A pensioner accused of drugging his wife for nearly ten years to deliver her to strangers who raped her at the family home in Mazan in the south of France will go on trial from Monday, a rare case involving 50 co-accused.
Emblematic of the issue of chemical submission, the trial will take place over four months before a criminal court composed exclusively of professional magistrates in Avignon.
Until December 20, 51 accused will appear, including 18 in the box reserved for prisoners, all men, aged 21 to 68 when the facts were discovered.
Firefighter, craftsman, nurse, ex-policeman, electrician, entrepreneur or even journalist, single, married or divorced: none of them suffer from any notable psychological pathology, according to experts, who nevertheless point out their feeling of “omnipotence” over the female body.
Most came once, ten times several times, sometimes up to six nights. Many maintain that they only thought they were participating in the fantasies of a libertine couple.
But according to the husband and main accused, now 71, “everyone knew” that his wife was drugged without his knowledge. According to the investigation, “each individual had free will” and could have “left the premises”.
During the investigation, the pensioner, a former employee of the electricity company EDF, admitted to having given his wife powerful anxiolytics on certain evenings without telling her.
Most often Temesta. And he dates the first facts from 2011, when the couple, together since 1971, still lived in the Paris region, before moving to Mazan in 2013.
Rapes filmed
For men recruited on a dating site, coco.fr, which has since closed, and invited in the middle of the night, the instructions were strict, so as not to wake the victim: no perfume or smell of cigarettes; warm your hands by running them under hot water; and undress in the kitchen, to avoid forgetting an item of clothing in the bedroom.
The husband participated in the rapes and filmed them, encouraging his accomplices in particularly degrading terms. But he did not demand any financial compensation, his only motivation appearing to be to satisfy his fantasies.
In total, 92 cases of rape were recorded, by 72 men. Only around fifty were formally identified.
The ex-wife, in a state “closer to a coma than sleep” according to an expert, did not realize anything. She learned everything at the age of 68, after almost fifty years of living together, when the investigation began in the fall of 2020: her husband had just been caught in a shopping center filming up the skirts of three customers.
By searching her computer, investigators discovered thousands of photos and videos of her, visibly unconscious, often in the fetal position, raped by dozens of strangers, at the family home.
The police also found conversations where he invited his interlocutors to come and take advantage of his wife.
For her, the trial promises to be “an absolutely terrible ordeal,” says Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers who is also defending her three children and five grandchildren.
She “will experience for the first time, in a delayed manner, the rapes she suffered for ten years”, because she has “no memory of them”, the lawyer explained to AFP.
A nightmare for the victim, the affair also broke the couple’s children, especially their daughter Caroline, who is now involved in a fight against chemical submission, via an association called “M’endors pas”.
Like the wives of her two brothers, Caroline Darian (Editor’s note: her pen name for the book she published in 2022, “And I stopped calling you dad”) was also photographed naked by her father, without her knowledge. And she wonders if he might have drugged her, an accusation that he denies and that the investigation has not proven.
Dominique P., who claims to have been raped by a nurse at the age of 9, is ready to “confront his wife, his family,” his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, told AFP.
Hunted by the Nanterre cold case unit in the Paris region, he was implicated in two other cases, a murder with rape in Paris in 1991 which he denies, and an attempted rape in Seine-et-Marne in 1999, which he admits to, after being caught by his DNA.
