Pelicot trial: French court hears how mass rape went undetected for years

Relatives of Gisèle Pelicot, the woman at the heart of a mass rape trial that has shaken France, testified in court on Tuesday about the deterioration they witnessed in Pelicot’s health throughout her almost decade-long ordeal, and the failure to determine its cause. Their accounts shed light on the widespread ignorance of drug-facilitated abuse that allowed the victim’s ordeal to go undetected for years.

Pelicot’s former husband Dominique, 71, is standing trial in the city of Avignon, along with 50 other men, accused of drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her in a case that has stunned the nation and made headlines around the world.

The affaire Mazan, after the small town in Provence where the couple lived, has been described as many things at once: a trial of warped masculinity and patriarchal domination, of societal indifference to the abuse suffered by women, and of French laws on sexual crimes that critics say omit the notion of consent.

The chilling case has also prompted soul-searching among health workers in France, highlighting doctors’ struggle to detect the signs of drug-facilitated abuse – known in France as “chemical submission”.

“To understand the origin of all this, we would have had to think of the unimaginable,” Joël Pelicot, a doctor and Dominique Pelicot's elder brother, told the court on Tuesday, illustrating widespread ignorance of the use of drugs to prey on women, particularly in cases of domestic abuse.


Read more on FRANCE 24 English

Read also:
Pelicot rape trial: press and public allowed to see video evidence
French mass rape trial shocks the nation: Pelicot and the banality of evil
France's mass rape trial sparks timid debate about systemic male violence