A 71-year-old French retiree, Dominique P., goes on trial Monday alongside 50 other men accused of raping his wife, who was drugged into unconsciousness.
Gatekeepers News reports that the trial, which will last until December, will be a “horrible ordeal” for the woman, now in her 70s, who was abused over 10 years without her knowledge.
The woman’s lawyers say she was so heavily sedated that she was not aware of the abuse, which only came to light in 2020.
“For the first time, long after the fact, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” said Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers.
The investigation began in September 2020 when Dominique P. was caught filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping center.
Police found thousands of pictures and videos of his wife, visibly unconscious and mostly in the fetal position, on his computer. They also found chats on a website where he recruited strangers to come to their home and have intercourse with his wife.
The abuse started in 2011 and continued after the couple moved to Mazan, a village in Provence. Dominique P. gave his wife powerful tranquilizers and instructed the men to not wake her up during the abuse.
The accused rapists, aged between 21 and 68, included a forklift driver, a fire brigade officer, and a journalist.
Their defense is that they simply helped a libertine couple live out its sexual fantasies, but Dominique P. told investigators that they were all aware that his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.
The trial will establish to what degree they understood the situation when they had intercourse with the woman, whose state was described as “closer to a coma than to sleep”.
Dominique P. is also charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, to which he admitted after conclusive DNA testing.
Psychiatric evaluations have shown him to be “a patriarch” and “a manipulator” with a “perverse” personality who used his wife as “bait”.
