Giving evidence in Avignon’s criminal court, a softly spoken woman in her 30s pondered the question if the medication she took as part of managing her multiple sclerosis might have allowed her ex-partner, Cédric G, to sexually abuse her without her knowledge. She described their relationship as “lies, from start to finish”.
Cédric G, 50, a software technician who used to run a record shop in Avignon, looked on from behind the glass-screened dock in the court. He is one of 51 men on trial over the rape of Gisèle Pelicot, whose then husband, Dominique Pelicot, crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into her food and invited dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020 in the village of Mazan in Provence.
Cédric G’s ex-partner, a wheelchair user, was asked by a judge if she felt she too had been drugged and abused by Cédric G. She said: “With my scleroris, when my muscle pain was too much, I’ve had medication that is a relaxant … I don’t think he did what you’re insinuating but I’m not certain.” When the judge asked if she had doubts her boyfriend might have done so, she replied “yes”.
Gisèle Pelicot, 72, a former logistics manager, has become a feminist hero after insisting that the rape trial of her ex-husband and 50 other men be held in public to raise awareness of the use of drugs and sedation to rape women, saying “it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.” A question raised by the weeks of court hearings is whether some of the accused men drugged other women or their own wives and partners to rape them without their knowledge.
Some ex-girlfriends of accused men have told the court of the burden not knowing if they may have been drugged. Dominique Pelicot, who told the court “I am a rapist,” said he recruited men in an online chatroom called “against her knowledge”.
One man, Jean-Pierre M, a former lorry driver for an agricultural cooperative, admitted using the same sedation technique learnt from Pelicot to drug and rape his own wife, and organising for Pelicot to rape her with him between 2015 and 2020, which Pelicot admits. The woman, who has five children with Jean-Pierre M, told the court she had known nothing of the abuse and said she felt “destroyed”.
The ex-girlfriend of another accused man, who was a tiler and motorbike enthusiast, had told the court: “I don’t know if I was raped … It’s terrible. I will always have doubts.”
One night in 2019 she woke to find her partner attempting to assault her. Her police complaint was dismissed for lack of evidence at the time. She said she experienced “dizziness” between September 2019 and March 2020.
Pelicot had experienced what she thought were serious neurological issues, including memory lapses she feared was Alzheimer’s, as well as gynaecological problems, but did not know she was being raped by strangers.
Cédric G, who appeared at the trial this week, is accused of two charges: of raping Pelicot in her home in October 2017 in the knowledge that she had been drugged unconscious and also of possessing child abuse imagery. He admitted both charges.
Cédric G, whom the court heard had been raped by an uncle aged 13, told the court he went to the Pelicots’ home to rape Gisèle Pelicot because he was “curious”. He said that at that time of his life, he was unemployed and he needed “urges” that “made me feel alive”.
He said: “My sexuality was already twisted … the deviance was already there.”
Turning to Pelicot in court, he said: “I was your rapist. I was your torturer.”
The court heard that Cédric G had also procured from Dominique Pelicot an amount of sedatives with the aim of drugging his own girlfriend at the time. He said he did not go through with it.
The 36-year-old woman was one of three of Cédric G’s former partners to address the court.
She said she had been with Cédric G for five years between 2013 and 2018 but left him when she realised that, without her knowledge, he had published online a number of intimate photos of her alongside her identity card, phone numbers, and address at work, “in order for me to be harrassed, which I was – for years”.
She had looked through Cédric G’s phone and computer, where she found a message from him to Dominique Pelicot about her, saying: “My dream is her getting raped on the way home from work.” She said: “It’s a phrase that has been going round my head ever since.”
Cédric G said he had shown Dominique Pelicot where his girlfriend lived, travelling in Dominique Pelicot’s car to her home in Aix-en-Provence while she was out and showing him the entrance to her flat.
Pelicot gave him a package of the same sedatives used to sedate Gisèle Pelicot. Cédric G said he did not use the sedatives but he said having them in his possession: “gave a feeling of power. It flatters your ego. I had the fantasy but I didn’t do it.”
The lead judge asked the woman in question if she had ever felt strange or “ever had the feeling of having been sedated”. She said that in April 2018, she had found herself unconscious outside one night. She told police, who took note of it, but no investigation was opened.
“The memory never came back. I’ve lived with that for six years,” she said. “I ask myself, what really happened? I’ve read in the press that he had intended to drug me. The only thing I can hope is that he didn’t do it.”
The trial runs until 20 December.
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