar Hamida, 41
A trained hairdresser who had also worked as a builder and delivery man, Hamida was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in October 2020 and was sentenced to 10 years in jail.
He said he went to the Pelicots’ home for a sexual encounter to celebrate the end of his bachelor days. He was getting married shortly after, and his wife-to-be was arriving imminently from his native Tunisia.
He told the court: “I arrived at a house with a pool and a garden; I never would have thought it was a rapist.” He said Dominique Pelicot said that his wife “liked that” and he trusted him. He said he now thought he too had been drugged by Dominique Pelicot: “I had red eyes, I was a robot.”
He said: “I’m not a rapist … Why would I rape a woman aged over 60?”
Hamida, who has previous convictions for domestic violence, had been in contact with Dominique Pelicot during the afternoon and went to the house a few hours later.
Pelicot, who had been arrested and questioned by police for filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket a month earlier, contacted Hamida just after leaving a court-ordered appointment with an expert psychiatrist.
Nicolas François, 42
A freelance journalist for several local newspapers in the south of France, François had also worked in town hall press offices. He was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bed in January 2018 and also convicted of possessing child abuse imagery. He was sentenced to eight years in jail.
François said he had logged into the hook-up website Coco “every morning” to try to “find a sexual partner”, and made contact with Dominique Pelicot there.
He said he went to the Pelicots’ home with the intention only of having a homosexual encounter with Dominique Pelicot, despite video evidence showing him on a bed with Gisèle Pelicot. He said he had shown a “lack of discernment” and should never have gone through the door.
The only child of public sector workers, he said he had had a pampered upbringing, with music tuition and tennis lessons.
Joseph Cocco, 69
A retired sales manager who was a karate coach for the police for 25 years, Cocco said he was experienced on the swingers scene and had often met couples who invited in another man. He was found guilty of sexually assaulting Gisèle Pelicot and sentenced to three years in jail, two of them suspended.
Cocco went to the Pelicots’ home in June 2020, when another man, Romain Vandevelde, was also in the bedroom. He denied sexual assault. He said he had “caressed” Gisèle Pelicot. He said there was no talking and he heard her snoring and asked Dominique Pelicot what was going on. He said Pelicot insulted him, so he quickly left.
He said: “If I knew he’d filmed me, I would have reported him. If I knew he drugged and raped his wife, I would have reported him. It’s not that I was scared, I didn’t know.”
The son of Italian immigrants, Cocco called on several police officer friends as character witnesses at the trial who said he was “respectful” and a decent man. One told the court: “I can spot liars and he isn’t one.”
Boris Moulin, 37
Moulin, who worked at a transport company in Avignon, was convicted of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot at her home in January 2020 and sentenced to eight years in prison.
He said he went to the Pelicots’ home after Dominique Pelicot told him online that he was looking for a man for his wife. Before he got there, he had three joints, two lines of cocaine and several glasses of whisky, he told the court.
When he arrived he thought Gisèle Pelicot was drunk, he said. He told the court he wasn’t sure if Dominique Pelicot had drugged him too. “You go into that house and you’re lobotomised,” he said.
Moulin said his life had changed completely when he was 27 and had a road accident while returning from a night out drinking, celebrating a work contract. He was hospitalised for nine months, suffered from depression and used drugs.
Philippe Leleu, 62
A gardener who had worked as an electrician and plumber, Leleu lived with his mother and described himself as shy. He was single and said he regularly paid for sex.
He was found guilty of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bed in June 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison, two of them suspended.
He said he had posted a message on the website Coco saying: “Seeking saucy lady.” Dominique Pelicot had replied, proposing a threesome.
Leleu said that when he got to the house it was a “bizarre scenario”. He said: “I lost connection with my brain.” He said his genitals were “where my brain should have been”.
The court heard that Leleu had discovered in his 30s that he was born after his mother was raped aged 15 by a rugby player.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In France, the France Victimes network can be contacted on 116 006. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html