Moment husband turned to wife and told her: ‘I am a rapist and so are all the others’

Finally, France’s most notorious rapist broke his silence.
Dominique Pélicot cut a frail and pathetic figure as he entered the Vaucluse criminal court trembling with a cane and frequently in tears to tell a packed room: “I am a rapist, like everyone else concerned in this courtroom.”
By contrast, the defiant woman he drugged and recruited men to rape over a decade at their Provence home as he filmed them was greeted with applause and cries of “We’re with you” outside the Avignon court in southern France.
Gisèle Pélicot has become a feminist heroine for waiving her right to anonymity to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.
It is now three weeks into a public trial that has captured the world’s attention due to its scale and perversity.
Pélicot, 71, said he took full responsibility for his depraved crimes, all meticulously filmed and stored on a computer hard drive under a file called “Abuse”.
“I recognise the facts in their entirety,” he said as he was cross-examined for hours before 50 other men, all accused of “aggravated rape” of his wife, also 71, over a period of 10 years. He faces 20 years in prison if found guilty.
“She did not deserve this,” he added.
There were disapproving murmurs in the courtroom as he claimed the 50 other defendants in the mass trial “knew everything” – 35 of the suspects deny rape.
His wife, who has initiated divorce proceedings, and their three children, two sons and a daughter, looked on impassively.
Ill health had forced the presiding judge to adjourn proceedings last week and Monday.
Pélicot had been suffering from a bladder stone and kidney infection. But medical experts deemed him able to appear with a comfortable chair and speak with frequent pauses.
While the hearing started with a promise of total transparency, as the day unfolded, Pélicot’s refusal to admit he drugged and took photos of his daughter sparked scenes of high drama as she stormed out of court.
“Caroline, I never drugged you or raped you.. .I never did that,” he insisted.
“You’re a liar”, she shouted as she left the room. “I’m going to throw up,” she went on. “I’ll kill him.”
By contrast, Mrs Pélicot, who wore dark glasses, remained cool throughout.
Experts warned that Pélicot was a “canny manipulator” and that the court should take what he says with a large pinch of salt.
Given his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde split personality, they said, it allowed him to act as genial patriarch by day and depraved rapist who invited strangers, one with HIV, into their home to commit 92 rapes.
But he launched straight into an emotional apology.
“I am guilty of what I have done. I ask my wife, my children, my grandchildren… to please accept my apologies. I ask for forgiveness, even if it is unforgivable,” Pélicot said.
“Even if it’s paradoxical, I never considered my wife to be an object, unfortunately the videos show the opposite.”
In tears, he added: “I was crazy about her, she had become everything. I loved her well for 40 years and badly for 10. I ruined everything, I should never have done it.
“I was very happy with her. I had three children and grandchildren that I never touched.
“My wife had a heart of gold. I was way out of line.”
By way of explanation for his decision to drug his wife for sex, Pélicot said: “I had a fantasy of sharing my wife… My wife was resistant to swinging, that’s why I put her to sleep.”
Then it was Mrs Pélicot’s turn to respond to the man she thought she knew until the day a policeman showed her shocking images of strangers abusing her comatose body like a “rag doll”.
“For me, it’s difficult to hear what Mr Pélicot has just said,” she stated. “I’ve lived with a man for 50 years… I never imagined for a single second that he could have committed these acts of rape and barbarity.
“Not for a single second did I doubt this man. I would have given him both my hands to cut off. I trusted him completely. I was completely mistaken.”
Pélicot told the court that childhood trauma – he says he was raped by a male nurse aged nine and forced to perform a sex act on a mentally handicapped woman as a teenage apprentice – had created an “A side and B side” with the latter controlled by “addictions”.
“The addiction got the better of me, the need kept growing,” he said.
“You’re not born this way. You become it.”
The pensioner also revealed he started planning the assaults after becoming “totally idle” in his retirement and turning to the internet to enlist dozens of strangers to rape his wife in her own bed.
He came up with a “final solution” to give her a dose of three Temesta anxiety-reducing pills in meals to send her to sleep.
When reminded that he placed his wife under risk of death – one of the defendants who raped her six times has HIV and she had a car crash due to the effect of the drugs – he insisted he asked each to provide tests but one lied.
Pélicot denied defendants’ key claims that they were under his sway.
“They agreed to undress in the kitchen with full knowledge of the facts,’ replied Pélicot.
There was a “tripod and a camera” in the room for all to see, Pélicot said, insisting that his co-accused knew they were being filmed.
“First of all, (filming) was a bit of fun, but it was also an insurance measure. Today, thanks to that, we can find those who took part,” he said.
Repeating a phrase employed by his wife earlier in the trial, he said: “I didn’t put a gun to their heads. The only question they asked was how much?”
He added that no money had changed hands though some tried to blackmail him.
His assertions sparked tension among the co-defendants, who clearly disagree with his account.
“So these people came to commit a crime without a condom, left traces that could identify them, and knowingly agreed to be filmed?,” said one defence lawyer.
“I told them I would clean her up afterwards,” said the pensioner.
“And that was enough for them to think that they would never be bothered by the law,” said the lawyer sarcastically.
Some of the accused have admitted he told them he was drugging his then-wife, while others claim they believed they were participating in a swinger couple’s fantasy.
Seventeen are in custody, as is Pélicot himself, while 32 other defendants are attending as free men.
One co-defendant is being tried in absentia.
The suspects include a fireman, a male nurse, a prison guard and a journalist.
The most tense moments were when Pélicot was grilled over photos of his daughter and grandchildren found on his computer.
His daughter Caroline Darian had previously testified that her father had taken nude images of her sleeping and said she believes he drugged her.
“Do you recognise that it was you who took this photo?” asked her lawyer.
“No, it wasn’t me,” her father shot back.
“You’re lying!” shouted Ms Darian from across the room.
“Can’t you act like a man and tell the truth? Don’t you understand that your daughter is suffering, that her distress is crying out?” said her lawyer in angry tones.
“I’ve never touched a child,” he insisted despite creating a photo montage of his partially nude sleeping daughter in someone else’s underwear and nude pictures of his wife under a file called: “My slut and her daughter.”
He said: “I can understand her doubts, but nothing happened at all.”
The trial continues.
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The judge said: “Mr Pelicot, you have not grasped the significance of what the prosecution is saying. We are not asking you whether you raped your daughter, but this exchange, this photomontage, was it normal?”
“No, not normal at all,” he responded. “Did you take these photographs of your daughter? he was asked again. “No.”
“You’re lying,” shouted out his daughter from across the courtroom.”
Antoine Camus, the lawyer for Gisele Pélicot and Caroline Darian, is now questioning the suspect over the photos he took of Caroline Darian who appeared to be asleep and naked. 
“Why didn’t you take any of your sons?” he asked.
“I’m not attracted to boys,” Pélicot replied.
Visibly furious, Ms Darian gives a thumbs-up before leaving the courtroom.
Dismayed by Mr Pélicot’s denial that he took the photos of his daughter found on his computer himself, Mr Camus said: “So the ‘my daughter in the nod’ file on your computer was created without your knowledge?”
The judge then returned to the issue of alleged incest against his daughter and grandchildren.
“This morning, Mr Pelicot, you said that, given your background, you would be incapable of pedophilia. What about incest?”
”I have never touched my children or my grandchildren,” he insisted again.
Asked if any of the other men were concerned about Gisèle Pelicot’s state, Pélicot said “none”. 
One of the judges then questioned why Pélicot blocked certain defendants from his telephone.
“They became too demanding and once there was contact, I didn’t want to see them anymore,” he said, adding: “From the moment it became a demand, it became painful.”
He said he would have preferred to have only different people come to the house.
Dominique Pélicot said he started raping his wife in 2011 and started offering men to take part in 2014.
One of the judges asked: “Did you ask for (HIV) tests from all contacts?”
“Yes,” he replied. 
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
This raised another murmur of disapproval among the co-defendants.
The court heard that before allegedly raping Jean-Pierre M.’s wife in a separate case, Pélicot admitted that he had gone to see what she looked like in a public place because she had severe eczema.
Pélicot said: “He said to me: ‘You can go at such and such a time, she’s there’.”
Visibly shocked, the presiding judge said: “Are we talking about a human being or an animal?”
Asked whether he was blackmailed by individuals, Pélicot responded: “Yes, I was. I’ve been blackmailed for money, 3,000, 5,000 euros, for photos I’ve received threats. I chased two people around my house one evening.”
Pélicot told the court he estimated that the rapes took place “two to three times” a week.
Asked why he filmed the abuse, he said: “Selfish pleasure no doubt”. 
He agreed with the statement he drugged his wife, Gisele, in order to satisfy his needs.
“To perform sexual acts that she had always refused you?” he was then asked.
“Yes. From the moment a nurse gave me the dosage,” he replied, referring to the powerful sedatives he allegedly used to put Gisele to sleep.
The judge asked Pélicot whether his wife was involved in the choice of men who he recruited, to which he answered: “No not at all”.
“What was the point of introducing your wife to men in shopping centres when she was conscious in broad daylight?” the judge then asked.
Pélicot replied: “It was at the request of a co-defendant.”
Pelicot was questioned by the judge over the defendants’ key claims that they were under his sway.
“You have been described as manipulative, and some of your contacts suggest that you had a hold over them, that you were able to dominate them,” judge Roger Arata said.
“You said that the only person you manipulated was your wife. Don’t you think that some of your contacts may have felt manipulated? Or when they found themselves naked under your domination?” asked judge Roger Arata. 
“They agreed to undress in the kitchen with full knowledge of the facts,’ replied Mr Pelicot.
Repeating a phrase employed by his wife earlier in the trial, he said: “I didn’t put a gun to their heads.”
“The only question they asked was how much?” he said, adding that no money changed hands.
His assertions have sparked tension among the co-defendants who clearly disagree with his account.
According to the judge, Pélicot confirmed to investigators that he had filmed his two daughters-in-law, Céline and Aurore without their knowledge in the bathroom, using a hidden camera.
Domnique Pélicot mentions that sexual trauma in his life had created a split personality, referring to himself as having “side A and side B” – “the same man but with addictions”.
Gisele Pélicot was applauded as she left the courtroom during an adjournment this afternoon.
She smiled at the crowd who had gathered in support of her. They shouted: “We’re with you”. One handed her a bouquet of flowers. 
Judge Roger Arata reminds the court that “92 separate scenes” of sexual abuse or rape were identified by investigators.
Referring to Pélicot’s previous testimony, he said the defendant estimated that the “first acts were committed on his wife on the night of 23 to 24 July 2011. They were filmed.”
Pélicot told the court that had he known that another man, nicknamed “Rasmus” who he allegedly helped drug his wife in a separate case, had experienced similar traumas a child, “I would not have continued”.
Rasmus, known only as Jean-Pierre M, was an alleged “disciple” of Dominique Pélicot. He is not on trial for raping Gisèle Pélicot, but rather for using the same method to allegedly rape his own wife and enlisting Pélicot to rape her too.
Jean-Pierre, 63, a former lorry driver, is alleged to had contact with Pélicot in a online chatroom, who then is accused of providing the sedatives to drug the man’s wife and travelling to rape her himself.
Twelve rapes of Jean-Pierre’s wife are alleged to have taken place between 2015 and 2020. Jean-Pierre said that he has admitted the charges.
The court heard how Jean-Pierre’s childhood was marked by extreme poverty and violence and sexual abuse within the family. “I was raised by pigs in the woods,” Jean-Pierre would tell his children.
Read more details on Ms Darian here.
The trial has resumed with an emotional standoff between Pélicot and his daughter.
Béatrice Zavarro, Dominique Pélicot’s lawyer, asked her client about his childhood and whether he had made any “inappropriate gestures” towards his grandchildren. “Never,” he insisted.
Ms Zavarro also asked if he had ever “drugged or raped” Caroline Darian, his daughter, who has accused him of at the very least drugging her.
“Caroline,” he said, looking at his daughter, who has repudiated him. “I never drugged you or raped you. It’s not possible to say that. I never did that.”
Ms Darian looked at him and shook her head.
Two defendants have failed to show in court, the presiding judge has said.
Some 18 defendants are remanded in custody but the remainder are free to come and go.
Defence lawyer Paul Roger Gontard asked Dominique Pélicot about his one and only visit to a swingers club with his wife. 
Pélicot said: “I saw that there was a mental block, I didn’t want to force her. It was maybe in 2009.”
The suspect previously told experts that it was after she refused to take part, he had decided to drug her at their home.
The trial was adjourned for lunch. The cross-examination will continue at 2.15pm local time (1.15pm UK).
Defence lawyer Nadia El Bouroumi asked Pélicot: “Did you trust these men after 15 minutes?”
Referring to the dozens of men he allegedly recruited to rape his wife, he responded: “I trusted these men who knew why they were coming.”
He was then asked: “Do you want to appear as a hero to your wife today, even if it means sacrificing certain men who didn’t know?”
Pélicot replied: “I don’t consider myself a superhero, I’m not the one pursuing these men in court. I’m just telling the truth.”
One defence lawyer reminded Mr Pélicot that he was behind one of the worst-ever rape cases in French history.
“If I were a monument, I’d be a very sad monument. I don’t invite anyone to visit it. I don’t pretend to be one,” he responded.
Asked by a defence lawyer how it felt to have “picked up dozens of strangers”, Pélicot said stridently: “I didn’t pick anyone up, they came and got me themselves.
“They asked me and I said yes. They agreed and came. I didn’t handcuff anyone to my home.”
Pélicot then claimed he did not manipulate anyone but his wife. 
Asked whether he was prepared “to do anything to satisfy” himself, Pélicot said: “No not anything. Not anything that would put (my wife’s) life in danger. I had a lot of respect (for her) and suddenly everything went off the rails.”
He called what he did to his wife “abominable”, adding that: “I didn’t think it would come to this, but addiction got me there”.
There was a “tripod and a camera” in the room for all to see, Pélicot said, insisting that the other 50 men accused of abusing his drugged wife knew they were being filmed.
“When does a person become a pervert?” asked Antoine Camus, Mrs Pélicot’s lawyer.
Dominique Pélicot said: “You try to deal with what you’ve been through. You become a pervert when you meet someone who gives you opportunities. That’s when you become a pervert.”
He dates this to his encounter on the Internet with a nurse who advised him to administer Temesta to his wife. “He gave me the right dosage… and from that moment on it started to happen”.
Pélicot then denied ever being a paedophile. “When someone talks to me about pedophilia…when you have suffered as a child what I have suffered, you are not tempted by it at all.”
“As for the rest, I still have a long way to go,” he added.
Dominique Pelicot also insisted that he was unable to stop for fear that the men filmed would go “directly” to his wife and give the game away.
Antoine Camus, Mrs Pélicot’s lawyer, then asked: “There is a desire to sully, to humiliate, to debase, was there not also hatred towards Gisèle Pélicot?”
Pélicot replied: “No, I never had any hatred towards my wife, I can’t hear that. I had only love for her.”
Antoine Camus, another lawyer for Mrs Pélicot said: “Your family is a field of ruins, your loved ones are under the rubble. You have heard them. For (your) children who are in a desperate quest for the truth, are you ready to respond to this vital expectation?”
Dominique Pélicot replied: “I was the patriarch of this family, built with my wife. I am ready to look at them between the eyes and tell them that nothing else happened.”
Pélicot is accused of drugging his daughter and taking pictures of her in her underwear without her knowledge, along with her two sisters-in-law.
In a separate case, Mr Pélicot has been charged with raping and murdering a 23-year-old estate agent in Paris in 1991. 
He has admitted one attempted rape in 1999, after DNA testing proved a case against him.
Pélicot was asked whether he knew that he exposed his wife to HIV six times after one HIV-positive defendant allegedly abused her six times.
He claimed the defendant with HIV “provided me a false test”.
Mrs Pélicot’s lawyer Stéphane Babonneau then said that by drugging his wife, she could had a car accident or drowning in her own sick. “Were you aware of this at the time?” 
“I couldn’t ignore it,” replied Mr Pélicot, who added weakly: “I never left her alone.”
 
Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said outside court that her client was “very distraught”. “He asked his wife to forgive him,” she added.
“He explained his life, the upheavals in his life, the traumas he has endured’, she said. “It is Dominique Pelicot’s truth.”
“We are in a confessional process, and it will continue. We’re going to see this trial through to the end and we’ll know everything about Dominique Pelicot,” she said.
The trial has resumed.
Judge Roger Arata asked: “You say you have become aware of the harm you have done. But what Mrs Pélicot cannot understand is that while you witnessed her decline, her worries, her neurological appointments, why did you not find the will to stop what you were making her go through?”
Dominique Pélicot replied: “The addiction got the better of me, the need was growing. I tried to reassure her. I betrayed her trust.”
“I should have stopped much earlier. Not starting at all would have been even better. But I am lugging too many things behind me,” he added.
“Mine was the ideal family, it was me who wasn’t,” Dominique Pélicot told the court.
The trial has been briefly suspended for a break.
The presiding judge asked Dominique Pélicot why he did not seek treatment after he was arrested for the first time in 2010 after being caught filming up women’s skirts.
Pélicot said: “I was fined. The shrink asked me if I remembered my birth…I stopped going.”
Dominique Pélicot described his wife, Gisele, as having “a heart of gold, she was never a submissive woman she did what she felt was necessary”.
He was then pushed by the judge on why his alleged childhood traumas “only resurfaced at the age of 60”.
Pélicot told the court: “I had my nose to the grindstone because I worked a lot, a lot. When I stopped I was totally idle and I had the misfortune to look on the internet.”
Asked whether he loved his wife, Dominique Pélicot said: “I was crazy about her. She had become the one who replaced everything. I loved her enormously, as I still do.”
He continued: “I loved her well for 40 years and badly for 10. I ruined everything, I lost everything. I should never have done it.”
The presiding judge told Pélicot: “You told experts that you were angry with your own family for having smeared the family, especially your daughter (Caroline) who wrote a book.”
Caroline Darian, who uses a pen name, released a book on the case in 2022 called “And I Stopped Calling You Daddy” She also launched the association ‘Don’t Send Me To Sleep’ to raise awareness over “chemical submission”.
Pélicot responded, saying: “She was right to write this book even if I haven’t read it. It was out of fear for my children (that I was against it),” he claimed.
The Pélicots have a daughter and two sons, all present in court.
“Today I still love them as much, in retrospect, I can’t blame them for that. She was right to create her association.”
Dominique Pélicot said he “considered suicide” when he learned that his wife was having an alleged extramarital affair.
He says he took the car and drove intending to crash into a row of trees but lacked the courage to go through with it. “Maybe I should have done,” he told the court.
Invited to respond to her comments by the judge, Pélicot addressed his wife to say: “I regret what I did even if it is unforgivable.”
Mrs Pélicot is in the process of divorcing her husband.
“Not for a single second did I doubt this man. I would have given him both my hands to cut off (I would have staked my life on him),” Gisele Pélicot continued.
“I didn’t see these flaws, I only remember one night when I woke up where he was raping me and I forgot about it the next day,” she said.
Mrs Pélicot had earlier testified that she had woken up once to find her husband raping her alone. She said she told him to stop and took the matter no further.
“It’s hard to hear what Mr Pelicot is saying. For 50 years I lived with a man I never imagined could commit these acts of rape. He is aware of his acts of rape, but not for a single second did I doubt this man,” Gisèle Pélicot told the court.
“I trusted him completely. I was completely mistaken.”
Even after your arrest for filming indecent images under the skirts of customers in a supermarket, you started up your home “rendez-vous” with strangers, said judge Roger Arata. “How do you explain this persistence in transgression?” 
“My wife had been away for a while when I was arrested, I was almost suicidal. I didn’t know how to get out of it,” Pélicot said, not really answering the question.
“I knew that by getting arrested, the breadcrumb trail would lead to my hard drives (where he stored 200,000 images of abuse). You don’t have to believe me but I became aware of the harm I’ve done over the past 3 years thanks to the psychoanalysts… you’re not born that way, you become that way.”
Mrs Pélicot put her sunglasses back when her husband said: “She didn’t deserve this, I admit this before her.”
“We had three children and 7 grandchildren that I never touched,” he claimed.
At times trembling and barely audible, Pélicot started by recounting his childhood.
“I was born on November 27, 1952. My mother, a very beautiful brunette woman spent her time working. My father was never there. I was raised by my big sister.”
Pélicot then mentioned the rape he says he suffered at the age of nine from a male nurse when he was hospitalised for a head injury.
“He told me: ‘My name is Basile, do you want some candy,’ sniffed Pélicot. “It started with caresses, I felt a mustache in my behind then a pain and lots of other things I didn’t understand,” he said.
Pélicot said he suffered another traumatic experience as a teenage builder. “On a construction site, I heard a woman, and they grabbed me by the collar and told me she’s going to deflower you. The woman was raped by other men. They put my head on her sex and I threw up,” he recounted.
“It was a little handicapped girl who lived nearby. I got my CAP (diploma) at 17, my degree in 1971 and then there was that beautiful meeting (when he met his wife Gisèle),” he said in tears.
“It was too much to bear, I held on for 40 years. I don’t blame (my wife) for anything, I was very happy with her.”
After allowing Mr Pélicot to speak, “I would like us to then give the floor to Mrs Pélicot if she agrees,” said the judge. 
Gisèle Pélicot gave a stirring testimony at the start of the trial two weeks ago in which she said she knew nothing of the nightly rapes she was subjected to over a decade after her husband allegedly spiked her food and drink in their Provence home.
Mr Pélicot has been given a comfy office chair in the box so that he can remain seated and a mattress in jail so that he can rest during the break times.
The presiding judge Roger Arata told Dominique Pélicot: “You are charged with the crime of aggravated rape against your wife and Mrs. X (the wife of a co-accused) and capturing indecent images of your daughter and your daughters-in-law.”
Microphone in hand, Pélicot replied: “I acknowledge the facts in their entirety.”
We’re bringing you the latest updates as Dominique Pelicot is set to take the stand.