AVIGNON, France: The trial of a Frenchman who recruited dozens of strangers to rape his drugged wife at their home resumed on Monday, with the cases of eight more defendants to be examined in court.

The case of Dominique Pelicot, 71, and 50 other co-defendants aged 26 to 74 years old has caused outrage and sparked protests since it opened on September 2 in the southern city of Avignon.

For refusing to be ashamed and demanding the trial be open to the public, his ex-wife Gisele Pelicot, also 71, has become a feminist heroine in France and abroad. The court has already questioned 36 of the defendants, including Pelicot himself, and is this week to examine the cases of eight more of the co-accused. Gisele Pelicot, who has divorced her husband but is using her married name to protect her privacy, was not present on Monday, but was due back in court on Tuesday.

Dominique Pelicot was back in the dock, ready according to his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro to "participate in proceedings when he is invited to”. The abuse was uncovered after police in 2020 arrested Dominique Pelicot for filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket.

He has admitted to raping his then-wife Gisele Pelicot and enlisting dozens to join him between 2011 and 2020, meticulously documenting the abuse in thousands of images investigators found on his hard drives. But his co-accused, most of whom risk up to 20 years in jail for aggravated rape if convicted, have largely claimed they had no idea it was non-consensual. They have said they thought they were taking part in the sex game of a libertine couple.

Investigators on Monday spoke to the court about the lives of the next eight men to be cross-examined, some of whom had reported themselves being victims of sexual abuse. Among them is an unemployed 41-year-old who has been accused of raping Gisele Pelicot in 2019, with the complicity of her then-husband, at the home of the couple’s daughter in the Paris region.

The investigators said he had told acquaintances that the father of a friend, a fireman chief, had raped him as a teenager. A 50-year-old software technician, who has been accused of planning to imitate Dominique Pelicot’s methods on his own wife, said he was raped by an uncle as a 12 or 14-year-old.

The other defendants this week are to include a 36-year-old truck driver, a 31-year-old laborer, a 36-year-old cleaner and a 42-year-old restaurant manager. Among them is also an HIV-positive single man, now aged 63, who has been charged with visiting the Pelicot home in the southern town of Mazan six times to abuse Gisele Pelicot, not once using a condom. Finally, the court will also examine the case of a 30-year-old who is the only co-defendant being tried in absentia. 

The couple’s two sons and daughter, who goes by her pen name Caroline Darian, have regularly appeared at the trial to support their mother. But Darian had not attended some of the more recent hearings.

In late October, after the trial reached half-mark, she announced on Instagram that she was checking in to a clinic for a few days to recharge and "to be able to sleep again”. Darian, who in 2022 wrote a book "Et j’ai cesse de t’appeler papa” ("And I stopped calling you dad”), has campaigned for awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse. She left the courtroom in tears early during the trial as the presiding judge recounted how her father also had naked photomontages of her on his computer.

"I too am a victim of Dominique P,” Darian wrote on Instagram. "He drugged me without my knowledge, and without a doubt abused his own and only daughter.” The trial is to last until December 20. Antoine Camus, one of Gisele Pelicot’s lawyers, said earlier that the international attention had given his client the strength to carry on. "She of course remains... determined to see it through, because she has also been uplifted by this wave of support in France and abroad,” he told AFP.

Despite this, he said, it had been "really tiring for Gisele Pelicot to almost systematically hear the same explanations from the accused... that she was victim of rape ‘by accident’, rape ‘by error of judgment’, or ‘reluctant’ rape.” — AFP