Dominique Pelicot: Boredom drove Monster of Mazan to drug wife and watch while she was raped by dozens of men

Faced with finding a fulfilling hobby after their working days are over, some men take up gardening or golf.

Dominique Pelicot came up with another way to while away his spare time in the Provencal village of Mazan – he invited other men to rape his sleeping wife Gisele.

With breathtaking insouciance, the so-called Monster of Mazan offered this reason on Tuesday in court when explaining why he committed the ultimate act of betrayal.

During his working life – as an electrician and an estate agent – he always had his “nose to the grindstone”, he said, but after he retired, at 60, he felt “utterly idle” and began visiting the perverted internet chatrooms where he got the idea for his twisted plan.

On one of these forays online, some 13 years ago, a male nurse had posted a compromising picture of his unconscious wife and boasted of drugging her for sex, while also describing the type of tranquillisers he used and the most effective dosage.

Soon afterwards, Pelicot copied the ploy by slipping these same pills into Gisele’s dinner, taking the perverted game to even greater extremes by inviting other men to rape her.

The court in Avignon heard how his ten-year rape campaign had endangered Ms Pelicot’s life.

While in a stupor she had a car accident, and could have drowned in the swimming pool at their chalet in Mazan, her lawyer said.

Pelicot also allowed her to be raped on six occasions by a man who was HIV positive and did not use a condom.

As he witnessed this “spectacle of decline” and accompanied her to medical appointments for unexplained memory lapses, wasn’t he moved to consider stopping the rapes, Ms Pelicot’s lawyer pressed him.

“I saw her suffering, but the addiction was stronger,” he replied, claiming the man with HIV had shown him a false negative test result.

He added: “I betrayed her trust. I should have stopped much earlier, even never started at all. But it was as if I was dragging someone else behind me, and I just couldn’t stop.”

On Tuesday, Ms Pelicot listened with evident incredulity as the father of her three children admitted to what another lawyer called “one of France’s worst-ever crimes”.

For four torturous years, since his arrest, she had waited for him to stand before her and tell her why he allowed dozens of strangers to defile her.

This was his day of reckoning. Yet if Pelicot was daunted by the prospect of facing the woman he delivered into the hands of likeminded deviants, if he felt contrite for allowing them to use her “like a bin-bag”, he had a strange way of showing it.

Yes there was the occasional sob as he pleaded – surely in vain – for his wife and family to “forgive the unforgivable”.

However, most of his pity seemed for himself as he offered a litany of excuses for his descent, and strove to ensure that, whatever punishment he faces, his 50 co-defendants will be convicted with him.

Having delayed the proceedings to receive treatment for a urinary infection, Pelicot hobbled into the stifling Avignon courtroom with a walking-stick and wrapped in a woolly grey jersey and white scarf.

Unlike his wife, who had stood proudly before the five judges when giving her testimony, he was permitted to recline in a chair in the dock, propping a microphone on his paunch.

“Good morning, Mr President, and hello everyone,” he began his address, sounding like an ageing chat-show host. “Yes, I recognise the facts of the case in their entirety.”

Then, presumably to win sympathy, he recounted a series of alleged traumas that had marred his formative years; walking into the room as his brutal father tied his mother’s hands behind her back and abused her.

Being sexually assaulted by a hospital nurse when he was nine. Witnessing his workmates rape a disabled girl on a building site when he was a 14-year-old apprentice.

“One is not born a pervert, one becomes a pervert,” he remarked almost haughtily.

All these events were forgotten at 17, when he met the “beautiful” Giselle, he said.

“I was crazy about her. She was the one who meant more than everything. I loved her well for 40 years and loved her badly for ten years. But I will always love her. I will die like that. I ruined everything. I lost everything and I must pay.”

Turning to their sex life, Pelicot admitted that he was “always too demanding” and “had trouble doing without” – problems that worsened after they retired to Mazan and his wife often returned to the Paris area on her own to care for their grandchildren.

“There was a terrible lack when she was absent,” he said, claiming that this was when his “addiction” took hold and “everything went terribly wrong”.

It was then that he thought of emulating the nurse in the interent chat room who had introduced him to “chemical submission”, he said.

“He showed me things I thought were impossible... and it went up a crescendo.”

Pelicot admitted gaining some pleasure from filming the rapes, but said he did it mainly to avoid being blackmailed by the men he invited to his home.

However, towards the end, his debauchery began to rebound on him. Some of the men would follow his wife when she was shopping.

“If you don’t let me [rape her], I’ll come and talk to her during the day,” he claimed that one man threatened him.

By then, Pelicot said, he was in such despair that he considered killing himself by driving into a tree.

Instead, he deliberately got himself arrested for taking photographs up the skirts of women shoppers, knowing that the police would investigate his affairs and uncover the rapes.

Several defendants claim Ms Pelicot was really awake when they had sex with her and consented as part of a swingers’ game.

Pelicot strongly refuted this on Tuesday.

“I am a rapist like all those accused in this room,” he said.

He also denied a lawyer’s accusation that he was “trying to look like a superhero” in an act of “bravado” designed to save his wife’s reputation – and in so doing “sacrificing” the other accused.

“I didn’t pick up anybody. They all agreed to come to my house. I didn’t handcuff them to make them come. The tripod (he used when filming the attacks) was there for all to see.”

During his four years in prison awaiting trial, Pelicot said there had been times when he came close to suicide.

Indeed, he had attempted to take his life after receiving a death threat from a fellow prisoner (on Saturday, the Daily Mail revealed how a picture of a coffin had been slipped under his cell door).

“Today, I no longer want to die. I want to fight, I want to prove, I want to educate myself in prison, which I couldn’t do as a child,” he said.

The Monster of Mazan certainly found an eloquent response when asked how it felt to be the protagonist in one of France’s biggest trials.

“If I am a monument, then I’d be a very sad monument, and I don’t invite anyone to visit me. I don’t have that retention,” he said.

When the judge gave Ms Pelicot the opportunity to say how his words made her feel, she said she found it all “hard to listen to”.

She left the court to resounding applause from supporters.

Pelicot’s day of reckoning over, he hobbled pathetically back to his cell.

— Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland

If you or someone you know is experiencing family violence, phone 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Crisis Care Helpline on 1800 199 008.

If you or someone you know needs help, contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732), or Sexual Assault Counselling Australia on 1800 211 028