[imagesource:wikimiedacommons]

Please be warned that this story contains details of horrific rape.

For years, her hair had thinned and her body had withered, as entire days slipped from her memory, and at times, she drifted into strange, dreamlike trances that left her distant and unreachable.

Her children and friends, helplessly watching her wither away, feared she was suffering from Alzheimer’s, but little did they know the true horrors that were causing her to unravel.

Only when she was summoned to a police station in southern France in 2020 did she learn that her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been drugging her with sleeping pills and then allowing countless men to rape her for years on end.

While she was heavily sedated, Dominique had ushered dozens of men into their home to film these men raping her, too – abuse that lasted up to 10 years.

Using the man’s photographs, videos and online messages, the police spent the next two years identifying and charging those other suspects, per The New York Times. Now, 51 men, including Mr Pelicot, a former employee at France’s power utility EDF, are on trial in Avignon, in a case that has shocked France and cast a harsh spotlight on the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the broader culture in which such crimes could occur.

The other major sickening part is that all these suspected rapists are from working-class and middle-class French society – the average Joe, who unbeknownst to anyone, desires non-consensual, abusive sex. They are truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, and a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many have children and are in relationships.

These men are due to be tried by the criminal court in southeastern France from September 2 to December 20, because they accepted a proposal from the 71-year-old to come and abuse his wife, who had been put into a comatose state by anxiolytic medication, which he had made her ingest without her knowing it.

In fact, “Without her knowing” was the name given to the chat room on the Coco.fr dating website, where the sick pensioner would recruit these men.

“You’re like me, you like rape mode,” wrote Dominique to a man, after they made contact on the chatroom, which was closed in June for having been implicated in several criminal cases.

It all started on September 12, 2020, with what seemed like a routine incident: Police officers were called to a supermarket in the town of Carpentras, where security guards had detained a retired man. Dominique had been caught filming up the skirts of several female shoppers, using a cell phone hidden in a bag. He explained it as a moment of impulse while his wife was away caring for their grandchildren.

A psychiatrist labelled it as a voyeuristic tendency. But when investigators examined the laptop they seized from his home, they found a file titled “abuses.” Inside were over 20,000 photos and videos, meticulously organised by date, first name or nickname, and accompanied by a pornographic title. A lot of them were of his wife, visibly unconscious and mostly in the fetal position.

At the police station, his wife was told the unthinkable: since 2011, the husband she had always described as “a great guy” had secretly orchestrated her rape by dozens of men. Drugged and left with no memory of the assaults, she had been completely unaware. When she learned the truth, she was devastated, per La Monde.

“He disgusts me. I feel dirty, defiled, betrayed,” she told the judge, describing the moment as being struck by a high-speed train, a tsunami that shattered her world.

The trial will be “a horrible ordeal” for the woman, now in her 70s, and who does not wish to be identified, said Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers, per CBS News.

“For the first time, long after the fact, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuses which she only discovered four years ago.

The woman could have asked for the trial to be held behind closed doors but didn’t, because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted,” Camus said.

“She is completely determined to face them and her husband with whom she lived for 50 years but whom she knew nothing about, as she discovered at 68,” the lawyer said.

Police counted a total of 92 rapes, committed by 72 men of whom 51 were formally identified.

Dominique P. admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug. It is noted that the abuse started in 2011 when the couple was living near Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later –  a small village of barely 6,000 inhabitants some 21 miles from Avignon in Provence.

The suspect gave the men strict instructions so they would not wake her up when they abused her during the night, like not being allowed to apply aftershave or smoke cigarettes. They also had to warm their hands before touching her and get undressed in the kitchen so they would not accidentally leave clothes behind in the bedroom.

The husband took part in the rapes, filmed them and encouraged the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors. Chillingly, none of this was for money, as no funds were exchanged.

These men who participated just once, some up to six times, said their defence has been that they simply helped a libertine couple live out its sexual fantasies. However, Dominique told investigators that they were all aware that his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

The trial will have to establish to what degree they understood the situation when they had intercourse with the woman whose state, an expert said, “was closer to a coma than to sleep.”

Dominique P., who said he himself was raped by a male nurse when he was nine, is ready to face “his family and his wife”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told AFP.

As if it can’t get any more sickening, this trial may not be his last. He has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, to which he admitted after conclusive DNA testing.

[source:nytimes&cbsnews&lamonde]